Biography
Dr. C. Edward Watson is Vice President for Digital Innovation for the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). There, he provides leadership for the association’s national and state-level advocacy to advance quality in undergraduate student learning with a particular focus on how technology can be used to facilitate student learning and student success. Providing thought leadership for higher education in regards to A.I. is a central component of his work. This is evidenced by the second edition of his best selling book Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning (Johns Hopkins University Press, December 2025) and his influential resesarch reports The AI Challenge: How College Faculty Assess the Present and Future of Higher Education in the Age of AI (2026) and Leading Through Disruption: Higher Education Executives Assess AI’s Impacts on Teaching and Learning (2025). His book series on General Education reform (Routledge) will arrive in early 2027.
Dr. Watson also directs AAC&U's Institute on AI, Pedagogy, and the Curriculum and the Conference on AI and Higher Education. Past programming he has led for AAC&U includes, the Institute on Digital Equity, the Institute on Open Educational Resources, the Forum on Digital Innovation, the Institute on General Education, Pedagogy, and Assessment, and the Conference on General Education, Pedagogy, and Assessment. Additional areas of leadership include an array of curricular and pedagogical improvement efforts, including the development of assignment design tools which align with AAC&U's VALUE rubrics.
Dr. Watson has nearly 30 years of experience in faculty and instructional development. He continues to serve as a Fellow in the Louise McBee Institute of Higher Education at the University of Georgia and recently stepped down after more than a decade as the Executive Editor of the International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. He is the founding Executive Editor of the International Journal of ePortfolio.
Prior to joining AAC&U in the summer of 2017, Dr. Watson was the Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Georgia (UGA) where he led efforts associated with the core instructional mission of the university. Activities within his purview included faculty development, TA development, student learning outcomes assessment, learning technologies, media production services, classroom support and learning spaces, and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. He also taught a range of graduate-level college courses on College Teaching and Student Learning, Course Design, Critically-Engaged Teaching with Advanced Technologies, Quantitative Research Methods in Education, and Questionnaire Design and Survey Research in Education.
In addition to the aforementioned books and research publications on A.I. and general education, he is also the author of Open Educational Resources: A New High-Impact Practice (AAC&U),Making the Case for Open Educational Resources (AAC&U), Leveraging Open Educational Resources to Advance Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: A Guide for Campus Change Agents (AAC&U), Teaching Naked Techniques: A Practical Guide to Designing Better Classes (Jossey-Bass) and Playing to Learn with Reacting to the Past - Research on High Impact, Active Learning Practices (Palgrave MacMillan).