Teaching Fellows

Agentic-AI for In-Class Simulated Decision-Making: Enhancing Experiential Learning Through AI-Driven Scenarios

This project integrates Agentic AI, an emerging class of AI that autonomously plans and executes tasks, into classroom learning to create dynamic, simulated decision-making experiences. Initially deployed in a Digital Marketing Analytics course at Ivey Business School, the simulation will focus on equity crowdfunding investment decisions. Unlike traditional generative AI, Agentic AI models can adapt to user inputs, engage in multi-step decision processes, and mirror real-world complexity.

The goal is to help students develop AI literacy and decision-making skills by interacting with a proactive AI agent that simulates investment scenarios based on real-time data. The project includes a research component analyzing how AI-driven outputs impact the investor’s decision-making. Insights will inform both pedagogy and academic research.

Beyond the initial deployment, the tool will be scalable across disciplines, marketing, finance, entrepreneurship, and decision sciences, empowering students to apply analytical thinking and AI-driven strategies to complex, real-world problems. The project will also produce a published teaching case, peer-reviewed research, and faculty workshops to support widespread adoption.

Generative AI Adaptive Learning Platform for Health Professions Education

Andrews’ project aims to design, build, and evaluate the impact of a GenAI learning platform on enhancing clinical reasoning through a case-based pedagogy in healthcare programs. The project will use GenAI to create dynamic, adaptable, and realistic case scenarios tailored to meet the individual learning needs of students. This personalized approach seeks to boost engagement and provides students with a space to practice clinical reasoning safely, where they can experiment and learn from feedback without jeopardizing patient safety. Using the Discover, Design/Build, and Test (DDBT) framework, the specific objectives of the project are:

(1) Conducting a needs assessment on the use of AI in physical therapy education and identifying potential barriers and facilitators to implementation.

(2) Designing and building a GenAI platform by fine-tuning existing GenAI tools with clinical cases.

(3) Evaluating the impact, perception, and satisfaction of the new GenAI learning platform on students’ clinical reasoning.

The GenAI-driven adaptive learning platform has the potential to change teaching and learning across various programs within rehabilitation sciences. By leveraging GenAI to enhance clinical reasoning through case-based learning, physical rehabilitation programs can not only improve educational outcomes but also advance the field.

Bill's project is titled Teaching Hybrid Human-AI Teamwork Using Qualitative Case Studies. It aims to develop innovative teaching techniques and modules that enhance student learning by leveraging the complementarity of human-AI teamwork, with a focus on qualitative reasoning under ambiguous and adversarial conditions. It will develop five teaching modules: 1) Leveraging Hallucination, teaches students to detect AI hallucinations and use hypothetical document embeddings to optimize information retrieval in complex analysis tasks. 2) Testing Hypotheses, utilizes retrieval augmented generation (RAG) combined with structured analytic techniques (SATs) to evaluate evidence consistency and improve hypothesis testing. 3) Combining Evidence, introduces Graph RAG to build knowledge graphs for formalized argumentation, thereby enhancing scenario-building and evidence-based reasoning. 4) Combatting Disinformation, develops natural language processing techniques to identify deceptive communication, using case studies of active disinformation. 5) Preventing Groupthink, enhances divergent thinking and prevents cognitive biases by leveraging AI to explore alternative perspectives and identify ‘unknown unknowns.’

By cultivating skills in qualitative reasoning, counterdeception, and evidence-based argumentation, the project will better prepare students for complex, information-rich environments. Moreover, the modules will be open source and are designed to be customizable, enabling faculty to adapt them for disciplines such as business, law, health, education, and social sciences, thereby benefiting a broader student base. The project will use experimental methods and metrics from human-AI teamwork research to measure complementarity, or the effectiveness of human-AI collaboration, within and across problem-solving scenarios. It will also compare team performance under shared information conditions versus scenarios where humans can access unique contextual insights (‘unobservables’).

Ashley's project titled, Transformative Pedagogies: Nurturing Cultural Humility through Epistemic Justice Education for Culturally Safe Healthcare Practice, seeks to foster 'epistemological diversity' and address biases in nursing curricula and allied health curricula, to support health professional student competency development in practicing cultural humility. This teaching innovation project aims to equip health professional students with tools for practicing cultural humility through an epistemic justice learning module. The overarching goal is to evaluate how teaching students to use an epistemic justice lens to guide their professional practice influences students' perceptions of cultural humility in their workplaces, fostering the establishment of culturally safe healthcare spaces. This project aims to advance major decolonial reforms in healthcare education by incorporating epistemic justice principles, fostering cultural humility, and disseminating findings to contribute to the broader discourse on equitable healthcare practices.

David’s project, Co-Teaching in Law Schools, involves developing three distinct approaches to collaborative teaching in law, each prioritizing a key thematic objective of legal education. In the first approach, David will collaborate with practitioners to reinforce the integration of theory and practice in the law classroom. This form of co-teaching will convey how the real-world experience of a practitioner can illustrate and bring to life the abstract principles of the law, and, conversely, how theory and scholarly inquiry can provide explanatory meaning, critical perspective, and recommendations for change to the world of legal practice. With the second approach, David will collaborate with a series of co-instructors to expose students to diverse models of legal professionalism, deploying exercises that encourage students to integrate their professional identity with their backgrounds, lived experiences, values, and goals. The third approach will bring David together with an instructor from a different discipline to collaboratively design and teach all aspects of a course, as an exercise in robust interdisciplinarity within the law curriculum. During his Fellowship, David will also offer a variety of professional development opportunities for colleagues in the Faculty of Law, including a Legal Education Seminar Series that will focus on pressing issues in teaching and learning in law, workshops and resources on collaborative teaching, and pedagogical consultations with faculty colleagues.

Dr. Nicole Campbell is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology and the Director of Interdisciplinary Medical Sciences at the Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry at Western University. She teaches undergraduate students and is leading a new course-based MSc in interdisciplinary medical sciences. She has received several awards for teaching and innovation, including the Marilyn Robinson Award for Teaching Excellence in 2019 and the Schulich Excellence in Education Award (2021). She has also been one of Western’s Teaching Fellows and Experiential Learning Scholars. Dr. Campbell’s scholarly interests include supporting student mental health and embedding skill development in the curriculum.