Gen AI Teaching and Learning Showcase - 2025

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Gen AI Teaching and Learning Showcase - 2025

Just under three years after generative AI burst into public consciousness, the momentum hasn’t eased: if anything, 2025 has ushered in a shift from Should we use AI? to How do we integrate it meaningfully?

Toni Jones | Lead, Education Gen AI
Nick McKintosh | Learning Futurist

Across higher education, the landscape is moving fast: regulators are more stringent on expectations, secure and verifiable assessment is becoming the norm, and early indicators suggest employers are rewarding genuine AI capability with noticeable salary premiums. And students? They're already using it making guidance and capability in Generative AI essential.

RMIT's third GenAI Showcase revealed what happens when educators stop debating and start building - behaviour-change role-plays that give students safe reps, AI tutors offering feedback at 3AM, and accounting assessments that aim to mirror industry.

Framed around four themes: AI-powered classrooms, the creative frontier, human-in-the-loop practice, and AI for student success. Our presenters shared what’s working, what’s challenging, and what’s emerging, always keeping students and RMIT values at the centre.

The pattern was impossible to ignore: thoughtful integration leads to better student outcomes.

Here's a summary of what that looks like in practice.

Theme 1: The AI-powered classroom

This theme focused on the practical craft of teaching - how educators are redesigning core activities, assessments, and learning scaffolds with AI to create more engaging and effective experiences.

Role-play with Val’s Imagino

Emilio Cadaris | Educator | STEM College

Behaviour-change conversations are some of the hardest skills for students to master, and yet they rarely get enough safe, low-pressure opportunities to practise them. Emilio Cadaris solved this with Imagino, an AI role-play persona in Val (RMIT’s private, secure Generative AI Environment available to students and staff), that enables chiropractic students to practise difficult conversations without stakes. Students can now fail safely, adjust their approach, and try again - something impossible with standardised patients or real clinical placements.

AI integration in academic success pathways

Danny Green | Senior Manager, Student Success | Student Experience & Success – RMIT Vietnam
Pierce Larkin | Manager, Learning Success | Student Experience & Success – RMIT Vietnam

Danny Green and Pierce Larkin redesigned the entire Academic Pathways course around one insight: AI literacy is an academic skill, not exclusively a policy problem, and when it comes to guidance on acceptable AI use, there can never be enough. With educators observing a decrease in cases of Academic misconduct in this area.

Using Val to build scaffolding activities

Khuong Nguyen | Lecturer, Electronic & Computer Systems Engineering | RMIT Vietnam

Highly technical courses often cause students to feel overwhelmed. Khuong Nguyen used Val to design learning activities that he strategically placed into course delivery to scaffold student development. Khuong’s pedagogical expertise and Val’s creative activity suggestions were a powerful example of human-AI collaboration. Instead of feeling overwhelmed, students were motivated to engage in dynamic learning tasks and developed a strong understanding of complex concepts.

Theme 2: The creative frontier

This theme is for the "wow" factor projects that push the boundaries of how we think about AI in education, showcasing its potential in unconventional and inspiring ways.

AI-generated manga for language learning

Paul Stanton | Educator | English for University – RMIT Vietnam

Teaching advanced grammar and vocabulary can feel heavy—unless you wrap it in a story students are excited to build. That’s where AI-powered manga creation came in. Paul demonstrated his lessons, in which Vietnamese students used ChatGPT to build characters and stories while integrating complex vocabulary. With reported improvements in engagement and assessment results, turns out students learn better when they're building something they care about.

Generative AI in 3D modelling

Ondris Poi | Associate Lecturer, Design Studies | RMIT Vietnam

As communities look for ways to digitally preserve sites, stories, and artefacts, AI is opening new possibilities. Ondris brought museum digitisation techniques into design studies, allowing students to scan and present 3D models digitally, reducing physical artefact handling and enhancing feedback.

Theme 3: Human in the loop: embedding ethics and critical thinking

This theme addresses the crucial need to move beyond simply using AI, focusing instead on teaching students how to use it responsibly, ethically, and critically.

Embedding generative AI in accounting assessment

Lina Xu | Lecturer, Accounting | College of Business and Law
Victor Borg | Senior Lecturer, Accounting | College of Business and Law

If industry is rapidly adopting AI, how can we justify teaching as if nothing has changed? It’s a key question often overlooked in Higher Education discussions about AI. Not for Lina and Victor, who moved quickly to adapt their accounting courses to stay in step with industry changes. The results speak for themselves: students show improvements in critical analysis, ethical awareness, and confidence with digital tools. Skills that match the evolving demands of the accounting field.

Comic-style role-play for industry-ready graduates

Mila Keightley | Senior Learning & Teaching Specialist | College of Business and Law
Patrick Lynch | Senior Learning & Teaching Specialist | College of Business and Law

With workplaces undergoing as much AI enabled transformation as classrooms, students need more than technical know-how they need practical judgement. Patrick Lynch and Mila Keightley from CoBL showcased the recently released Heng’s Quest: AI at Work, which offers exactly that. Students step into real virtual workplace scenarios where they must decide how to use AI responsibly, balance speed with quality, and uphold the ethical standards industry now demands.

Theme 4: AI for student success

in service of student learning: providing timely support, creating space for practice, and helping students build confidence for professional contexts.

AI x virtual workplace innovation

Kirsty McAfee | Senior Learning Designer | College of Vocational Education

Students were expected to be workplace-ready before they’d ever stepped into a workplace. So the team flipped the model and built a virtual workplace inside the Canvas RMIT’s LMS. Learning designers in the College of Vocational Education rapidly generated industry-specific documents, policies, and tasks, giving students a safe space to practise real work. The result? Scalable, accessible learning with rich analytics and a foundation that keeps growing.

3:00 AM tutor for just-in-time support

Thomas Bierly | Academic Career Development Fellow | College of Business and Law
Vineet Tawani | Business Administration/Management (Education Focused) (ACDF) Accounting | College of Business and Law

Students study at all hours and waiting for feedback often breaks learning momentum. To solve this, the team developed the 3:00 AM Tutor. A Val persona embedded in Canvas that provides immediate hints, feedback, and encouragement using coaching frameworks rather than answers. The chat bot was integrated into Canvas replacing static H5P learning activities with dynamic, AI-generated practice scenarios. Students can request targeted practice, receive tailored feedback, and iterate until concepts, building on the knowledge gained in the classroom.

Final thoughts

Whether it was creating safe spaces for practice, providing feedback when educators weren’t available, scaffolding complex skills, or helping students develop confidence and judgement, each example showed AI working with educator expertise, not replacing it. What stood out most was the intentionality: pedagogy led the design, values shaped the decisions, and student learning remained the focus. These projects remind us that meaningful AI adoption doesn’t start with the tool, it starts with a problem worth solving.

Get inspired, get involved: gaile@rmit.edu.au

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