Dr. Szymon Machajewski

Dr. Szymon Machajewski is an educator, AI strategist, and national advocate for human-centered technology in higher education. He serves as Director of Academic Technology and Learning Innovation at the University of Illinois Chicago, and across more than two decades in community colleges and universities he has focused on ensuring that technology expands access and amplifies human capability. His research introduces the pedagogical singularity, the moment an institution reorganizes around AI-mediated cognition as its default mode, along with the related ideas of cognitive friction and cognitive capital, which recast good AI design as the deliberate preservation of productive struggle; he is also the creator of the AI Instructional Framework, a model of the many ways human and machine intelligence can be paired in teaching and learning. He is the author of The Learn-It-All Educator: A Guidebook for Training Brains, Not Replacing Them with AI, published in collaboration with Lansing Community College’s Faculty Fellow for Teaching with AI program. He also authored The Well-Played Class: A Case Study on How Gaming the System Motivates Students and Restores the Joy of Teaching, based on his work at Grand Valley State University. His honors include national recognition for his work in learning analytics and student success, as well as the UIC Award of Merit; in a 2017 Amazon AI hackathon a team of his students built a tool to detect emotional distress in student writing, and his teaching has been recognized with a Most Inclusive Classroom Award. He chairs the EDUCAUSE Student Success Analytics Steering Committee, is certified in Mental Health First Aid, and holds a U.S. software patent in e-learning.