Learning With the World: Building Relational Intelligence through Human-AI Partnership in the Cosmogogy Collaborative

This paper reports on the Cosmogogy Collaborative (CosCollab), a cross-institutional pilot under Project Nexus, a Technology and Innovation Network project, as a model for building human-AI collaborative capacity building in global higher education. Grounded in Lindsay's (2016) Cosmogogy framework, which positions learning as happening "with" rather than "about" the world, the pilot engaged students and educators across institutions in Europe, the Americas and Africa in an 8-week collaborative challenge to co-create solutions to a real-world sustainability problem. Drawing on a mixed-methods case study, data from post-pilot surveys and two focus groups are examined through three lenses: collaboration, co-creation, and relational intelligence. The CosCollab provides early evidence that when AI is positioned as a relational partner within a structured global ecosystem, participants develop capacities that go beyond what technology alone affords. The paper presents implications and a transferable blueprint for institutions seeking to embed human-AI collaboration into curricula.