As artificial intelligence (AI) transforms industries, equipping students with AI skills has become a pressing priority. Abu Dhabi University (ADU) is addressing this challenge with the AI4All initiative, a project aimed at making AI education accessible to all students, regardless of their field of study. This presentation highlights ADU’s innovative approach to teaching AI, leveraging AI technologies to ensure a personalized, feedback-rich, and cost-effective learning experience at scale.

AI4All was designed to remove traditional barriers to AI learning, such as complex programming or advanced mathematics, enabling students from diverse disciplines to gain practical AI skills relevant to today’s job market. By integrating AI education into the core curriculum, AI4All treats AI as an essential skill, akin to digital literacy, that enhances employability across various industries. The program employs project-based learning, emphasizing real-world applications of AI to drive student engagement and knowledge retention.

A key feature of AI4All is its use of AI to deliver personalized educational content. Through AI-driven tools, students receive customized learning experiences that adjust to their progress and learning styles. This personalization extends to secure, AI-proctored exams, ensuring academic integrity without logistical complications. Furthermore, AI-enabled attendance tracking streamlines class management, enhancing administrative efficiency. These tools, combined with common software like Excel to teach advanced AI concepts, ensure students gain theoretical understanding and practical skills.

The initiative also fosters discussions on the ethical and societal implications of AI. By addressing the broader impacts of AI on society, AI4All prepares students to engage with AI responsibly, equipping them with the knowledge to navigate complex ethical challenges in their future careers. The program’s focus on ethics ensures that students not only understand AI’s technical aspects but also its potential consequences in various fields.

To date, over 1,800 students from multiple disciplines have benefited from AI4All, with significant positive feedback on both content and delivery. The program’s scalability and success were affirmed by a decree from the Ministry of Education, making AI training mandatory for all students. The widespread adoption of the initiative demonstrates its effectiveness in providing scalable, practical AI education while maintaining high-quality, differentiated learning experiences.

Beyond the core AI literacy components, ADU has also explored innovative methods for improving student engagement, particularly in remote learning environments. The Diverse Distant-Students Deep Emotion Recognition and Visualization (D3ERV) project uses AI to monitor the emotional dynamics of culturally diverse students during online lectures. This system, built using a specialized dataset of emotions from Arab students, leverages advanced facial recognition algorithms to assess student engagement in real-time.

The D3ERV model has achieved significant accuracy rates—86.29% on a dataset of Arab students and 98.84% on the CK+ benchmark dataset, surpassing state-of-the-art models. The system’s real-time feedback, displayed through a user-friendly dashboard, allows instructors to adjust teaching strategies dynamically based on students’ emotional responses. This approach fosters a more responsive learning environment, ensuring that students remain engaged during lectures.

The scalability of the D3ERV project is demonstrated by its pilot phase, which involved over 250 participants. The system’s cloud-based, modular architecture ensures that it can be applied to different educational formats, from small seminars to large-scale lectures. Crucially, the model respects cultural sensitivities and privacy, providing a tool that enhances education without compromising student comfort.

By integrating AI-based emotion recognition with the AI4All initiative, ADU offers a comprehensive model for teaching AI at scale while preserving a personalized, culturally sensitive approach. The combined power of AI-driven learning tools and real-time emotional insights enables ADU to deliver a rich, adaptive educational experience that meets the diverse needs of its students.

In conclusion, the AI4All initiative demonstrates how AI can be reimagined as a universal skill, accessible to all students and applicable across disciplines. Through the use of AI to deliver personalized learning experiences and monitor student engagement, ADU has created a model that is scalable, effective, and globally replicable. The initiative equips students with essential AI skills while preparing them to navigate the ethical challenges of an AI-driven future, positioning it as a blueprint for future AI education.

Mohammed Ghazal, Director of the Research Institute for AI and Emerging Technology, Abu Dhabi University

AI misuse is among the top concerns of educators today. Students have unlimited access to AI-generative software tools, resulting in an increase of assignment submissions that cross the boundary from demonstrating original thinking into violating academic integrity policies. At our institution, we have responded to this crisis by increasing our support of faculty and students as well as maintaining high expectations of all parties involved. The support element of our approach involves providing educational resources to determine and prevent AI misuse, equipping educators to evaluate assignments effectively using resources such as Turnitin, and providing our own Plagiarism Prevention School option to rehabilitate students who submit unoriginal content. Equally important, we maintain that students, faculty, and administrators are held accountable to the high standards of academic integrity that support the aim of higher education. In this session, attendees will learn how one institution is taking actionable steps toward maintaining academic integrity in the age of AI.

Ben Garcia, Writing Resources Coordinator, English & Creative Writing Faculty, Hope International University
Natalie Hewitt, ALO, Academic Dean, Hope International University

This presentation will summarize the findings of a study conducted at Westcliff University’s SMART program, which explored the collaboration between 138 companies and over 600 students. It examines how these partnerships, alongside AI tools, helped students develop critical thinking and communication skills, offering insights for designing future-oriented academic programs.

The presentation will start by introducing the SMART program, emphasizing its goal of giving students hands-on experience in professional settings through company partnerships. It will then explore how AI tools enhanced student learning, particularly in problem-solving, communication, and critical thinking. Examples include AI-driven communication platforms and data analysis tools used in student-company projects.

Key findings will show how these collaborations, supported by AI, improved students' abilities to think critically and communicate in professional environments. The broader implications for curriculum development will also be discussed, suggesting ways universities can adapt their programs to meet modern workforce needs.

Case studies from the SMART program will be presented to demonstrate successful projects and their impact on student performance. The presentation will offer recommendations for educators and administrators on integrating AI and industry collaborations into curricula to create a more dynamic, skills-based learning environment.

Finally, the presentation will conclude by discussing the future of university-industry partnerships, the role of AI in education, and the potential to design curricula that prepare students for both present and future challenges in the workforce.

Omar Haddad, Professor, Westcliff University
Raef Assaf, Professor, Westcliff University