The use of Generative AI (GenAI) is increasing across UBC’s academic landscape, as instructors and students experiment with its potential to enrich and transform teaching and learning. To help advance this exploration, the 2025/26 Large Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund (TLEF) funding round featured a special call supporting UBC Vancouver teams in developing GenAI-focused projects. As a result, 11 new Large TLEF Transformation projects received funding this year, alongside two returning projects now in their second year of exploring GenAI. Each project brings a unique lens to GenAI integration, together reflecting the breadth of innovative thinking taking shape across the university as faculty engage with this rapidly evolving technology.
Showcasing a growing range of GenAI projects
From engineering and pharmacy to computer science and the humanities, Faculty-led projects supported through the TLEF special call hope to increase UBC’s understanding of GenAI’s versatility and impact for teaching and learning. These projects highlight not only the breadth of GenAI’s application – spanning faculties with distinct pedagogical approaches – but also discipline related engagement, with projects designed to support both instructor innovation and student learning while meaningfully enhancing educational experiences.
One example is the Chat UBC: Conversational AI for Personalized and Targeted Learning project. Developed within the Faculty of Applied Science, it will create two GenAI tools to support students’ ethical decision-making through dialogue and reflection. It will also include a campus-wide platform designed to help instructors personalize learning, encourage student reflection, and manage engagement in large classes. Currently in its first year, this Large TLEF project aims to eventually engage students with diverse communities through individualized, interactive case studies, and support their exploration of ethical framework for decision-making.
“Our project seeks to incorporate GenAI to mitigate instructor and student barriers for the teaching and learning of ethics and social responsibility in engineering,” explain Assistant Professor of Teaching, Mechanical Engineering, Christoph Sielmann, and Lecturer, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Paul Lusina, from the Faculty of Applied Science. “Our objective is also to provide students with a “take away” AI model trained through their own discussions, which will continue to be a resource to encourage sociotechnical thinking and reflection in professional practice.”
Another TLEF project, GENRx: Generative AI-Enhanced Role-Playing for Pharmacy Education and Physical Examination is under development in the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Science, in collaboration with UBC’s Cloud Innovation Centre. GENRx will develop a web-based proof-of-concept prototype using GenAI to simulate virtual consultations, allowing pharmacy students to practice skills such as history taking, communication, physical assessment, and documentation. This project aims to use GenAI to enhance teaching and learning by increasing flexibility and accessibility, as well as improving students’ clinical confidence and competence. Upon completion, GENRx will support the integration of GenAI-driven patient cases across the Entry-to-Practice PharmD program, and offer insights for adapting this approach to other health disciplines and continuing education programs for pharmacists.
“The GENRx project has the potential to impact not only pharmacy education, but health professions education in general as the open-source platform can be modified and adapted to specific contexts,” explain Assistant Professor of Teaching Fong Chan, and Clinical Pharmacist and Lecturer Jamie Yuen, from the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Science. “It is important to the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Science, and our students, to engage with GenAI as we better understand its impact on student and instructor experiences in teaching and learning.”
TLEF projects also often involve collaboration across two different faculties, such as the GRASP: Using Generative AI to Efficiently Provide Space, Elaborative, Interleaving Formative Assessments project, which involves faculty and courses in the Faculty of Science and the Faculty of Arts. Led by Associate Professor of Teaching, Chemistry, Kayli Johnson and Associate Professor of Teaching, Psychology, Simon Lolliot, it plans to use GenAI to help faculty create formative assessment questions for regular retrieval practice. These follow-up assessments will adapt to each student’s individual needs, focusing on areas where they previously struggled. By the end of their Large TLEF project, the GRASP team aims to reduce study barriers and engage more students in highly effective, research-backed learning strategies.
“We are excited to build GRASP, a tool designed to make it easier for students and faculty to use research-backed strategies that improve learning,” Kayli and Simon describe. “What excites us most is the potential to remove barriers that prevent students from using proven study strategies and to support faculty in embedding these strategies seamlessly into their courses. Our goal is to support faculty, strengthen student learning, and put evidence-based strategies firmly within their grasp.”
Integrating GenAI in classrooms
While some TLEF projects focus on applying GenAI to meet immediate, discipline-specific needs, others are taking a step back to examine its broader implications. These initiatives explore what it means to teach and learn in a world where GenAI is already reshaping professional landscapes, and where students must be prepared not only to use these tools, but to critically engage with their ethical, social, and long-term impacts.
Addressing the growing uncertainty instructors face about how best to prepare instructors and students for an AI-transformed filed is at the core of the Preparing for an Automated Future: Building Automation Resilience in Computer and Data Science Education project. Guided by two pillars: AI-integrated learning and AI-invariant learning, with AI literacy as a strong component of both, this Large TLEF project, led by Associate Professor Dongwook Yoon from the Faculty of Science, is designed to reshape the curriculum in Computer Science and Data Science at UBC. By equipping students with both the tools to engage with GenAI and the foundational knowledge that transcends technological shifts, the project aims to empower them not just to navigate an AI-driven workforce, but to lead confidently and responsibly within it.
