Purdue’s AI Bytes workshops hit 1,000 attendances milestone

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Purdue University’s innovative AI Bytes workshop sessions recently achieved 1,000 attendances. The virtual sessions, which invite faculty and staff from around campus to come together and learn more about artificial intelligence, have been hosted each month since fall 2024. The upcoming spring 2026 session lineup is available on the AI Bytes website.

This attendance achievement is a testament to AI Bytes’ popularity among Purdue instructors and faculty and to the transformative potential of AI in education. According to Gallup, over 60% of educators are currently using AI in the classroom. This number is likely to increase, especially considering the amount of AI resources currently available to educators.

“The rapid and enthusiastic uptake of AI Bytes by our faculty and staff shows that these workshops are becoming an essential part of how Purdue innovates teaching,” said Dimitrios Peroulis, Purdue’s senior vice president for partnerships and online. “By giving instructors hands-on experience with generative AI, we’re dramatically lowering the barrier to meaningful AI adoption in the classroom, saving instructors time and helping them reimagine course design to better serve students across disciplines.”

The workshops provide just-in-time AI training that is aimed at improving faculty’s AI literacy and helping them prepare students to meet Purdue’s new AI competency graduation requirement. Fall 2025 session topics included how to develop effective AI prompts, an exploration of Purdue’s GenAI Studio, how to research using AI and how to incorporate AI in the classroom.

Alison Roth, clinical assistant professor in Purdue’s School of Health Sciences, said attending sessions like these helped her feel more comfortable using AI tools.

“I use a bigger variety of AI tools now, and I have the vocabulary to explain them,” Roth said. “My comfort has increased a lot.”

John Race, Purdue winter session manager, said the AI Bytes workshops help instructors make sense of the myriad AI resources that exist and provide guidance on how to use them.

“There’s so much information out there right now,” Race said. “These workshops do a great job of synthesizing it and making it understandable.”

In October 2025, AI Bytes gave Purdue instructors the opportunity to share their AI expertise with colleagues by hosting its first instructor showcase. The event was a full-circle moment for the program, as instructors were able to show how they’ve applied what they’ve learned about AI in real Purdue courses.

“At the showcase, I walked colleagues through how we’re transforming lecture transcripts into interactive learning tools, from AI-generated textbook prose to a course assistant that can answer student questions at 2 a.m.,” said Timothy Reese, assistant professor of practice in Purdue’s Department of Statistics and one of the presenters in the instructor showcase. “What I took away was just as valuable: seeing how instructors in completely different disciplines are using GenAI Studio to make feedback timelier and more personalized.”

Patti Darbishire, executive associate dean and clinical professor of pharmacy practice in Purdue’s College of Pharmacy, also presented at the showcase. Her presentation explored how she uses an AI platform called Synthesia to convert text into video avatars. She said the video avatars helped her connect with students by demonstrating innovation and creativity, and they improved her sense of presence in online classrooms. She also explored the drawbacks of using this technology.

By offering real-world examples of AI integration for learning, Darbishire and other showcase presenters gave attendees ideas for how to integrate AI into their own courses, and they explored the ethical questions associated with AI usage.

“AI is here to stay, so it’s important to incorporate it into our courses in a thoughtful way that helps our students think through the ethical implications of its adoption and use,” said fellow presenter Cara Putman, clinical associate professor and the Marsha B. Allen Director of the Brock-Wilson Center in Purdue’s Mitch Daniels School of Business.

During her showcase presentation, Putman explained how she incorporates lessons about AI ethics into her Foundations of Ethics course. In the course, her students explore the implications of using AI and the biases ingrained in the technology before proposing AI policies. Through this exercise, they develop the skills they need to succeed in modern businesses, where AI is a frequent collaborator.

“These kinds of assignments pull students into a reflective process that models critical thinking and curiosity about how to best use it while also showing them I’m using it, too. I’m also modeling how to be intentional and thoughtful about when and how it is used,” Putman said.

Jing Lu, Purdue clinical assistant professor and AI literacy specialist, contributed to the showcase as well, sharing her experience using AI tools in Purdue’s School of Information Studies. During her presentation, she showed faculty how Napkin.ai can create compelling teaching materials — assisting in everything from drafting well-structured explanations for course topics, to fine-tuning content, to creating diagrams and visuals.

“My goal was to help colleagues feel confident using these tools to save time and elevate the quality of their slides, posters and course materials,” Lu said.

Through these demonstrations and an array of other intentionally crafted AI workshops, AI Bytes aims to make AI tools more understandable, accessible and useful to university educators so that innovation can thrive in classrooms across campus and online. The content AI Bytes develops is continually updated to reflect the trends, topics and best practices defining the AI landscape currently.

The AI Bytes webpage has information about all past sessions, including recordings and presentation slides. Visit the webpage for more details.

About Purdue University

Purdue University is a public research university leading with excellence at scale. Ranked among top 10 public universities in the United States, Purdue discovers, disseminates and deploys knowledge with a quality and at a scale second to none. More than 106,000 students study at Purdue across multiple campuses, locations and modalities, including more than 57,000 at our main campus locations in West Lafayette and Indianapolis. Committed to affordability and accessibility, Purdue’s main campus has frozen tuition 14 years in a row. See how Purdue never stops in the persistent pursuit of the next giant leap — including its integrated, comprehensive Indianapolis urban expansion; the Mitch Daniels School of Business; Purdue Computes; and the One Health initiative — at https://www.purdue.edu/president/strategic-initiatives.