Founding Scholars (August 2026)

Learning Delivery Adjunct

Abigail Tarbotton

Executives and senior leaders who set strategy, lead teams, and drive organizational outcomes.

Broad professional audience — content relevant across many roles and functions.

Startup founders building new businesses, from MVP to scale.

Applying AI tools and techniques to professional workflows — assign alongside more specific AI topics.

Measuring and evaluating AI model performance, quality, and reliability for production use cases.

Teachers, course creators, and instructional designers building learning experiences.

Establishing policies, ethics frameworks, and oversight for responsible AI use in organizations.

Leading organizational AI adoption — change management, strategy, and building AI-ready teams.

Automating professional workflows with AI tools — productivity, operations, and task automation.

You will move from using AI on faith to using it with judgement: spotting when it helps, catching when it harms, and knowing the difference.

Full Professor of Critical AI Literacy

WIRED

Financial Times

Scientific American

Dr Sam Illingworth

Critical AI Literacy: When to Use AI and When to Leave It Alone

Springer Nature

Times Higher Education

The Conversation U.S.

Full Professor of Critical AI Literacy 

<h3>Why I enrolled</h3>
<p class="p2-tall">Hi everyone! My goals for the course are around developing my own critical use of AI and being able to help support others (staff and students) in developing their own AI literacy. I'm also keen to develop my own use of AI within my work, while still protecting private or sensitive educational data. One area I would like to explore is running general rubrics or assessments through AI to improve the assessments and make them more meaningful to students. From my work as a marker, I have seen the issues that come with policing AI use (Turnitin scores and academic integrity reviews), but also see a gap in helping students and staff develop their own critical AI literacy skills to use AI intentionally, ethically, and helpfully. With my librarian hat on, I also want to help our students develop good information literacy skills (which also involve AI skills). I worry that if they are outsourcing their learning to AI early on in their learning process, they are missing out on building up their own body of knowledge to critically use AI. Looking forward to learning with you all :)</p>
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    <h3>A breakthrough moment</h3><p class="p2-tall">What I've learned so far is challenging the way we tend to think of Artificial Intelligence - whether as a machine or computational model, or something more human (alien?) like - and our tendency to anthropomorphise and attribute agency to generative-AI tools. I am rethinking the language I use to discuss these tools.</p>

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<h3>What I’ll apply</h3>
<p class="p2-tall">I'm excited to continue my learning about the human side of AI and the semantics in which we talk about these tools, as well as finding practical ways to enhance my own work. Putting together this presentation for the researchers at my institution will be a great way of pulling everything together. I've really appreciated this community and all your perspectives to help shape and challenge my own thinking - let's keep this going :) Happy to connect on Linkedin and to continue learning together.</p>
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Certificate

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