Rodrigo  Gomez | Miramar College

Join Professor Gomez for an engaging, student-centered look at how educators can bring trust, care, and equity to generative AI in the classroom. His T.R.U.S.T. framework—Transparency, Responsibility, Understanding, Strategy, and Tenacity—adapts principles from Culturally Responsive Teaching to help teachers guide students with clarity and confidence. Drawing on Zaretta Hammond’s “warm demander” stance, Laura Rendón’s Validation Theory, and Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade’s Critical Hope, this session connects AI integration to relationship-building, belonging, and rigorous learning. Participants will explore how to co-create AI norms with students, model ethical use, and design scaffolded, high-challenge tasks grounded in trust and reflection. Whether you’re new to AI or deepening your practice, you’ll leave with practical strategies to foster agency, cultural awareness, and academic integrity in an AI-integrated world—helping students grow as independent, thoughtful learners ready to navigate emerging technologies with purpose and care.

Alayne Flores & Sheila Davis | San Diego College of Continuing Education

In an AI-saturated classroom, many instructors feel forced to either ban AI or ignore it. This interactive session offers a third path: designing “dual-path” assignments that deliberately cultivate higher-order thinking with and without AI. Using Bloom’s Taxonomy as a lens, participants will explore how the same task can ask students first to generate their own ideas, and then to interrogate, critique, and improve AI-generated output. Examples from ESL contexts will illustrate reading, critical thinking, and argumentation tasks where AI becomes the object of analysis rather than the source of finished work. Participants will practice transforming one of their own assignments into a dual-path design, write rubric language that rewards reasoning over polish, and embed short reflection prompts that surface students’ metacognition about AI use. Attendees will leave with a reusable Dual-Path Bloom’s Assignment Template, sample tasks, and a Bloom’s/AI alignment chart they can immediately adapt for their own courses.

Mohan Paturi | UC San Diego

SmartLearning Hub (SLH) is a platform for creating and deploying AI-tutors, pioneered by UC San Diego and the AI Grand Challenge team from Palomar College, San Diego City College, CSU San Marcos, and San Diego State University. SLH AI-Tutors are instructor-centric and are designed to supplement the instructional team (faculty instructors, graduate teaching assistants, and undergraduate tutors) to provide effective instruction in a scalable fashion for large courses across STEM. In addition, AI-tutors will provide an opportunity to get almost real-time feedback about student learning which can then be used to finetune instruction. Originally developed at UC San Diego, SLH was piloted in a Nanoengineering course in 2024 with initial success in student engagement: 95% of students used AI-tutors to support learning from textbooks, and 60% exchanged messages weekly with AI-tutors. Here, with support from AI Grand Challenge, we describe our efforts to scale SLH with newly developed AI-tutors in biology, computer science, and data science across contexts. For example, in biology, we are focusing on genetics topics that appear across introductory and intermediate courses. In computer science, we are deploying AI-tutors in a hybrid introduction to programming course co-taught in person and online to provide broader access.

Elli Constantin | CCCCO, Cypress College 

This session explores how AI can support faculty in anticipating learner variability and designing flexible, accessible, and inclusive courses. Grounded in Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and accessibility best practices, participants will discover how AI tools can help streamline course design, improve clarity, embed meaningful choice, and proactively remove barriers. Practical examples and strategies will be shared to support student thinking, agency, and ownership, with immediate application across disciplines.

Par Mohammadian | Los Angeles Mission College

This workshop presents a student-centered approach to integrating Generative AI into teaching and learning, emphasizing creativity, connection, and motivation. Participants will explore how PlayLab can be used to embed an interactive AI tutor within courses, offering students on-demand academic support and personalized guidance. In addition, the workshop will demonstrate how AI tools can help students strengthen essential study skills and time management strategies, fostering independence and confidence beyond the classroom. The session will also showcase how students use NotebookLM to create podcasts that encourage reflection, storytelling, and deeper understanding of course content. Together, these practices illustrate how educators can use AI thoughtfully to support both cognitive and emotional aspects of learning. Attendees will leave with concrete strategies and inspiration to design learning experiences that merge human creativity with intelligent technology—keeping compassion, inclusion, and student growth at the center of innovation.

Sesh Murthy & Virginia de Sa | UC San Diego

Many students arrive at college needing remedial math before they can begin the courses required for STEM degrees. That delay increases cost, slows progress, and can push students out of STEM pathways. In this session we will share what we learned from building and deploying ASPIRE at UC San Diego to help students close prerequisite gaps quickly and effectively. ASPIRE pairs a 24/7 AI tutor with a course workflow that gets students to actually use it. The tutor is guided by an instructor-designed map (domain model) of small prerequisite skills and a student model that tracks what each student has mastered. Students use ASPIRE for AI-assisted homework, targeted practice based on diagnostics, immediate feedback on their reasoning, and unlimited practice tests generated from course problem types. Faculty and TAs can supervise the content and monitor engagement and progress. We will walk through the design choices that mattered, including how we balance help with productive struggle, how we improve engagement with the tutor, and how we integrate the tutor into normal course requirements. We will also share early evidence from foundational math deployments at UC San Diego. In Math 3B, we observed a large reduction in failure rate after introducing the ASPIRE-supported workflow

Jim Julius & Rick White | MiraCosta College

In this session, MiraCosta faculty members Jim Julius and Rick White will share several examples of innovative approaches that they have used to provide invitational spaces for faculty, classified professionals, administrators, and students to come together to raise their awareness and ability with generative artificial intelligence technologies. These explorations build fluency and invite critical analysis, and ultimately provide opportunities for collective engagement around AI tools and issues. Participants will find practical ideas and resources that can be adapted to their own contexts.

Alex Dejean | Los Angeles Harbor College

This session introduces practical, inclusive methods for integrating AI tools into career readiness instruction. Participants will explore how to guide students in generating, revising, and evaluating job application materials such as résumés, cover letters, and interview responses using publicly available AI platforms. The workshop emphasizes equitable access to digital literacy by helping all students—especially those without prior professional networks—gain confidence in AI-assisted communication. By the end, participants will leave with classroom-ready activities that teach both technical proficiency and critical analysis of AI-generated content. The session incorporates accessible, free-to-use AI tools such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, or other generative platforms. Participants will learn best practices for introducing these tools responsibly, including modeling transparent use, setting clear ethical guidelines, and using AI outputs as teaching aids rather than replacements for student creativity. The session will also highlight strategies for protecting student data, preventing overreliance, and fostering critical digital literacy.

Andrew Mertig | Palomar College

In a time where technology increasingly shapes how institutions engage with students, the challenge lies in leveraging AI without losing the human touch that defines strong outreach and recruitment initiatives. This session explores how Palomar College is implementing the Element451 CRM, an AI-powered platform designed to enhance student outreach, recruitment, and retention. Participants will gain insight into how predictive analytics, conversational AI, and personalized communication journeys are being used to better understand and meet students’ needs while preserving authenticity and empathy in every interaction.