UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Five Penn State instructors from three campuses worked in teams with Penn State's Teaching and Learning with Technology (TLT) over the past two years as part of the 2024-26 TLT Faculty Fellows program. Their goal was to enrich the student engagement experience through technology, addressing themes such as generative AI, student connection and belonging, and digital fluency.
Faculty Fellows are selected through an application process and collaborate with TLT to enhance innovative opportunities in their teaching and research, with the chance to disseminate their discoveries widely within Penn State and the broader higher education community. Additionally, they strive to revamp courses by utilizing technology-driven teaching methods tailored to support University, campus or college objectives.
“The Faculty Fellows program highlights what’s possible when faculty have the time and support to experiment and collaborate,” said Amy Kuntz, lead for the TLT Faculty Fellows program. “These projects showcase creative, discipline-specific approaches to teaching with technology that can scale across courses, campuses and the broader Penn State community.”
As the current cohort is wrapping up their projects, the following are lessons learned from their work.
Kyle Chalupczynski, 'PALS: Personalized AI Learning Simulations'
Chalupczynski, teaching professor of management information systems, began his fellowship with the goal of designing custom GPT-based chatbots for the course MIS 204: Introduction to Management Information Systems that would serve as personalized AI tutors for each chapter of the course. At the start of the semester, students create fictional companies, and each chatbot uses that company's context to guide them through course concepts using a Socratic, conversational approach.
“Rather than giving answers, the chatbots push students to think critically and apply course material to their own business scenarios,” Chalupczynski said. “What I didn't anticipate was how much the chatbots would unlock. The time I reclaimed from traditional lecture prep allowed me to build PALS (Personalized AI Learning Simulations), a full gamified learning platform that wraps around the chatbot experience.”
Students now earn company valuations that rise and fall based on submission behavior, collect more than 40 achievement badges, receive AI-powered document feedback before submitting and track their progress through a visually engaging dashboard. Every feature reinforces the business narrative that students are not just completing homework but running a fictitious company.
One unexpected outcome has been the platform's role in teaching AI literacy. A transparency feature called “Under the Hood” explains the AI technology powering each tool, turning every interaction into a mini digital literacy lesson. The platform’s support chatbot is even being built by a Penn State honors student, allowing for hands-on AI literacy while supporting peers.
“Engagement has been consistently strong, and the business simulation framing has given students a sense of ownership over their learning that traditional assignments rarely achieve,” Chalupczynski said.
Andjela Kaur and Samantha Beebe, 'Adventures in Disability Culture'
Kaur, assistant professor of biobehavioral health at Penn State Lehigh Valley, and Beebe, lecturer of biobehavioral health at Penn State Lehigh Valley developed “Adventures in Disability Culture,” a multimedia, choose-your-adventure e-book and website designed to introduce learners to disability culture through disability art, history and theory. The story is a gateway to multiple pathways of exploration — from virtual art galleries to video clips — giving learners agency in how they engage with the material. The project is especially well-suited for Penn State’s RHS 100: Introduction to Disability Culture course and can function as a standalone exploration or a structured multi-week journey.
“Designing ‘Adventures in Disability Culture’ was one of the most creatively fulfilling projects I have undertaken,” Kaur said. “The process challenged me to move beyond conventional academic formats and imagine learning as something genuinely exploratory — where students choose their own path rather than follow a prescribed sequence. There was real joy in building a structure that honored both the complexity of disability culture and the diversity of how people learn.”
The project emphasizes both accessibility and engagement, embedding disability perspectives directly into the structure of the learning experience.
“What made this project feel meaningful was watching a concept transform into something with real pedagogical reach,” Kaur said. “Embedding disability art, history and theory into interactive ‘adventures’ allowed the material to breathe in ways a traditional textbook never could. Knowing this resource could serve Penn State students — many encountering disability culture for the first time — makes me especially glad that we have undertaken this project.”
If you are interested in adopting the choose-your-adventure e-book and website, complete the interest form to be notified of final release.
Mariah Kupfner, 'Making Virtual Space and Expanding the VR World: 3D Scanning, Virtual Museums and Design Thinking'
Kupfner, assistant professor of american studies and public heritage, integrated virtual reality (VR) and 3D scanning tools across several humanities courses, from art history and material culture to museum studies and public heritage. While her classes utilize digital tools, her focus remains on material surroundings and the cultural meanings embedded in physical forms.
In courses like American Art and Society, students visit immersive exhibitions on VR headsets, exploring galleries otherwise inaccessible during the semester and reflecting critically on VR as one technology in a long history of visual technologies that promise to transport viewers.
Advanced undergraduate and graduate students in the course Museum Studies build from visiting immersive VR exhibits to conceptualizing and building their own museum spaces in VR, using user-friendly platforms to bring their visions to life.
“They must make deliberate choices about space, layout and audience experience, linking their exhibition content to practical decisions about design,” Kupfner said.
In the course Public Heritage Practices, advanced undergraduate and graduate students can create 3D scans of material culture at historic sites, creating digitally accessible representations of objects layered with their own historical research and interpretive annotations. Their scans function as a form of digital preservation that also help them make historical meaning visible and accessible.
“These tools can enable students to move from theoretical, abstract exercises to applied, contextual learning. Students work to build places that don’t yet exist, to make visible that which is hard to see, and to imagine varied audiences,” Kupfner said. “I am excited to continue to build on this work and support critical digital literacies in service of better understanding the material world around us.”
Tiffany Petricini, 'Embedding AI Literacy within the Communication Basic Course'
Petricini, assistant teaching professor of communications arts and sciences, had her project examine how institutions were conceptualizing and implementing AI literacy in the wake of generative AI. Much of the existing guidance was developed prior to the rapid expansion of large language models and often assumed that AI literacy can be applied uniformly across disciplines.
“This fellowship provided space to critically analyze those assumptions and to explore how AI literacy might be more meaningfully grounded in disciplinary expertise and classroom context,” Petricini said.
Her project focused on CAS 100: Effective Speech, one of Penn State’s largest enrolled general education courses. The project investigated how communication studies are uniquely positioned to address AI as a rhetorical and communicative phenomenon rather than solely a technical tool.
“Because generative AI operates through language, persuasion and audience adaptation, communication courses provide a foundational site for cultivating student discernment, ethical reflection and critical analysis of AI-mediated discourse,” Petricini said. “This work contributes to broader institutional conversations about how AI literacy can move beyond generic frameworks toward approaches that preserve instructor autonomy, respect disciplinary differences and prepare students to navigate increasingly AI-mediated environments with intellectual and communicative responsibility.”
With support and funding from the University Libraries’ Sally W. Kalin Early Career Librarianship for Learning Innovations, this Faculty Fellows project expanded into a cross-unit, collaborative public speaking resource offering scalable and adaptable materials to instructors. The Pressbook “Beyond the Podium: AI, Speech, and Civic Voice” and corresponding Creative Commons Canvas modules include assignments, activities and openly licensed content that can be adopted, adapted and remixed for individual instructor needs.
Visit TLT Faculty Fellows Program or email fellows@psu.edu to learn more.