Congratulations to Associate Professor Laura Nelson for receiving funding for the 2025/2026 Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund (TLEF)!
The TLEF supports projects that bring innovative and effective educational enhancements to UBC in order to enrich student learning.
Dr. Laura Nelson
Professor Nelson’s project, “Unpacking the Black Box: Critical AI Literacies for Arts Education,” is one of 17 Arts projects to receive funding and one of four Large TLEF projects.
This project will develop and pilot a set of discipline-specific educational modules to demystify AI for undergraduate students in the Faculty of Arts. The project’s emphasis is on the skills being taught to students, not tools to change the way students learn.
These modules will show students that AI tools can be used to better understand their discipline, and why a critical understanding of these tools is necessary to use them well. It will also help faculty learn how to implement these tools in the classroom and explore what infrastructure is necessary to use them at-scale.
Students will undertake small, discipline-specific projects that use AI tool to address pertinent questions or challenges in their fields of study. Modules will also include detailed, non-technical explanations of how these tools are constructed, how they function, how they can be applied in academic research, and critical discussion of their development and use.
Professor Nelson’s co-applicants on the project are Jonathan Graves (Associate Professor of Teaching in Economics) and Ekatarina Grguric (Digital Scholarship Librarian, UBC Library Research Commons).
We’re excited to watch the project get underway as the team works with faculty across Arts to teach undergraduate students key skills and critical perspectives on AI, as well as how AI relates to—and enhances—their own education!
