In Winter 2025, Temple’s Center for American Language and Culture (TCALC) pioneered a new approach to AI literacy supporting international students through its groundbreaking course, AI Essentials for Academic Success.
“This innovative course bridges the gap between advanced AI technologies and the unique needs of multilingual learners, equipping these students with real-world skills,” said Curriculum and Assessment Specialist, Meghan Killeen, who integrated AI-powered elements into TCALC’s curriculum. Killeen’s commitment to equitable AI use is evident in the way the course provides AI skills to diverse learners.
The course came about in response to ongoing internal discussions about how to respond to the changing norms for academic integrity while ensuring that TCALC’s pathway program to undergraduate study is preparing students for these changes. While much of the public discourse surrounding AI in education focuses on preventing plagiarism, this course takes a different approach—helping students use AI ethically and effectively while maintaining their authentic voice.
“The approach that I took was to make sure that students feel empowered and supported rather than seeing academic integrity as something punitive,” said Killeen.
Teaching AI Literacy
Through engaging discussions, hands-on activities, and expert-led sessions, students in the course developed the confidence to articulate their stance on AI in academic settings. By the end of the program, they felt empowered to discuss AI usage policies with their professors and advocate for their learning needs.
One example of the course’s emphasis on critical thinking and AI literacy was an exercise that helped students confront potential AI biases and hallucinations (misleading information). This exercise tasked students with using OpenArt AI to generate iconic cultural images from their home countries.
As designed, the exercise provoked an important discussion about AI bias when a student from Oman, Omran Al Siyabi, noticed a glaring mistake in the generated image of a well-known mosque in his home country. Instead of producing the correct image, the AI displayed a mosque in Saudi Arabia.
Al Syabi’s discovery was a powerful teachable moment, revealing a critical truth: AI, while impressive, is far from infallible. This student’s ability to spot the misrepresentation wasn’t just about correcting an error—it was an act of intellectual engagement, exactly the kind of critical thinking the course strived to cultivate.
“I wanted students to recognize the potential for bias in AI while building their confidence to discuss these issues openly when coming across inaccuracies or cultural misrepresentations,” said Killeen.
Reflecting on his evolving perspective on AI, Al Syabi said, “Back home, I never used AI because my thoughts were that it was cheating,” he said. However, after participating in the course, he realized that AI could be a valuable tool when used ethically and effectively. “AI tools can be a source of information in research,” he added.
“This collaboration was invaluable in helping us develop a product that truly supports linguistic diversity, helping students’ ability to succeed in higher education.”
-Laura Lubin, Kyron Learning’s AI Innovator program manager
Partnership with Kyron Learning
Killeen collaborated with Kyron Learning, an interactive AI-driven education platform, incorporating their AI-powered interactive elements into the course. As part of the AI Innovator’s Cohort, Kyron fine-tuned its AI prompts to better support multilingual users, using valuable feedback from TCALC. Kyron then applied TCALC’s expertise to shape a more inclusive ed-tech platform. In turn, Kyron’s cutting-edge technology enriched TCALC’s AI curriculum, creating a dynamic learning experience for students.
“As we worked with Meghan and the students, we gained a deeper understanding of the barriers multilingual learners face in accessing AI tools,” said Laura Lubin, Kyron Learning’s AI Innovator Program manager. “This collaboration was invaluable in helping us develop a product that truly supports linguistic diversity, helping students’ ability to succeed in higher education.”
Guest Speakers Amplified Knowledge
Students also engaged with guest speakers who brought diverse perspectives on AI and academic success. Dasanj Aberdeen, an adjunct Temple Engineering professor, introduced students to Socratic prompting, demonstrating how effective it can be to prompt students to create their own AI tutor to drive and support critical thinking skills.
Drawing from her experience as a consultant focused on interdisciplinary education and practice, Aberdeen explained that presenting to the students reignited her desire to incorporate diverse perspectives and examples into her future talks on AI, ensuring that her message is inclusive and relevant to broader audiences.
Another impactful guest speaker was Stephen D. Kelly, assistant director of Writing Services at Temple, who emphasized the importance of maintaining student voice in AI-assisted writing. Kelly shared a story from his own experience:
“A student followed me into the hallway after my presentation was over with concerns about whether using ChatGPT to study English was making her writing ‘soulless.’ She had been using ChatGPT to create reading material that was suitable for her level. The reading material she was encountering in her classwork was often a little too sophisticated for her to emulate, but she found that with ChatGPT, she was able to generate and comprehend English-language text with sentences and vocabulary that she could model.”
Kelly reassured her that this approach was a good one since she was supplementing what she found with her own thoughts and insights.
Another student, Rahwah Aljabri, a nursing student from Oman, also reflected on her own journey with AI: “I know when I can use AI and when not to. For example, when I start my program major, I know there are some classes for which I should not use AI.” This awareness of appropriate AI usage—good for brainstorming but not for generating text and passing it off as original—was a key course takeaway, for all the students, and was central to their capstone projects. For the projects, students researched a topic of their choice and identified for which aspects they could justify AI use, basing their choices on academic integrity.
Next Steps
The overwhelmingly positive response from students has made it clear that this course needs to continue and even be expanded. Many students expressed their feelings that AI Essentials for Academic Success should be longer. Based on their feedback, TCALC plans to run the course again in the summer for a special cohort of Brazilian English teachers participating in the Brazilian English Teachers at Temple (BETT) program. This expansion will provide valuable training for international educators, equipping them with AI literacy skills that they too can apply in their classrooms.
With TCALC leading the way in AI education for international students, AI Essentials for Academic Success is more than just a course—it’s a transformative opportunity that equips students with a competitive edge, giving them the AI literacy skills essential for academic and professional success.
The students completed the course with insights, experiences, and critical engagement to challenge AI biases, enrich academic discourse, and drive innovation.
By Lisa Z. Meritz, director of Communications and Marketing, Global Engagement