AI Ambassador Program at CU Boulder's Division of Continuing Education

I was brought on to help design and lead a year-long faculty development program for instructors teaching asynchronous online courses at CU Boulder's Division of Continuing Education. The program was a companion to the main campus AI Literacy Ambassadors initiative, but it needed to be built from the ground up for a different reality: working adult learners, no classroom to reconvene in, and faculty whose disciplinary communities often sit elsewhere. The reflexive answers that had emerged on main campus (in-class writing, oral defenses, proctored assessments) weren't available to us. We had to help faculty design for something harder: students developing genuine agency and discernment with AI, on their own, in the quiet of asynchronous coursework.

Working alongside program lead Teresa Nugent and co-facilitator Chris, I helped shape the arc of the cohort experience across fall workshops and spring innovation development. My role centered on mentoring faculty as they moved from open-ended questions about AI's impact on their disciplines into concrete, teachable innovations for their courses. That meant sitting with the tentative, exploratory nature of the work and helping ambassadors name what they were actually discovering, often before there was academic language for it.

The innovations that came out of the cohort reflect the range of what's possible when discipline experts are trusted to think for themselves about AI. Dennis built a case study on cognitive sovereignty for organizational leadership students. Hannah developed the concept of “reality apathy” in studio art and, in a separate strand, worked on AI guardrails for clinical nutrition. Sara redesigned economics assignments around peer verification. Christina brought labor-based grading into conversation with generative AI in writing courses. Daniella refined writing instruction for a world where the draft is no longer the artifact it once was. Several ambassadors drew on the AI Collaboration Cube from the Artificiality Institute and began documenting how their students actually engaged with the framework, quiet research in its own right.

The program culminated in a spring showcase where seventeen ambassadors presented their work over two hours. In my opening remarks, I framed what the audience was about to see as field dispatches, reports from instructors doing the actual work of figuring out what AI literacy looks like inside specific disciplines, in real courses, with real students. That framing mattered. It respected how new and unsettled the work still is, and it honored the fact that these faculty were showing us something the broader conversation about AI in higher education mostly hasn't caught up to yet: pedagogy that moves past resistance and toward agency, discernment, and creative partnership with the technology.

What I'm most proud of is that the cohort's work sits ahead of the curve. While much of higher education is still debating whether to allow AI, these ambassadors were already teaching students how to use it well, and building the disciplinary language the rest of the field will eventually need.