Advanced Generative AI for Language Teaching: Evaluation and Customization
Summer 2025 Mini-course
Session 1: June 16-July 18, with online meetings Thursdays, 1pm-3pm Central
Session 2: July 14-August 15, with online meetings Thursdays, 10am-12pm Central
To follow up on our first-of-its-kind mini-course on generative AI and AI literacy for language teachers, the UChicago Language Center is offering a new course that takes teachers’ knowledge and experience several steps forward.
This course combines content knowledge and hands-on, project-based learning to go beyond out-of-the-box generative AI tools and into the evaluation, use, and creation of customized AI tools. AI enthusiasts will become better users and tool-creators through this mini-course; AI skeptics will gain a more critical understanding of the AI tools spreading into more and more aspects of education and daily life.
Taught fully online, with weekly synchronous meetings. Session 1 and Session 2 are identical, NOT sequential.
Objectives
By participating in this course, language instructors will be able to:
- Understand recent developments in generative AI like reasoning models and AI agents, and their potential utility in language teaching
- Develop frameworks to evaluate generative AI’s performance on language-teaching related tasks
- Create and evaluate the effectiveness of Custom GPTs
- Utilize techniques like retrieval-augmented generation and few shot learning to customize and improve generative AI output
- Analyze and recreate the basic functionality of generative AI apps
Aysnchronous course content includes readings, video mini-lectures, hands-on practice, and discussion assignments. The course will culminate with each participant giving a brief presentation about a customized generative AI tool they built during the course, along with how it was created and its strengths and weaknesses.
Information for 2025 course:
Cost & Cancellation Policies
- Registration: $1000
- AI tools: This mini-course will utilize some paid features of ChatGPT, so participants are expected to purchase one month of ChatGPT Plus ($20/mo as of March, 2025).
Cancellation policy:
- 14 days or more before course begins: full refund. Between 13 to five days before course begins: 90% refund. Less than five days before course begins: no refund.
Target Audience
- Basic proficiency with and understanding of generative AI tools is required. This course follows up on last summer’s course titled ‘ChatGPT and Generative AI for Language Teachers.’ Completion of that course is NOT required for participation in this new course, but prospective participants should have a basic understanding of the topic covered in that class.
- Pre-service or in-service language instructors or administrators at the university level. K-12 educators are welcome to join, but young students will have a different set of security and privacy concerns that will not be addressed in this course.
- Instructors of any second or foreign language are welcome. Please note that these tools may have limited functionality in some languages, but a) that should improve over time, and b) it will still be valuable to learn more about these tools, even if they handle your target language poorly.
About the Instructor
Nicholas Swinehart is the Managing Director of Instructional Technology at the University of Chicago Language Center, where he supports instructors of over fifty languages with technology use and professional development. He is co-editor of the February, 2024 CALICO Journal special issue on social media for language learning and is co-author of Teaching Languages in Blended Synchronous Classrooms: A Practical Guide (2020). He has been invited to talk about generative AI and language teaching at New York University, the African Language Teachers Association Conference, and the Language Assessment Research Colloquium, among others.
Registration info coming soon!