Tom Ritchie, a US-UK Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Elon in 2025–26, received Echo360’s Global Learning Ambassador award in Chicago after a talk built around the work of Elon students and Elon Academy Scholars.
Tom Ritchie, reader and director of student experience at the University of Warwick and a US-UK Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Elon during 2025–26, has received Echo360’s Global Learning Ambassador award at EchoExperience’26 North America in Chicago.
Ritchie gave a spotlight session, “People, Not Systems: AI, Belonging and Readiness,” and joined the closing leadership panel on what must change next in higher education. Much of the session was built around his teaching at Elon.
During his Fulbright year, Ritchie taught The AI Revolution at Elon, a course he co-created at Warwick. Elon students and Warwick students took on the same assignment in two very different classrooms, imagining possible futures shaped by AI and writing policy briefs to people with the power to act on them. One Elon first-year student argued the course should be compulsory for every Elon student. Comparing the two classrooms shaped the talk’s central argument: students are not the readiness problem; institutions are.
The work of Zach Conklin ’28 and other students from the course is featured throughout. In class, Conklin wrote on the whiteboard that “the hardest problems aren’t technical. They’re human.” Ritchie used the line to close his talk. Conklin has since become one of the Elon student editors of a joint Elon–Warwick special issue of “Reinvention: an International Journal of Undergraduate Research,” on AI and the final-year research experience.
The talk also drew on “Your Place in the World: Exploring Identity, Sustainability, and AI,” the course Ritchie taught at the Elon Academy summer program. Scholars co-wrote their own honor code before using AI, then recreated hand-drawn designs with AI tools and reflected on what the technology made, what they made, and how they handled bias along the way.
“Money buys adoption. People make readiness,” Ritchie said. “The students at Elon showed me that, in the classroom and at the Academy.”
The award follows the AI in Learning Excellence Award Ritchie received from Echo360 this summer.