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Building an AI Playbook for Faculty
Meryl Krieger, University of Pennsylvania • Suparna Sinha, Rutgers University • Samaa Haniya, PhD., Pepperdine University • Anne Fensie, PhD, University of Maine at Augusta • Clayton Colmon, PhD, University of Pennsylvania
2025 People's Choice Award for Most Engaging Session
This session is an inquiry and reflection on the current state of higher ed teaching in an AI era. Come with your own burning questions about ethical and responsible use of AI in your teaching and learning design practices and we will hash it out and build some best practices examples. The facilitators of this discussion are drafting an AI playbook for faculty and have concrete ideas to share but want to hear and work through your vexations and ventures.
This session is an inquiry and reflection on the current state of higher ed teaching in an AI era. Come with your own burning questions about ethical and responsible use of AI in your teaching and learning design practices and we will hash it out and build some best practices examples. The facilitators of this discussion are drafting an AI playbook for faculty and have concrete ideas to share but want to hear and work through your vexations and ventures.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Love AI
Levi Fischer, Front Range Community College
Join Levi Fischer, research librarian and instructor for Creative Tools and Technology, a Business in Creative Industries for a tour through AI and other technologies. This will include the tools such as Midjourney, ChatGPT, Crayon, Claude, Benchmark and more that creatives use to innovate and optimize opportunities to communicate, analyze, and lead other creatives.
Empathy in Action: How AI Avatars are Transforming Patient Communication & Education
Clint Carlson, University of Colorado, Anschutz
Dive into the rapidly evolving world of AI avatars and discover how they’re reshaping education by enhancing social-emotional communication and other soft-skill training! In this immersive session, join Clint and one of his very realistic avatars, Vicki. Together we will explore the latest innovations in A.I. avatar technology—highlighting how interactive, emotionally responsive simulations help medical learners refine bedside manner, build empathy and confidence, de-escalate intense meetings, and deliver compassionate care at CU. From past breakthroughs to tomorrow’s visionary tools, gain insights and explore the collaboration opportunities that come with harnessing AI avatars to improve patient outcomes, boost learner engagement, and usher in a new era of empathetic healthcare.
Taking A Mosaic Approach to AI in the Writing Classroom
Chris Ostro, University of Colorado – Boulder
2025 People's Choice Award for Most Thought Provoking Session
In the last few years many tools have quickly emerged that can successfully complete many traditional assessments and a number of AI detection tools quickly followed in an attempt to solve this problem. Unfortunately these tools are imperfect, at best, but they still have a use. In this talk, Assistant Teaching Professor and Learning/AI Strategist Chris Ostro will detail the ways he has leveraged these tools, along with others, in a “mosaic approach” to help safeguard integrity in his course, but more importantly to get us all past the “cops and robbers” phase and back to the student/teacher dynamic.
In the last few years many tools have quickly emerged that can successfully complete many traditional assessments and a number of AI detection tools quickly followed in an attempt to solve this problem. Unfortunately these tools are imperfect, at best, but they still have a use. In this talk, Assistant Teaching Professor and Learning/AI Strategist Chris Ostro will detail the ways he has leveraged these tools, along with others, in a “mosaic approach” to help safeguard integrity in his course, but more importantly to get us all past the “cops and robbers” phase and back to the student/teacher dynamic.
Infusing Your Classroom with AI Activities
Katie Wheeler, Pikes Peak State College
Ready to harness the power of AI as an engaging teaching tool? Discover how to seamlessly integrate AI tools into your classroom while building essential digital literacy skills. This hands-on workshop equips you with practical strategies for introducing AI tools to students, teaching prompt engineering, and weaving course learning outcomes into AI activities. You’ll leave with ready-to-implement resources including instructions and prompts to turn an AI tool into live action roleplay games, create text-based adventure activities, and guide students through AI-assisted research journeys.
