CIDDL Office Hours: Introducing CIDDL AI Studio: A Space to Build, Think, and Solve Together
Authors: Philip Garza; info@ciddl.org
What do you do when a 15-week graduate course on AI ends and your students don’t want to stop? If you’re Dr. Basham and Dr. Vasquez, you build something new.
At the May 19 CIDDL Office Hour, the duo unveiled CIDDL AI Studio, a free, six-week collaborative experience designed for educators, researchers, and district leaders who want to move beyond tool demos and develop genuine AI literacy in community with others.
Where the Idea Came From
After co-teaching a graduate AI course, Dr. Basham and Dr. Vasquez kept hearing the same thing from students and practitioners alike: they wanted a space to keep learning, keep building, and keep thinking alongside people wrestling with the same questions. At the same time, district leaders across the country told them they were stuck. They were trying to develop AI policy, evaluate platforms, and redesign workflows without a clear starting point.
The CIDDL AI Studio grew directly out of those conversations.
What the Studio Is (and What It Is Not)
CIDDL AI Studio is neither a webinar series nor a traditional course. Dr. Basham described it as an intellectual salon-meets-applied sandbox, a shared thinking space where participants bring real problems of practice and work through them together.
The studio structure mirrors a sprint model Dr. Basham and Dr. Vasquez used with their graduate students: identify a challenge, start building, surface problems and solutions with the group, then present what you’ve made. The emphasis throughout is on sketching, critiquing, and iterating, the same process that drives good design work.
Anchoring the experience is The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman, a book that Dr. Basham and Dr. Vasquez have successfully used in their course. It is accessible enough to spark broad conversation while covering enough ground to launch discussions on AI policy, platform decisions, workforce implications, and the future of knowledge production. Each chapter provides a jumping-off point for the studio’s weekly sessions.
Who Should Join
CIDDL’s core mission centers on transforming how we prepare educators who serve individuals with disabilities, and the AI Studio reflects that focus. CIDDL is opening the first cohort to anyone working in or adjacent to education: higher education faculty, K-12 leaders, classroom teachers, and district administrators.
The first cohort begins on June 15th, 2026, and is capped at 25 participants. The studio is intentionally designed for busy professionals. Weekly live sessions will be hosted on the CIDDL Community Platform, with flexible participation structures that recognize participants may occasionally miss sessions due to professional and personal commitments. Resources, discussions, and collaborative artifacts will remain accessible asynchronously throughout the experience.
Because CIDDL is funded through a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Education Office of Special Education Programs, there is no cost to join. Dr. Basham noted that the studio’s content does not represent official Department of Education policy, but the grant does make the experience free for everyone.
What Participants Will Build
Two examples from Dr. Basham and Dr. Vasquez’s graduate course give a sense of what the studio might produce.
One student mapped every researcher at her university who had published on AI, then visualized their collaborative relationships. The resulting network revealed both existing partnerships and untapped opportunities: people working in adjacent areas who had never connected, potential collaborators for future grant work sitting just down the hall from each other.
Another student built a custom AI tool that analyzed a course syllabus for accessibility, alignment with Universal Design for Learning principles, and support for students with disabilities. The tool did not just flag gaps; it rewrote the syllabus and redesigned the course structure with specific suggestions.
Both projects started with a problem someone actually had. The AI Studio aims to produce more of the same.
Dr. Vasquez noted that participants who develop something especially useful or creative will have the opportunity to share it on the CIDDL AI Studio website, contributing to a growing showcase of applied, human-first AI design work.
How to Sign Up
The first cohort of 25 opens now. Interested participants can sign up by clicking here. Follow CIDDL on social media for additional details as the CIDDL AI studio launch approaches.
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