Erin Aspenlieder is the Director of the Office of Teaching & Learning at the University of Guelph where she leads strategy and services that advance teaching excellence and inclusive and learner-centred pedagogy. She previously served as Associate Vice-Provost, Academic Quality & Teaching Innovation at Sheridan College and as Special Advisor to the Provost on Generative AI at McMaster University.
There is no shortage of problems in Canadian post-secondary teaching and learning: underfunding resulting in choices to expand class sizes and reduce teaching support; incentive structures that reward research over teaching; assessment models attuned to scale and output; uneven support services for students at a time when multiple and intersecting stressors impact learning conditions; and educators asked – again – to adapt, to pivot, to shift, to change to meet the moment.
The moment – 2025 – is one that likewise offers much in the way of challenges for post-secondary education in Canada and for the world. In this talk we will take one of those challenges – the investment in generative and agentic artificial intelligence “AI” – and ask how the specific challenges of AI for teaching and learning exacerbate the structural breakages already in place that jeopardize teaching and learning and what we might do next.
We will begin by considering what problems AI has amplified for teaching and learning, and both how it is currently making these problems worse (and offering windows of possibility). Tempting as it is to shift from the portrait of concern to that of hope, the talk shifts instead to considering what about teaching in the learning university, in particular, might warrant effort to preserve, what we might need to reimagine, and what might need to be built entirely anew.