Increasingly I think this is the only way to address the structural challenges of AI, encompassing low tech, no tech pedagogy alongside integration work into teaching, assessment and curriculum. In other words building AI into some areas of our programmes, taking it out of others and ensuring this is done in a purporsive and coherent way:
Beginning in winter quarter 2027, academic departments and programs that offer undergraduate majors can apply for one- to two-year grants of up to $750,000 to reimagine their academic offerings for the AI era. The curriculum innovation effort will be facilitated and managed by the Office of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education (VPUE) and the AI Meets Education at Stanford (AIMES) initiative leadership in collaboration with the Stanford Accelerator for Learning.
Elam, the William Robertson Coe Professor of the Humanities in the English Department and senior associate vice provost for undergraduate education, said, “This exciting initiative is especially distinctive in that it directly engages AI and curricula at the department-wide level, offering faculty a unique opportunity to consider how AI might or should shape their disciplines, and to ask: What does AI mean for our field? How should it influence our norms, ethics, policies, and educational priorities? And how might these conversations inform not only individual courses but, even more transformationally, the design of our major?
https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2026/11/provost-initiative-college-majors-ai
Horii said academic departments will be encouraged to “dream big” about curricular possibilities while also grounding changes in the needs and norms of their fields. Initiative leaders and staff will help departments map AI-related learning outcomes across their majors – including different stances toward and approaches to the technology – and across courses, pathways, and sequences.
https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2026/11/provost-initiative-college-majors-ai
How do we fund this? Unless we can find a way to think at this scale we are effectively going to be kicking the can down the road. It can’t purely take place at a departmental level because there’s expert guidance (learning designers, a framework guiding their work and strategic objectives for learning across institution) and infrastructure investment (e.g. building the facilities to run BYOD for what secure investment remains) which is also needed.
