At the behest of President Levin and Provost Martinez, we are pleased to announce that AI Meets Education at Stanford (AIMES) with the support of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning has launched a new university-wide seed grant program, AI in Teaching and Learning at Stanford. The goal is to bring Stanford’s world-class spirit of innovation, inquiry, and evidence to bear on the use of artificial intelligence in teaching and learning at the college level. The effort will engage faculty, instructors, staff, and students to shape the educational future at Stanford and across the higher education landscape.
The program offers grant funding for faculty, instructors, academic staff and students. There are three streams of funding:
- Course and curriculum grants to help develop and revise Stanford classes that meaningfully address AI, whether or not students use AI;
- Innovation with evidence grants to support the development and empirical testing of innovative approaches to AI, teaching, and learning at Stanford; and,
- Thought leadership funding for intellectual works on critical issues regarding AI and education at Stanford.
1. Course and Curriculum Grants | Grants up to $100K, available to faculty and lecturers.
Led by the Office of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education's (VPUE) AIMES initiative, Course and Curriculum grants provide a pool of planning and implementation funds that will support faculty and lecturers in redesigning courses and curricula to meaningfully address or integrate AI. These grants will enable instructors and student collaborators to experiment with new pedagogies, learning experiences, and ways of assessing learning in undergraduate and graduate courses—grounded in both creativity and instructional rigor. Course-based instructor-student teams will play a critical role in prototyping and testing new approaches. The Stanford Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) will provide expertise, coordination, and support for educational design and for understanding student learning and the effectiveness of seed grant projects.
2. Innovation with Evidence Grants | R&D grants up to $50,000, available to faculty, instructors, and students.
Led by the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, this program will serve as a research and development engine to benefit Stanford’s students with the broader goal of providing instances, insights, and evidence for college-level teaching and learning more generally. Innovation with Evidence grants will fund the development and evaluation of AI-enabled teaching approaches, examining their impact on student outcomes such as learning and effort. Importantly, grantees are required to collect empirical data from the implementation of their innovation. The Stanford Accelerator for Learning will provide dedicated expertise to support grantees in the science of learning, research design and execution, measurement and data collection, and modest technical support. Innovations may address, but are not limited to, a unit of instruction, section and lab activities, homework, experiential learning, assessment and full courses.
3. Thought Leadership Grants and Awards | Commissions and prizes up to $3,000, available to faculty, staff, lecturers, and students.
Thought Leadership funding is intended to support thought pieces and exchanges regarding pressing issues at the intersection of AI and college-level education. It uses an experimental format for funding that may prove to be highly engaging. Through publications and cross-sector dialogue, the two tracks —one with a focused theme, the other with an open call —will ideally foster a vibrant, intellectual and interdisciplinary community that brings together faculty, lecturers, students, and staff to engage in thoughtful, forward-looking exchange.
Track 1 has been awarded. Track 2 will open in the fall.
Track 1 — Themed Topics: This track of the Thought Leadership grants solicited proposals for intellectual works that consider the potential impacts of generative AI on the learning and production of critical thinking and creativity. There are strong and varied opinions about the impacts of AI on critical thinking and creativity. It is valuable to bring different ideas in different forms into productive dialog. We accepted proposals for a broad range of intellectual works including thought pieces, art, demonstrations, videos, software and more. A grant may be thought of as a commission to complete the proposed work. Awardees will be expected to join a forum in fall 2026 to share their work, and ideally, lead to synthesis publications or products that exemplify Stanford’s thought leadership on AI, teaching, and human potential.
Track 2 — Open Topics: In the fall of 2026, the Thought Leadership competition broadens the scope to any pertinent topic at the intersection of AI and education. For example, topics could include AI in relation to play, authorship, privacy, bias, mental health, surveillance, environmental and human labor impacts, faculty-student and peer-to-peer interactions, debates over educational models and more. Whereas Track 1 provides a commission to complete the work, Track 2 will give awards for completed products submitted through an open call. Applicants can submit short thought-pieces in the form of their choosing–from high-quality essays, policy briefs, videos or alternative media. The solicitation and sharing of these contributions will help shape not only academic perspectives but also public understanding and institutional decision-making.
Together, these three grants competitions — course and curriculum change, innovation with evidence, and thought leadership — should serve as both a catalyst within Stanford and as a help for the broader higher education field.
