How are Dartmouth educators and students experimenting with AI?
The following are case studies of Dartmouth educators who, with funding and guidance from the Teaching and GenAI Initiative, have made small and large changes in their courses to best prepare students for learning in the age of GenAI. With varying ideas and tools, and with legitimate concerns, they came up with creative approaches to enhance their students' learning experiences and, together, share their findings.
Note: This is a living resource, last updated Aug. 3, 2026. New case studies are being added regularly. Check back often! And in the meantime, you can find short AI assignment examples on the Teaching and GenAI Guidance page.
Simulating Feedback on Professional Presence
John Bell designed two AI-related interventions for FILM 44.17: a discussion on the ethics of using AI in professional self-promotion and an assignment that used LLMs to simulate diverse beta reader feedback on students’ personal bios.
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Using GenAI to Create Instructional Materials in a Multisectional Course
GaYee Park initially intended to integrate instructor- and student-facing uses of GenAI into MATH 11. But the course's multisectional structure created constraints, and Park shifted the bulk of her experimentation to instructor-side uses: generating practice problems, drafting and refining exam questions, and preparing concept explanations.
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Setting Limits on GenAI in an Intro Astronomy Course
To encourage attendance and active participation, and to prevent cognitive offloading, Elisabeth Newton restructured some of her course assignments. Where she did permit AI use, including in aspects of a creative final project, she set explicit parameters for what acceptable use looked like.
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Using AI Personas to Practice Evidence-Based Argumentation
Maggie Hernandez designed an assignment where students used AI personas as safe sparring partners, practicing for the pushback when correcting misconceptions about human biological variation.
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From Answers to Inquiry: Fostering Close Reading with GenAI
Brian O'Connor designed a tool that flips the typical human-AI interaction, prompting the LLM to act as a question-asking partner to help first-year students deepen their analytical skills of course readings and secondary sources.
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Teaching Future AI Developers
Nikhil Singh designed an assignment where students didn't just read about AI, they analyzed their own interactions with it. Their reflections brought rich, firsthand material to class discussions on thorny ethical and technical challenges.
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Students as Co-Investigators: Piloting GenAI on a Spanish-Language Archive
To understand how scholarly fields evolve outside the English-speaking academy, a Dartmouth professor had students experiment with AI to analyze a large body of Spanish-language scholarship.
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