---
title: "MIT trains college faculty to teach AI in class"
url: https://www.herecharleston.com/2026/09/10/mit-schwarzman-faculty-ai-across-disciplines/
date: 2026-09-10T05:20:11-04:00
modified: 2026-09-10T11:06:18-04:00
author: "Jordan Okafor"
categories: ["Education"]
site: "HERE Charleston"
attribution: "HERE Charleston"
---

# MIT trains college faculty to teach AI in class

*Source: [HERE Charleston](https://www.herecharleston.com/2026/09/10/mit-schwarzman-faculty-ai-across-disciplines/) — September 10, 2026 by Jordan Okafor*

The MIT Schwarzman College of Computing has launched a summer training program that brings college faculty from around the country to Cambridge to learn how to teach foundational artificial intelligence and machine learning across their own disciplines, from engineering and statistics to finance and sustainability.

The inaugural AI Educators Pilot ran for one week in July at MIT and brought together 19 faculty members from Allen University, Babson College, Brandeis University, Marshall University, the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, the University of North Texas, and Wentworth Institute of Technology. The participating institutions span four states — Massachusetts, South Carolina, West Virginia, and Texas — and a range of institutional types, from small private colleges and a historically Black university to large public research universities. The pilot is built around an MIT undergraduate course, C01/C51 Modeling with Machine Learning, developed through the college’s Common Ground initiative to help students understand the mathematical foundations of AI methods and apply those methods to problems in their own fields.

The workshop is free to accepted faculty; participating institutions cover travel and lodging. Faculty spent the week working with MIT instructors on the pedagogy behind the course, adapting its examples and exercises to their own classrooms, and reflecting at the end of the week on which materials they planned to bring back. The pilot is led by Saurabh Amin, the Edmund K. Turner Professor in Civil Engineering and faculty director of the AI Educators Pilot, and Dan Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and the Panasonic Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, has described its aim as expanding AI education by investing in the training of instructors rather than only students. Support for this year’s cohort came from Jake and Robin Reynolds.

The pilot sits inside a broader campus effort called the Computing Commons, an outgrowth of the Common Ground initiative for computing and AI education. The educators pilot is the college’s attempt to move that curriculum outside its own campus by giving other institutions a running start with modules, activities, and teaching techniques that have already been classroom-tested.

More than half a dozen MIT instructors from fields spanning finance, computer science, and sustainability contributed materials to the workshop, and participants worked through demonstrations, videos, exercises, and hands-on adaptations. Feedback collected from the first participants will shape future iterations, and the college has said it will publish updates on future workshop dates rather than fix a permanent schedule.

Applications for this summer’s workshop have closed. The college has indicated that the pilot is intended to grow into a larger, ongoing program if the first cohort’s classroom adaptations produce useful results back at their home institutions. The wider effort MIT is describing is straightforward: as generative AI seeps into every kind of academic work, the scarcest resource is not the technology itself but instructors who can teach students to use it with judgment, and preparing those instructors requires the kind of hands-on program the pilot is meant to test.