AI for Innovation in Education

AI & I is the Jacobs Institute’s reflective inquiry into the evolving relationship between humans and artificial intelligence in education.

The Human–AI Learning Design Framework
A white paper by Lisa Dawley, PhD and collaborators

Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming part of how people think, create, plan, and learn across educational, professional, and personal contexts. This shift raises new questions about how human development unfolds when learning occurs in ongoing dialogue with AI.

The Human–AI Learning Design Framework offers a human-centered approach for designing learning experiences in AI-enabled environments. Grounded in learning sciences traditions, the framework views learning as a developmental process of sense-making shaped through interaction, language, and judgment over time.

At the heart of the framework are three core human learning orientations:

• Self-reflection, which supports awareness of intention, emotion, and learning patterns
• Creation, which positions learners as authors and meaning-makers with AI as a collaborator
• Application, which connects learning to real contexts, decisions, and consequences

Together, these orientations provide a structure for designing learning experiences that strengthen human agency, judgment, and ethical responsibility in AI-integrated environments. Rather than treating AI as a tool for efficiency alone, the framework emphasizes how learners reflect, create, and apply understanding through sustained interaction with intelligent systems.

The paper offers:

• A conceptual foundation for human–AI ways of knowing
• A practical design workflow for learning with AI
• Developmentally aligned prompting strategies
• Guidance for ethical human–AI interaction
• A worked example illustrating the framework in practice

The framework is intended for educators, designers, researchers, policymakers, and leaders seeking to design learning that supports human growth in an AI-enabled world.