Dear LDL Community,

Welcome to the Learning Design and Leadership (LDL) program at the University of Illinois! We are so excited about this academic year and would like to share a little bit about the LDL program with you.

LDL has been at the forefront of integrating technology into education for years. As the first online doctorate at UIUC since 2016, LDL has consistently led the charge in innovative educational practices.

Under the guidance of Professors Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, LDL has developed nine Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), attracting over 150,000 learners worldwide.

This year, LDL has been integrating Generative AI to provide students with personalized, immediate, and contextually relevant feedback.

In our ongoing commitment to enhancing learning, 351 graduate students across 15 master’s and doctoral courses have already benefited from AI-driven reviews. This cutting-edge tool, CGMap, uses Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technology, powered by a vast vector store of over 35 million tokens. In simpler terms, each student project is evaluated against a rich knowledge base that includes LDL faculty research and student projects dating back to 2019.

We have some exciting changes coming up in the program, with two outstanding new academic appointments: Assistant Professor Vania Castro, Prof. Liam Magee and Assistant Professor Xinran Zhu.

We will also be introducing new Generative AI functions into the CGScholar platform later this semester, both for general courses and the exam-dissertation sequence. With this initiative, we aim to provide you with new tools to enhance your writing and thinking processes.

This is collaborative intelligence in action—leveraging AI to support and elevate the educational experience.

We are proud to continue our legacy of leadership in learning design, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in education.

The LDL team