"A Book of Arguments"; Showcasing an Open Pedagogy Response to AI
Mark Hussey, Front Range Community College
What happens in an online classroom when students are empowered to create, license, and publish their own OER resources? Join this session for a guided tour of an Open Pedagogy English Curriculum where students drafted, composed, and self-published our class book, “A Book of Arguments.” After three semesters of trial and error, this session provides lessons-learned, practical advice, and how-to suggestions for responding to AI with Open Pedagogy.
Generative Futures for AI in Teaching, Learning and Knowledge Management
Diane Sieber, University of Colorado – Boulder
This presentation addresses our imperative--as educators-- to help students navigate the ethical and effective use of new generative AI co-authoring and knowledge management tools that they will be expected to master by the time of their first employment. Generative AI is not merely a tool, like a typewriter or a computer, but rather it is a new collaborative ecosystem; its impacts will be powerful and far-reaching, ecological rather than additive. We can leverage its affordances to help “level the playing field” for students with less extensive writing and research backgrounds and to help launch graduates successfully into a competitive and hyper-productive work environment: both dialogic co-authoring with AI and use of generative AIs as research and creative agents lay a foundation for developing advanced research, communication and information retrieval proficiencies. I present findings, guides and exercises from 5 consecutive semesters (since the November 2022 public release of ChatGPT) of iterative curricular development for AI-forward undergraduate engineering courses. The findings apply equally well to writing-specific coursework and to writing and knowledge management in technical courses. Our course materials also address the ethics of generative AI use, as well as the ethics of genAI training and data sourcing. Among the research questions that we address are: How can generative AI be introduced into engineering coursework such that students augment rather than circumvent learning? And how can we examine in class the technical and ethical questions that generative AIs raise, such as how to mitigate privacy and security concerns, why the sourcing of training data for LLMs and their fine-tuning impact bias and explainability, and how generative AIs alter our thinking and writing processes.
Bridging AI and Worlds in A Life Worth Living
Cynthia Calongne, Colorado Technical University • Andrew Stricker, Retired, formerly with CTU and Air University
Virtual Harmony is where our fellowship of friends called the Harmony Arts Society dream big and reflect on how to make our world a better place. In 2025, we integrated our prior work into a composite study of what it means to Live a Life Worth Living. In our virtual world research design, we integrated elements from Native American culture, best practices, character strengths, and the qualities we value. Join us and share your insights on how to Live A Life Worth Living.
Transformation of Religious and Ethical Concepts through Digital Platforms and AI-Enabled Translation Systems
Hatice Merve Caliskan Baser, Indiana University, Middle Eastern Language Studies • Izmir Katip Celebi University (Turkey) Faculty of Divinity
This study aims to explore how digital platforms and AI-enabled translation systems transform the meaning of religious and ethical concepts. Particularly, social media platforms like Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) allow individuals and communities to share insights about religious and ethical values. These digital tools may influence how religious (halal, haram, sin, reward) and ethical (justice, cleanliness, security, honesty) concepts are perceived and disseminated. Social media provides new insights into how individuals and communities reshape, discuss, and communicate these concepts. The posts and discussions on these platforms create perceptions that are influenced by societal norms, beliefs, and personal interpretations.
The study will conduct an ethnographic analysis of content on Instagram and X platforms, aiming to examine how religious and ethical concepts are perceived in these environments. The concepts under investigation will include core religious and ethical terms such as halal, haram, sin, reward, justice, cleanliness, security, and honesty. The study will observe how these concepts are represented on these platforms, how users interact with them, and how discussions, posts, and comments evolve over time.
The study will conduct an ethnographic analysis of content on Instagram and X platforms, aiming to examine how religious and ethical concepts are perceived in these environments. The concepts under investigation will include core religious and ethical terms such as halal, haram, sin, reward, justice, cleanliness, security, and honesty. The study will observe how these concepts are represented on these platforms, how users interact with them, and how discussions, posts, and comments evolve over time.