About prAxIs
prAxIs is a Large Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund (TLEF) project started at the University of British Columbia in 2025 that seeks to show students (and faculty) how machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) tools can be used in their disciplines to help create new forms of knowledge.
Based at UBC’s Vancouver School of Economics, the Department of Sociology, and the Centre for Computational Social Science, our team consists of faculty and students working together to develop hands-on learning modules that explore the disciplinary applications of AI and machine learning tools in Arts.
Getting Started with prAxIs
For Learners
These modules cover different applications of AI or machine learning in the context of a particular discipline or course. Current courses include:
- HIST 414
- AMNE 170
- AMNE 376
- SOCI 415
- SOCI 217
- SOCI 280
- ECON 227
Modules can be accessed from the menus at the top of the page. They come in different formats, but most are written as interactive JupyterNotebooks and can be viewed in their .html form via a browser, or by downloading them in .ipynb form and launching them in a JupyterHub. If you are affiliated with UBC, you can do this directly from the website via UBC’s in-house JupyterHub called JupyterOpen for which these modules were designed. PIMS offers a non-UBC specific JupyterHub called Syzygy if you are at another institution or JupyterOpen goes down.
Launching the notebooks in a JupyterHub will allow you to run the code for yourself and complete the exercises on your own. Please let us know if you have any problems: you can submit an issue to our GitHub directory if you find something that you think could be improved. Happy learning!
For Educators
This project aims to develop discipline-specific educational modules designed to demystify AI for undergraduate students in the Faculty of Arts. These modules show students that AI tools can be used to better understand their discipline, and why a critical understanding of these tools is necessary to use them well. We also provide guidance and lessons plans for implementing these tools in the classroom, and explain what infrastructure and tools are needed.
In each module, students undertake a small, discipline-specific project that uses AI tools to address pertinent questions or challenges in their fields of study. Modules include a theoretical component, designed to complement the application. This includes detailed, but non-technical, explanations of how these tools are constructed, how they function, and how they can be applied in academic research and industry, as well as critical discussion of their development and use.
We want to support accessibility for these kinds of topics by publishing our work as an open-source library of educational resources for broad instructional needs with the hope of lowering software costs and hardware requirements for students and learning institutions.
We welcome any feedback on how our project might be more accessible. This can be done by submitting an issue to our GitHub directory.
For more information on integrating prAxIs resources into your instruction, check out our Using prAxIs for Teaching page.
Citing prAxIs
This project is open-source with a mixture of licenses for the data. Our notebooks are all licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
CC-BY-SA NC.
This means that in general you can use and adapt this project for your own teaching or learning provided that you:
- Provide attribution (see our suggestion below).
- You only use this material for non-commercial purposes (i.e. you cannot make money off it)
- If you produce derivative materials they must share the CC-BY-SA NC license
Our suggested attribution is:
Nelson, L., Graves, J., and other prAxIs Contributors. 2023. ‘The prAxIs Project: Unpacking the Black Box’. https://ubcecon.github.io/praxis-ubc.
However, some notebooks have an additional suggested attribution. Check the authors on the notebook page!
Further, some of the data used in the project has different attribution requirements. You can find details about the licensing on our copyright page.
Get Involved
prAxIs is proudly open-source and community driven. We welcome and encourage contributions from students, educators, and the public regardless of what area or field you call home.