The Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation invites faculty, staff, and faculty/staff/student teams from accredited Maryland institutions of higher education to showcase innovative approaches to incorporating Generative AI into teaching and learning practices at our Spring 2026 Generative AI Virtual Showcase on Friday, April 24, 2026. This state-wide event will provide a platform to share promising practices, critical insights, and lessons learned as we continue to navigate the evolving landscape of AI in higher education.
We invite proposals from individuals or teams to showcase your work integrating Generative AI into workflows, assignments, learning activities, and course design. Proposals may represent individual faculty innovations, department-wide programs, or campus-wide initiatives. Proposals might also focus on broader AI initiatives, policies, or infrastructure provided the angle addressed relates to teaching and learning. We particularly welcome submissions grounded in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) or that demonstrate evidence-based teaching practices, and we encourage discipline-specific applications across all tracks.
Proposals should align with one of the following tracks:
Track 1: Philosophical and Critical Conversations in AI
This track focuses on AI tensions and debates, ethics, and academic integrity. Proposals might address approaches to teaching responsible AI use, developing institutional or course-level AI policies, navigating plagiarism and attribution concerns, exploring ethical dimensions of AI in society and education, or engaging students in critical examination of AI’s societal impact.
Track 2: Engaging Students with AI
This track emphasizes student-centered AI integration for learning and skill development. Proposals might address students using AI tools as collaborators in the learning process (brainstorming, drafting, revision, tutoring, feedback), assignments that help students understand how AI works and evaluate AI outputs, or activities that invite students to critically examine AI’s role in their discipline and future profession.
Track 3: AI for Course Design, Accessibility, and Faculty Productivity
This track highlights faculty and staff use of AI to enhance teaching effectiveness and efficiency. Proposals might address using AI to create greater transparency and relevance in course materials, enhance accessibility for diverse learners, create or adapt open educational resources (OER), improve inclusive teaching practices, streamline feedback workflows, or support course redesign efforts.
We strongly encourage proposals showcasing use cases that support the success of all learners across varied backgrounds and learning needs, enhance accessibility, and include the meaningful engagement of students as co-creators or contributors. We are seeking examples from across different sectors, disciplines, levels (lower division, upper division, graduate), and assignment types.
Up to 36 presentations will be accepted into the showcase. Proposed presentations should be 15 minutes long, with 5 minutes for questions, for a total of 20 minutes. Presentations will be clustered by track into concurrent sessions (a tentative schedule is included near the end of this call). Presentations are well suited for completed or in-progress projects and should highlight key aspects of your work. We ask you to limit the number of presenters to no more than 3 people, though additional collaborators are welcome to be in the session and be available for the Q&A portion of the presentation.
Proposals are due by 11:59 p.m. on Friday, March 6, 2026.
