AI teaching innovation grants

Dear colleagues

The growth in Artificial Intelligence (AI) has reshaped the technology landscape in far-reaching ways over the last few years. In particular, generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude present both major challenges and significant opportunities for teaching, learning and assessment in universities. In a context of rapid change, it is important to explore the wide range of possibilities for how our practices should co-evolve with the ways technologies and society is changing around us.

I am therefore delighted to announce a special purpose round of Teaching Innovation Grants that focus on leveraging AI. Individual staff members, teams or departments are invited to submit a proposal for funding support for a teaching innovation or enhancement that leverages AI.

More about the initiative

UCT’s draft Framework for AI in education acknowledges the potential of integrating AI into teaching and learning spaces and that for this to happen in ethical and responsible ways, staff will need support and resources to encourage and spur innovation.

AI-enabled innovation in teaching and learning is premised on leveraging the affordances of these emerging tools to enhance teaching and learning, offering potential responses and solutions to institutional imperatives such as supporting multilingualism, curriculum change and redesign, advancing digitally enabled education, supporting student success and reducing workload for academic and support staff.

UCT would like to support pilot projects that use AI to respond to teaching and learning imperatives and provide opportunities to critically evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of AI tools in different contexts. These projects could be new concepts, or accelerate work already under way, for example where staff and students have been building custom bots for personal and course-level use, using AI as personal tutors, experimenting with AI tools for marking, grading and feedback, and using tools for developing course materials and assessments.

Proposed projects should:

• investigate the application of AI in a teaching and learning context with a bold, exploratory mindset
• include evaluation and feedback to help shape the future use of AI tools at UCT
• adhere to UCT’s policies and principles on procurement, data privacy and ethical use of student data.

A limited number of grants are available from R20 000 to R120 000, and will be awarded on a competitive basis. Please view the AI Teaching Innovation grants webpage for more information and instructions on how to submit a proposal. Potential applicants may attend a briefing session (book via the webpage) and/or request a consultation to assist with ideation or proposal development by contacting Max Tommy.

A special working group of the Teaching Awards and Grants sub-committee, which reports to the Senate Teaching and Learning Committee, oversees this process.

The closing date for all applications is 24 March 2025.

Sincerely

Professor Brandon Collier-Reed
Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Teaching and Learning

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