Our Goal: Shared Knowledge; Pooled Resources

The field of educational development in Canada has a tradition of sharing resources, knowledge, practices and skills (McDonald and Stockley, 2008). This tradition serves teaching and learning leaders well in this moment of profound and deepening change to teaching and learning brought by advances in artificial intelligence. Simply put: no one individual or institution can plan, respond, and adapt to this moment alone.

This “AI Playbook” is one answer to the call for pooled knowledge, approaches and resources. We’ve made a first effort at bringing together existing materials we’ve sourced from publicly available sites and annotating these resources with our own experiences and insights. We then invited our community to contribute to the Playbook through editing, revising and adding content. We had 25 members of the community from across Canada and beyond contribute ideas and experiences. We hope for additional contributions to the next edition of this Playbook, planned for winter 2026. Please see the chapter “Next Steps for the Playbook” for more information on how to get involved.

While there are an increasing number of frameworks related to AI in teaching and learning that approach the why of this work – including the excellent CRAFT framework – there are fewer collections on the how. This Playbook aims to fill that gap by providing teaching and learning leaders with concrete and practical approaches to leading and doing the work.

Our hope is that we can use this space to continue to share what we build, what we learn and what we need from one another.

A few contextual notes:

• How we wrote the Playbook: In a decision to be inefficient we have written this Playbook ourselves first as two authors and then with our community, unaided by AI unless noted. While we regularly use AI in our work, an underlying theme of this collection is community and experience and for that reason have decided that the form of the book ought to reflect those themes with our human-experience behind the text.
• Who is it for? We wrote this Playbook for “Teaching and Learning Leaders” – a capacious term that is meant to speak to anyone who sees their role and work reflected in it. You might be a Center for Teaching and Learning Director, or a faculty-member tasked with leading a working group, or an educational developer who wants to lead, or a committee of folks working together. Your ‘role’ is less important to using and contributing to this Playbook as is your orientation and actions that matter. With that this book is for you if:
  • You/your group is prepared to lead. What this means is you are prepared to envision where your institution needs to go and are willing to recommend, advocate and work to bring the institution to that future.

  We  also wrote this Playbook to speak across institutional contexts – colleges and universities, large and small, those with funded positions (or units) and those working on a shoestring. In setting such an open scope, we know some materials will be less relevant to some readers.

• What we assume about you: You/your group is prepared to lead. What this means is you are prepared to envision where your institution needs to go and are willing to recommend, advocate and work to bring the institution to that We trust you to suspend the “yes, but… this won’t work in my context” impulse and to instead ask yourself “yes, and… how could this example or suggestion apply in my context.” We also hope and welcome additions to this Playbook from your perspective and your experience.

How to Read This Playbook

The Playbook addresses many topics and depending on your experience with AI and your institutional culture, some sections are likely going to be more relevant than others. With that, we offer three pathways to read through the Playbook that you might consider. Of course, you can read it as you like, too.

With that, let’s get to the business of sharing what we know and what some of our institutions have already done/are doing.