8/15/2025 Bruce Adams
CS professor Abdussalam Alawini and a team of colleagues from across Illinois Grainger College of Engineering are building personalized learning systems that utilize AI as the back end, where students learn and take assessments across various topics. This summer, Alawini has participated in workshops that explored innovative teaching practices on campus and with partners from other institutions.
Written by Bruce Adams
What motivated Abdussalam Alawini, computer science teaching associate professor from the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science in The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, to integrate generative AI into his teaching?
His ability to teach a skill and track students at a scale of nearly 500 students per class.
Alawini recalls that he didn't easily see what they were doing. "I couldn't track them at any point in time except by looking at papers. Since joining Illinois, I have made it my mission to automate and utilize automation to provide more support to students. And along the same lines, I found that even before the emergence of Gen AI, the standard machine learning techniques that were evolving in the early 2000s were proving useful and could be used in instruction."
Aside from streamlining his workflow, Alawini uses the technology to help his students in learning database systems. "One thing I do is group activities where students solve database programming. Students come to class and begin working on in-class activities in groups of four."
He explains that, in database programming, the same solution can be arrived at in different ways. "Some of them are a good way, and some of them are overly complicated." Examining the work of 400-500 students, divided into 112 or 114 groups, is time-intensive. "I deployed machine learning. I take all students' submissions in real-time, cluster them into groups, and then present them in Canvas, where I can view the clusters of similar solutions. I click on them, and I can see samples of a particular type of solution. Then, I loop this back to the students and say, 'Hey, a large chunk of the groups have followed this technique, and the technique is good in this way, maybe needs improvement in that way.' I started to notice the impact of machine learning in improving grading, engagement, and collaborative learning."
“I've learned throughout my journey, that when something starts and you feel that it's going to be disruptive, you must be in the lead. You must take the driver's seat. A way for me to put myself in the lead and start learning is to learn and offer help to colleagues.”
— Abdussalam Alawini
Alawini reached out to share what he was learning, providing workshops to the Grainger College Business Office and a session for James Scholars students as part of a faculty development program. Then, he says, "I started talking to faculty and forming practice groups among us to try to figure out what's happening."
In fall 2024, Alawini and co-investigators, research associate professor Volodymyr Kindratenko (NCSA, ECE), senior lecturer and research scientist Sotiria Koloutsou-Vakakis (CEE), professor Tomasz Kozlowski (NPRE), Christopher Tessum (CEE), instructor Meredith Blumthal (ACES), with adjunct assistant professor Maryalice Wu (CITL), received a Grainger College of Engineering Strategic Instructional Innovations Program (SIIP) Grant for the proposal "Exploring the impact and potential of Generative AI in Engineering Education." See the team's project update.
Kindratenko was instrumental in the creation of the UIUC chatbot (renamed Illinois Chat), which Alawini says "helps students with class material and does it in a useful way. You can use several models, group course materials into groups, and apply sophisticated knowledge to help students. What's important is that we can track the students' interaction with the model."
Regarding Illinois Chat, Alawini says, "Electrical engineering, nuclear and plasma engineering, and agriculture and economics were doing similar work, and we wanted to explore the impact outside engineering. We had all our students use Illinois Chat freely without any structure, and we tracked how students use it and what type of assignments they've used it for."
With their SIIP grant renewed, the team is aligning their work with the KEEN (Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network) Mindset Framework. They are building personalized learning systems that utilize AI as the back end, where students learn and take assessments across various topics. As Alawini describes it, "We're tracking their progress and providing structured knowledge to our LLMs to be able to act like an instructor. It's not just giving an LLM a bunch of documents to see what a student submits for one particular assignment and giving feedback. It's about tracking the student life cycle throughout the system, getting all these performance metrics, understanding the context of the course, the course material, the structure of the course material, and the prerequisite connections between the topics introduced in the course."
Early in summer 2025, Alawini led a multi-day faculty development workshop hosted at Illinois titled "Enhancing Entrepreneurial Mindset Through AI", in collaboration with KEEN partners. The workshop was attended by 20 faculty members, including 17 from KEEN partner institutions such as Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Michigan Tech, UW-Platteville, George Mason University, Ohio State, Colorado School of Mines, and others.
The workshop brought together engineering educators to explore how generative AI can be used with the elements of the KEEN 3Cs (Curiosity, Connections, Creating Value) framework. Participants engaged in interactive sessions, collaborative design activities, and follow-up virtual workshops designed to support the development of new instructional strategies and grant proposals.
The effort was led by the KEEN Instructional Catalysts, a team of Illinois faculty and staff who developed and facilitated the workshop and are continuing to support participants throughout the academic year. This group included senior director of AE3 Jay Mann, BioE professors Holly Golecki and Rebecca Reck, Jacob Henschen (CEE) and Avinash Gupta (HXRI Lab). KEEN consultants included were professors Yael Gertner (CS), Matt Goodman (MatSe), Ann Sychterz (MechSe) and Abhishek Umrawal (ECE).
Alawini also spoke at the Illinois CS Summer Teaching Workshop, giving a talk titled "Structuring Concepts, Amplifying Insight: Graph RAG for AI-Personalized Student Feedback". The event brought together instructors from across the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to explore innovative teaching practices, and Alawini shared some of the tools and frameworks being developed for integrating AI into the classroom. These initiatives represent important momentum in faculty development and cross-institutional collaboration around AI-enhanced pedagogy.
The upcoming KEEN Annual Conference will present another opportunity for Illinois Grainger Engineering to broaden its impact and reach, as well as collaborate in the curation of best practices and methods for integrating generative AI at scale into engineering instruction.
Grainger Engineering Affiliations
Abdussalam Alawini is an Illinois Grainger Engineering associate teaching professor of computer science.
Yael Gertner is an Illinois Grainger Engineering assistant teaching professor of computer science & engineering.
Matt Goodman is an Illinois Grainger Engineering senior lecturer of materials science & engineering.
Volodymyr Kindratenko is an Illinois Grainger Engineering associate research professor of electrical and computer engineering and is affiliated with computer science and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
Holly Golecki is an Illinois Grainger Engineering assistant teaching professor of bioengineering.
Avanish Gupta is an Illinois Grainger Engineering teaching assistant professor.
Jacob Henschen is an Illinois Grainger Engineering professor of civil and environmental engineering.
Sotiria Koloutsou-Vakakis is an Illinois Grainger Engineering professor of civil and environmental engineering.
Tomasz Kozlowski is an Illinois Grainger Engineering professor of nuclear, plasma, and radiological engineering.
Rebecca Reck is an Illinois Grainger Engineering professor of bioengineering.
Ann Sychterz is an Illinois Grainger Engineering professor of mechanical science and engineering and is affiliated with civil engineering.
Christopher Tessum is an Illinois Grainger Engineering professor of civil and environmental engineering.
Abhishek Umrawal is an Illinois Grainger Engineering professor of electrical and computer engineering and is affiliated with the Coordinated Science Laboratory and Graduate College.