CU Denver opens an AI hub for hands-on learning, leaving classroom rules to instructors

CU Denver’s new Artificial Intelligence Hub is open, but its teaching program is still taking shape. The university opened the space on October 7, 2026, in the North Classroom building on the Auraria Campus. Leaders want students, faculty, and staff to experiment with AI while examining how to use it responsibly.

A computer room becomes a shared learning space

The hub gives an existing computer room another role: a meeting place for learning about AI and discussing its use. Faculty plan to host lectures, teach students how to work with the technology, and examine responsible research and innovation practices. The intended audience extends beyond students studying computing to people across the university.

Planned programming includes applied AI learning, interdisciplinary projects, workshops, hackathons, and student innovation initiatives. That agenda pairs hands-on work with evaluation: the hub is intended to help students both use AI technologies and assess them. These are planned activities, rather than a completed schedule of sessions students can already choose from.

The initiative began in the College of Engineering, Design and Computing, which developed it with the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Office of Information Technology. Computer science and engineering professor Farnoush Banaei-Kashani described the collaboration as an effort to create a common space for campus discussions about AI.

A grant from the Lakewood-based Clarence V. LaGuardia Foundation supports staffing, room renovation, and infrastructure upgrades. At the opening, Banaei-Kashani said faculty were still planning events and lectures. Their goal, he told Chalkbeat, was to address the biggest AI issues facing the campus through a systematic approach rather than react as problems arose.

This is a place where students, staff, and faculty can come together responsibly and practically to ask questions and interrogate AI.

Karen Marrongelle, CU Denver provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs, speaking to Chalkbeat

Experimentation without a classroom mandate

Opening the hub does not impose one AI rule on every class. Provost Karen Marrongelle said CU Denver does not want to limit or mandate classroom AI use. Individual instructors can set their own rules. The shared learning space therefore sits alongside faculty discretion, rather than replacing it with a university-wide requirement to adopt the technology.

Marrongelle hopes the hub will offer a safe place to learn and experiment. She also expects what people learn there to help administrators develop campus policies as the technology shifts. That makes policy development an intended result of the hub’s work, not something settled by the opening itself.

Students bring ambition and reservations

For Jack Clark, a 19-year-old sophomore math major who attended the opening, the hub signals preparation for a changing job market. He told Chalkbeat that students cannot know where AI will go, but can prepare for what comes next. His emphasis was practical: students need to understand how to use the tool.

Fourth-year computer sciences student Thomas Phommarath plans to use the hub to explore AI more deeply, but he also voiced concerns about its effects on the environment and art. He pointed to possible uses in mass surveillance and decisions requiring human judgment. Those concerns were part of his interest in the hub, not a reason to avoid it.

Phommarath’s hopes are conditional: if the hub gets its approach right, he believes students and graduates could learn responsible AI use and apply it to major problems. His response captures the task now facing the new space—making room for students who want practical skills without asking them to leave their questions about the technology behind.