“There is uncertainty about what instructors should be teaching to ensure that our graduates have relevant skill sets for an AI-augmented workforce,” explains Dongwook. “That’s why we are working to implement a framework that helps bridge this gap.” In collaboration with his team, he is developing a conceptual framework designed to help instructors meaningfully integrate AI into their courses, alongside a set of adaptable tools to support real-world implementation. The project’s focus is clear: to enhance students’ AI literacy while equipping them with the confidence and insight to understand how GenAI may shape their future careers – not only in Computer Science, but across a wide range of professional paths. “Our goal is to eventually scale this work across the entire university, and even beyond UBC,” Dongwook describes. “We are specifically designing our framework to be domain-agnostic, so that it can be used by instructors across different faculties, including Arts, Science, and others.”
At the heart of the TLEF is a commitment to enhancing the student learning experience. Achieving that goal depends on equipping instructors with the knowledge, tools, and support needed to create meaningful and effective learning environments. In the context of GenAI, this involves helping educators understand both the challenges and opportunities these technologies bring, while also supporting a range of approaches and comfort levels as they explore how to integrate GenAI into their teaching.
A similar approach shapes We’re Only Human? Educative Frameworks for Artificial Intelligence, Academic Integrity, and Writing in the Faculty of Arts, a Large TLEF project in its second year of funding co-led by Professor of Teaching, English, Laurie McNeill and Associate Professor of Teaching, Political Science, Andrew Owen, from the Faculty of Arts. This initiative brings together a team of educators to extend an existing educative framework to address the evolving challenges and possibilities GenAI introduces in writing-intensive Arts courses. As the project progresses, the team aims to develop shareable, adaptable resources on GenAI and writing that draw from academic integrity and writing studies, while responding directly to the needs and concerns of UBC Arts instructors and students.
“Our project provides instructors with learning materials that fit a range of pedagogical approaches,” Andrew and Laurie explain. “For those who prefer students to use little to no AI at any stage of their writing, we created classroom activities and discussion prompts that promote dialogue between students and instructors about why we write and the skills students develop at different stages of the writing process. […] We are also developing materials for instructors who want to help students integrate GenAI into their research and writing process.” The project’s goal is to ensure that instructors, regardless of where they stand on their AI journey, are equipped with the resources and support needed to engage with educational changes proactively, rather than reactively. “We expect assessment in the Arts and education more broadly will change considerably in the coming years, and we are excited to be part of this conversation.”
Supporting faculty innovation
Behind the wide-ranging GenAI TLEF projects is a strong, intentional ecosystem of institutional and structural support that enables innovation in teaching and learning while upholding UBC’s Strategic Priorities. This ecosystem is anchored by both technical infrastructure and dedicated pedagogical guidance, ensuring that instructors can explore GenAI in meaningful and responsible ways. A core component of this infrastructure is the LLM Sandbox, which is a locally hosted, privacy-conscious large language model service developed by UBC’s Learning Technology and Innovation Centre. Purpose-built for academic contexts, the LLM Sandbox addresses essential concerns such privacy, data residency, and long-term sustainability. By supporting a common API and avoiding vendor lock-in, it offers instructors the flexibility to experiment with GenAI tools in ways that align with their course objectives, while ensuring student data remains protected. This new platform has the potential to become instrumental in helping TLEF-supported projects test and scale GenAI applications in diverse teaching and learning contexts.
Equally important as the tools themselves is the institutional commitment behind them. The Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology (CTLT), the Learning Technology Incubator, and the TLEF have played a key role in supporting teams throughout the various stages of their projects. From specialized workshops to strategic consultations and financial backing, UBC is committed to providing teams with the support they need to develop their projects.
“We wanted to provide a safe space for an early-adopter group of faculty to experiment if, how and where these tools may fit in their courses,” said Dr. Simon Bates Vice-Provost and Associate Vice-President, Teaching and Learning. “We were able to stand up the tools in under a year thanks to work from the CTLT’s Learning Technology Hub and innovation incubator, with funding support from the TLEF. It is important to us to provide instructors with the necessary infrastructure and support to ensure technology isn’t a barrier to this exciting new approach of pedagogical inquiry.”
“We are grateful for UBC’s leadership’s forward-thinking approach to evaluating how GenAI technology fits within higher education,” emphasize Fong Chan and Jamie Yuen.
For many project leads, this support structure around the TLEF GenAI special call has been invaluable. As Dongwook Yoon explains, “the CTLT has played a significant role in promoting institutional initiatives that have really helped me clarify and ideate around the challenges in my course and field.” Laurie McNeil and Andrew Owen echo this appreciation: “We are thankful for the flexibility and expertise provided by the TLEF, as well as the thoughtful and helpful advice the team is sharing as the project evolves to confront the ongoing changes in technologies along with student and instructor experiences with these tools.”
As the Gen-AI focused TLEF projects move into their second year and beyond, they are helping to build understanding of what these emerging tools can do. These initiatives are not only enhancing individual courses but prompting deeper conversations about pedagogy, ethics, and the student experience in an increasingly AI-impacted world.
From building automation resilience in data science, to supporting instructors in adjusting their approach to teaching, and much more, each project highlights pedagogically informed exploration and integration of this emerging technology. Additionally, it demonstrates how a coordinated and supported institutional strategy can create space for experimentation, reflection, and an enhanced teaching and learning experience for instructors and students.
The work is only getting started, but thanks to the creative energy of instructors and the support of programs like the TLEF, UBC is establishing itself as a driving force in preparing its faculty and students for the opportunities and challenges of GenAI in the future.