When Professor Jen Manilay, in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, returned from sabbatical, she didn’t just refresh her research agenda, she reimagined her classroom. Armed with a sabbatical-fueled curiosity and a little help from ChatGPT, she redesigned her Developmental Immunology course from the ground up.
“I wanted to reach more students,” Jen explained. “There are no textbooks for this class, and I was trying to reduce the prerequisites. So, I thought—why not see what AI can do?”
It Started with Syllabus Planning
The spark came during a CETL course redesign workshop, where Jen joined a multidisciplinary faculty cohort exploring how to integrate AI into pedagogy. “We realized in the first session that we didn’t even know what AI tools could do,” she laughed. “So, we shifted our goal to learning how to use it ourselves before teaching our students.”
She began experimenting with ChatGPT to draft a week-by-week schedule and learning outcomes. “It gave me a structure. I could edit from there, but it took the cognitive load off,” she said. The AI helped generate action-verb-driven learning objectives, trimmed from ten to a focused four or five. It even helped her craft her CatCourses page: “I asked it to help with a welcome message, and to create a word cloud for a graphic—I wanted a warm, engaging feel.”
Reading Guides, Group Work, and Case Studies—With a Digital Assistant
With no textbook, Jen leaned heavily on primary literature. Each week, she uploaded review articles to ChatGPT and asked it to generate student-friendly learning outcomes and glossaries. “It was pretty amazing,” she said. “It would even give me a downloadable Excel sheet and Word doc.” Even more impressively, it helped her structure lectures. “It gave me a PowerPoint template for topics I already knew. It was enough to get started.”
For group work, Jen spoke to ChatGPT as she might a teaching assistant. “I'd tell it, ‘My vision is for students to explain figures from the paper in groups.’ And it would suggest a structure, timing, and guiding questions.” The AI even offered metacognitive prompts and exit ticket ideas. “Over the semester, I started talking to it like a colleague.”
She also used it to craft weekly homework—feeding it her slides and papers and asking for questions that hit all levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. “It was fast. And yes, I had to check the answers—but the time it saved was huge.”
Bringing Students Into the AI Loop
Jen didn’t hide her use of AI from students. She invited them into the conversation. “I was transparent. I told them: I’m using this to build your study guides and assignments.”
But when she noticed suspiciously uniform homework answers, she paused. “We had a discussion about AI tools. They knew about Grammarly, but also mentioned Gemini, ChatGPT, and others. We talked about academic integrity and transparency.”
She even crowdsourced classroom norms using AI. “I gave them index cards asking what conditions were needed for a great learning environment. I fed their responses into ChatGPT and got a summary list of community norms, including integrity.”
AI as Teaching Partner—and Teaching Topic
Jen didn’t stop with course design but she brought AI into classroom content. “We explored clinicaltrials.gov in group work, and I asked ChatGPT to help design activities around that. It even pulled examples and structured a whole class session.”
She also used it to introduce case studies. “I asked it to suggest symptoms and clues for genetic immunodeficiencies and how to scaffold those into discovery-based activities. It even gave me a stepwise breakdown for how to teach with case studies. That was gold.”
The course was a success—by student feedback and by Jen’s own measure. “Without ChatGPT, I could not have built this course in one semester,” she admitted. “I’d need two more iterations.”
Reflections, Cautions, and the Future
Jen’s experience highlighted the need for thoughtful AI integration: not just tool use, but tool literacy. “Students are using AI to make quizzes, generate study guides. That’s great, but they need to know how it works, and where it might go wrong.”
For graduate students, she suggested adapting CETL-style faculty workshops, with field-specific examples and prompts that build critical evaluation. “Start by polling students: when do you use AI? Then show them how to use it to summarize articles, organize thoughts, or assess their own writing.”
As for the faculty community, Jen’s advocacy is clear: “We need to normalize this. Publish it. Talk about it. Make it part of teaching expectations.”
She’ll be speaking at the American Association of Immunologists conference this May on her AI-enhanced course design. And yes—ChatGPT helped her prepare that talk too.
Hearing Jen reflect with such candor and creativity reminded me just how powerful these tools can be—not as shortcuts, but as catalysts for thoughtful, student-centered teaching.
Interested in discussing how you AI? Email sghosh@ucmerced.edu
