Joint AI Summit

Panelists:
Dave Gannon, Director of Innovation and Technology, Bryant University
Carrie Kell, Lecturer and Coordinator of First-Year Writing Curriculum, Bryant University
Huan Kuang, Assistant Professor of Finance, Bryant University
Mike Roberto, Trustee Professor of Management, Bryant University
    
This session showcases AI supported tutoring resources developed for courses across the curriculum, highlighting both how the tools function and how they were intentionally designed. Panelists will provide live demonstrations of tutoring resources created for several general education courses, as well as a senior Business capstone focused on strategic management. Beyond demonstrations, the panel will emphasize the collaborative processes behind resource development. Panelists will discuss how course goals, disciplinary expectations, and student needs informed design choices; how boundaries were established to ensure the tools reinforce rather than replace learning; and how faculty, instructional designers, and technologists worked together to align AI resources with course level outcomes. The session offers concrete examples of AI enabled academic support in practice, along with transferable insights into the design, iteration, and institutional collaboration required to create tutoring resources that are pedagogically grounded, scalable, and responsive to diverse student populations.

Panelists:
Matt Duncan, Professor of Philosophy, RIC
Jennifer Horan, Lecturer in History, Literature, and the Arts, Bryant University
David Liao, Lecturer in History, Literature, and the Arts, Bryant University
David Ramirez, Associate Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies, RIC
        
This panel explores how artificial intelligence is reshaping the humanities by transforming how we read, create, teach, and define our disciplines. Panelists will examine AI’s growing role in mediating complex texts, from summarizing dense theoretical works to supporting new forms of creative and scholarly production, while also questioning what may be lost when engagement is reduced to synopsis or extraction. The discussion will consider how AI complicates traditional practices of close reading, interpretive labor, and theoretical struggle, even as it opens possibilities for access, scale, and experimentation. Attention will also be given to the changing classroom, where AI challenges assumptions about preparation, authorship, and learning, prompting renewed reflection on what it means to study, teach, and value the humanities in an AI-inflected educational landscape.

Panelists:
Erim Ergene, Associate Professor of Management, Bryant University
Chris Morse, Professor and Chair of Communication and Language Studies, Bryant University
Michelle Munoz, Associate Director of Instructional Technology, Bryant University
Ron Washburn, Lecturer, Politics, Law, and Society, Bryant University
                
This panel centers on concrete teaching use cases for AI, illustrated through live demonstrations of study and teaching apps used in real classroom settings. Panelists will show how these tools are built and, more importantly, how they are deployed to support specific learning goals within courses. The session will focus on instructional applications in areas such as writing and programming, highlighting examples of AI supported study tools, “vibe coding” projects, and simple AI agents designed for student use. Panelists will share how these tools have been integrated into daily teaching practice.

Across demonstrations and discussion, emphasis will be placed on how instructors are using AI to scaffold learning, redesign activities, and rethink what classroom practice looks like when AI is present. The panel aims to offer participants clear, transferable examples of how AI can be used intentionally and effectively in teaching, grounded in actual course experience rather than abstract possibility.

Panelists:
Mengqi Deng, Lecturer of Mathematics and Economics, Bryant University
Dave Gannon, Director of Innovation and Technology, Bryant University
Kaitlyn Hughes, Lecturer of Mathematics and Economics, Bryant University
Allison Kaminaga, Lecturer of Mathematics and Economics, Bryant University
El Rustambekov, Chair and Associate Professor Management, Bryant University
Isil Yaviz, Associate Professor of Management, Bryant University

This session brings together faculty participating in the first year of a Davis Educational Foundation grant at Bryant to pursue two related goals: piloting AI supported learning assistants in undergraduate courses and examining how AI is reshaping disciplinary expectations and graduate preparation. Panelists will describe how learning assistants were designed and implemented across various General Education classes, the learning challenges they were intended to address, how students were introduced to them, and the boundaries established to ensure the tools support rather than replace core learning. Faculty will share early insights from these pilots, including how student use has informed instructional decisions. Grounded in first year grant work, the session connects course level experimentation to broader questions of curricular responsibility in an era of AI.

Panelists:
Mary Ann Gallo, Lecturer of Communication and Language Studies, Bryant University
Carrie Kell, Lecturer and Coordinator of First-Year Writing Curriculum, Bryant University
Michael Michaud, Professor of English, Chair Writing Board, RIC

This session examines how generative AI is reshaping the teaching of writing and the pedagogical choices faculty now face. Panelists will address varied disciplinary attitudes toward AI from restriction to integration, and discuss how these differences shape expectations for students. The discussion will explore effective instructional strategies, including using AI as a scaffold for drafting and revision, applying Socratic methodologies to interrogate AI-generated text, and flipping the classroom to emphasize process, reflection, and critique. Attention will be given to the importance of clear, transparent guidelines around acceptable AI use, as well as to AI detection systems – their promises, limitations, and risks of misuse. Finally, the session will consider AI’s broader potential to support rhetorical awareness, metacognition, and equitable access in writing instruction while preserving the core values of authorship and learning.

Panelists:
Gianluca Brero, Assistant Professor of Information Systems and Analytics, Bryant University
Brian Blais, Professor of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Bryant University
Maura Dowling, Lecturer of Finance, Bryant University
Soumyadeep Mukherjee, Associate Professor Community and Public Health, RIC
Michelle Munoz, Associate Director of Instructional Technology, Bryant University
Kemal Saatcioglu, Professor Economics and Finance, RIC
ML Tlachac, Assistant Professor of Information Systems and Analytics, Bryant University

This panel highlights a second set of teaching use cases that showcase creative and experimental ways faculty are integrating generative AI into their courses. Panelists will share concrete examples of classroom activities designed to support engagement, exploration, and critical examination of AI’s capabilities and limits.

Examples discussed will include creating custom GPTs for role playing exercises, incorporating AI generated podcasts as instructional resources, and assigning students to produce AI generated recaps. Faculty will also describe assignments in which students test generative AI’s ability to produce modeling code or perform other discipline specific tasks.

Across use cases, the emphasis will be on how instructors are designing novel learning activities, encouraging students to evaluate AI critically, and adapting teaching practices based on how these tools perform in real classroom settings, including experiences working with locally run models and the tradeoffs they introduce.