Announcements
January 28, 2025
Announcing the Educational IT Innovation Grant Awards for 2025
The Educational IT Committee, a part of the University of Rochester's IT Governance structure, promotes the use of technologies to support instructional innovation throughout the University of Rochester. By encouraging and supporting faculty and staff efforts in this area we hope to enhance learner experiences and outcomes. We also seek opportunities that lead to the broad applicability of educational IT innovations across multiple schools in order to maximize the potential impact.
To support these aims, our Innovation Grant program provides funding through a proposal process to support faculty and staff in adopting new technologies to their teaching. This program also includes mentorship, support, and connection to existing resources in the institution through the committee. We are excited to announce the grant awards for 2025.
Chemistry Review Resource - This project aims to develop a web application to enhance students' review processes in chemistry courses. Currently, past exam and workshop problems are provided in PDF form. While helpful, these resources require students to manually search through years of materials, using their judgment to identify relevant problems. This process is inefficient and limits the precision with which students can address specific areas of difficulty. The proposed web application will allow students to search for practice questions based on criteria such as topic, module, exam, and question type. Each question will link to corresponding OpenStax textbook sections and time-stamped lecture recordings covering the tested concepts. These features will help students focus on learning goals and track their progress, creating a motivating feedback loop. Lightboard recordings will enhance the quality of the lecture clips as needed. Using UR IT-supported tools, the platform will launch for CHEM 204 in Spring 2025. Following a successful pilot, it will expand to other chemistry courses and, eventually, other disciplines within the University.
Using AI Tools to Fast-Track Content Creation - This project proposes using three AI tools—Synthesia, Hey Gen, and Eleven Labs—to accelerate content creation. Instructional designers (IDs) from each group will collaborate with subject matter experts (SMEs) to develop microlearning videos, online modules, communications, or podcasts using these tools. These AI tools will address time constraints SMEs face, streamline workflows, and enable “optimization of teacher roles.” According to Training Magazine’s Leveraging AI for L&D white paper, AI tools will create “draft” videos as “thought starters” that IDs can rework and refine. Synthesia creates “studio-quality videos” from text or a slide deck using AI-generated avatars. It is already being widely used within the industry. Hey Gen creates “studio-quality videos” from text with AI-generated avatars but also translates videos of up to 30 minutes in 175+ languages/dialects.
Enhancing Student Support through the URcourseBot: A Collaborative Pilot Program - This project will pilot the use of the URCourseBot across schools to provide innovative support for faculty and students. This initiative responds to the rapid development of AI by fostering adaptive and forward-thinking strategies that enhance education at the University of Rochester. Simon Business School has developed and piloted this, and it is currently operating within a small-scale team. This project proposes to collaborate with two schools, Simon Business School and Warner School of Education, as a team for large-scale support across schools within the University of Rochester.