Launching the CLAiRE (Constraints Led AI Redesign for Education) Open Toolkit

The velocity at which generative AI capabilities are developing tests our ability as educators to adapt to the challenges and opportunities that these systems bring, not only for our students, but also for our own work. Adapting curricula to ensure that our students develop both domain knowledge, and critical AI literacies throughout their programmes of study has become a major focus in higher education, and while there have been numerous AI literacy frameworks and guidance documents issued, advice on how to practically translate those to practice at either a module or course level has been lacking.

The CLA is a method that we have adapted from coaching theory, which has previously applied to skills development in multiple disciplines (e.g. law, nursing, medicine). The CLA consists of a simple model that recognises that individual, environmental, and task constraints triadically interact to produce affordances that influence learning. Educators can manipulate both the environment and tasks to create affordances that influence how students will interact with AI in their classrooms, guiding them towards a productive relationship with these powerful tools that have rapidly become a normalised part of their lives, and developing the domain knowledge they need to be able to use them safely and responsibly.

In this poster, we present the CLAiRE (Constraints Led AI Redesign for Education) open digital resource kit, which includes links to our publications on the project, workshop resources, planning resources, and beta access to the CLA Curriculum Assistant that can help in the design of assessment and learning activities aligned with the CLA approach. The CLA has been piloted in Ireland and Canada, and we are now looking to make the resources available more widely and to a broader range of disciplines. We believe that open access to these kinds of supports and knowledge sharing is more critical than ever as higher education tries to navigate and rapidly adapt to an AI-enabled world, perhaps the most significant disruptor we have ever collectively faced.