Reframing Bloom's Taxonomy for the Age of AI

Blackboard White Papers and Research: From Insight to Impact

UMBC Training Centers will offer a series of online AI courses in early 2026 on 15 different topics, available to anyone through a paid yearly subscription or individually. Most are four hours long and a few are shorter. The courses are offered in the morning, afternoon, or early evening to accommodate different schedules and time zones.

You can find more information about the available AI online courses and their upcoming dates by clicking the links below. Times are ET. Visit the site for possible updates and additions.

• Data Science with AI: 1/12 1pm, 1/20 4pm, 3/3 8am, 4/1 4pm, 5/5 1pm, 6/11 8am

• AI Adoption: 1/13 8am, 2/9 4pm, 3/10 1pm, 4/13 4pm, 5/12 1pm, 6/17 4pm

• Introduction to Agentic AI: 1/14 8am, 2/12 4pm, 2/23 1pm, 3/311pm, 4/28 4pm, 5/13 8am, 6/9 1pm, 6/30 4pm

• AI Essentials: 1/15 8am, 3/11 4pm, 4/16 1pm, 5/14 1pm, 6/15 4pm

• Using AI for Increased Productivity: 1/16 1pm, 1/29 4pm, 2/4 8am, 2/20 4pm, 3/5 1pm, 3/30 4pm, 4/9 8am, 4/22 4pm, 5/7 1pm, 5/29 4pm, 6/4 8am, 6/29 4pm

• Agentic AI in Action: Building and Orchestrating Agents: 1/21 1pm, 3/12 4pm, 5/15 1pm, 6/25 1pm

• AI for Leaders: 1/21 8am, 1/30 4pm, 2/19 1pm, 3/18 4pm, 3/23 8am, 4/21 1pm, 5/18 4pm, 5/26 8am, 6/23 1pm

• Prompt Engineering I: 1/22 8am, 1/26 4pm, 2/17 1pm, 2/25 4pm, 3/17 8am, 3/25 4pm, 4/14 1pm, 4/29 4pm, 5/19 8am, 5/27 4pm, 6/16 1pm, 6/24 4pm

• Prompt Engineering II: 1/23 1pm, 1/28 4pm, 2/18 8am, 2/26 4pm, 3/19 1pm, 3/26 4pm 4/15 8am, 4/30 4pm, 5/20,1pm, 5/28 4pm, 6/18 8am, 6/25 4pm

• AI Governance & Responsible AI: 1/27 1pm, 2/24 4pm, 3/24 8am, 5/21 1pm, 6/22 4pm

• AI Strategy & Governance: Building Human-Centered and Accountable Innovation:  1/29 10am-12pm (2 hours)

• AI for Project Managers: 1/30 8am, 3/6 4pm , 5/8 8am, 6/12 1pm

• Context Engineering: 2/6 1pm, 3/6 8am, 5/1 4pm, 6/5 8qm

• AI for Deep Research: Intelligent Tools and Workflows: 2/6 1pm, 3/20 4pm , 5/22 1pm 6/26 4pm (2.5 hours)

• Cybersecurity in the Age of AI 2/11 4pm, 4/20 4pm, 6/22 4pm

Google offers many free online short courses on AI-relevant topics. Here's a list you might explore over the holiday break.

• Introduction to Cloud Computing, Learn cloud basics and why they matter for AI

• Prompt Engineering in Vertex AI,  Learn to write better prompts and get more out of Gemini

• Google AI Essentials (Coursera),  Use AI for productivity, brainstorming, and writing

• What Is Generative AI?,  Beginner-friendly, no coding required

• Large Language Models Explained, Understand how models like ChatGPT actually work

• AI Principles in Google Cloud, How Google applies responsible AI in real products

• Programming Basics, Foundational coding and logical thinking

• Cloud Computing Foundations,, Cloud, big data, and machine learning — together.

• Responsible AI Practices, Build ethical, safe, and inclusive AI systems

• Upskill for the holidays, Links to additional courses relevant to AI

UMBC is offering another new class on AI this spring: 

PHIL 352: THE ETHICS OF AI & OTHER TECHNOLOGIES
SPRING 2026 | MW 2:30-3:45 | PAHB 229 | GEP: AH
Instructor: Dr. Blake Francis
Counts as an elective in the HCST certificate program

This course surveys ethical questions about the development, use, and regulation of AI and other technology. Topics to be discussed include surveillance, algorithmic fairness, self-driving cars, social media, the future of work, and the environmental impacts of AI. Competing ethical frameworks are used to evaluate how AI and other technologies affect society and the environment.

The course will be taught by Blake Francis who is a professor in the Department of Philosophy and also the director of UMBC's Human Context of Science and Technology program.

Human Context of Science and Technology (HCST) is a UMBC certificate program that provides students with a deeper understanding of the human context of science, technology, engineering, and medicine. In Spring 2026, Eric Brown will teach a new undergraduate special topics class on how AI and robotics will affect our world.

HCST 499/INDS 430:  Robots, AI, & Transhumanists: Exploring the Uncanny Valley
Eric Brown, Spring 2026, TuTh 4:00-5:15pm

Over the next one to two decades, humanity faces the prospect of having to share the planet with completely new and invented beings - robots, artificial intelligences, and humans who have begun to transform themselves into something other. The science and technology seem to be catching up with the heady dreams of sci-fi authors like Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick. Through this course, students will form a community of thinkers and experimenters that will engage with the complexities of living in this space. We will explore through discussion and doing what it is like to develop relationships with artificial intelligences and investigate the incursion of robots (e.g., delivery bots, robotaxis, and eldercare bots) into spaces traditionally reserved for humans. We will ask ourselves at what point, if ever, does the integration of technology into the human body transform that body into something that is beyond human. We will wonder together just how prepared are we to live in a world where sci-fi is no longer fiction?

As part of the 2nd Annual HDR Machine Learning Challenge, UMBC's iHARP project, along with other NSF HDR Institutes, is hosting a kick-off virtual hackathon on December 18th (2 - 5 PM EST) that will take palce in Gathertown.

They invite students, researchers, and practitioners of ALL levels to join in. See flyer here. Interested students and faculty can register here to receive participant details. Teams/Groups are welcome! 

UMBC's IHARP team looks forward to seeing you in Gathertown for the virtual hackathon on December 18.

UMBC Professor Ramana Vinjamuri and his students used Bharatanatyam Mudras, Indian classical dance hand gestures, to help train and evaluate their system for recognizing and modeling human hand gestures. The work is described in the article, Reconstructing hand gestures with synergies extracted from dance movements, published in Nature Scientific Reports.

The gestures were successfully mapped onto Mitra, a humanoid robot with five-degree-of-freedom hands developed by a company led by Balaji Viswanathan, '23 Ph.D. Computer Science. This work demonstrates the potential of dance-inspired structured learning in enhancing dexterity, rehabilitation, and motor control, enabling more efficient gesture-based interaction models in robotics, prosthetics, and rehabilitation.