Outcomes

• Review how storytelling can function as a form of virtual exchange 

• Gain practical facilitation approaches for cross-cultural dialogue online 

• Explore how small-group creative writing can deepen global learning experiences 

• Reflect on the role of personal narrative in building empathy across borders

Description

This session will introduce Creative Writing for Social Change (CWSC) as a model of virtual exchange through storytelling, demonstrating how creative writing can create powerful spaces for dialogue across borders, particularly among participants who may never otherwise encounter one another.

The presentation will explore:

• How small-group storytelling creates deep intercultural engagement

• The role of vulnerability, listening, and reflection in virtual exchange

• Lessons learned from facilitating diverse international groups

• The potential of storytelling as a tool for social change and global learning

Participants in the session will also experience a short adapted writing exercise used in the workshops, offering a practical insight into how storytelling can be used to foster empathy and dialogue in international learning environments.

Outcomes

Come to our keynote session and learn two ways that we can incorporate generative artificial intelligence (AI) methods lower access barriers for our learners by using the universal design for learning (UDL) framework in the design of our learning experiences. You’ll leave with

•  an understanding of how instructors, tools, and learners’ own ideas intersect throughout the learning process;

•  concrete ways to talk with your learners about how, when, and to what extent they should (and shouldn’t) use AI tools at various stages of their learning; and

• simple ways to use AI tools to make your design efforts more inclusive, easier to use, and more accessible—all while preserving the rigor of the content itself.

Description

When was the last time you heard colleagues talking about how artificial intelligence (AI) tools are either a) ruining our collective ability to think and address complex challenges or b) a miraculous solution that optimizes our time and energy, saving us from repetitive labor, low-complexity drudgery, and having to decide which shirt to wear with those slacks? Like most new tools that we’ve encountered in the past many decades in further, technical, and higher education, AI products are, at the end of the day, still just tools—tools that we can learn how to use well and situate in the progression of our learning activities.

In this keynote session, we will introduce and expand on the universal design for learning (UDL) framework for creating learner engagements, content, and activities. Whether you are familiar with UDL or are new to the concept, you’ll discover specific actions you can take in order to lower access barriers for a variety of learners. We will also build on the foundation of UDL to discover ways to help learners to use artificial intelligence (AI) tools effectively at all stages of the learning arc, from beginners through proficiency all the way to approaching expertise. As a cap to our conversation, we’ll also note several places in the design process where we as classroom professionals can use AI tools ourselves in order to make materials and activities more engaging and more accessible for learners.

• Setting: our session will open with a thought experiment about where you or your learners already experience challenges in the learning activities that you do with them. This will set up our later conversations about UDL and AI tools.

• Welcome: we will establish many different ways that you can “be” in our session, whether you are in the room or joining us remotely.

• Wicked challenges: as we examine UDL and AI concepts, we will collectively define some thorny problems that many of us face in our design for, teaching of, and support of our learners.

• Questions & small-group rounds: we will make time to brainstorm three big questions. We will define barriers, predict the elements of UDL that can help to lower such barriers, and then plan for using AI tools in either/both the learner-action and planning stages of learning-activity development.

• Harvest: as we wrap up our session, we will create a shared record of our ideas, questions, action plans, and take-aways from our time together.

This session will provide multiple ways to keep participants engaged (solo, collaborative, and interactive), multiple ways to present information (slide visuals, video sharing, text-chat, spoken audio), and multiple ways to join the conversation and show skills (video, text chat, self-guided reflection). We will use active-learning techniques and provide use-them-now resources for participants. Especially by relating UDL to broader access benefits for all learners, our activities will serve as models for participants to re-frame accessibility and inclusion conversations.

This session also posits diversity in its most inclusive form: instead of relying solely on providing accommodation services to learners with disabilities—which is most often a last-minute, ad-hoc, reactive process—adopting UDL as part of an institution’s culture of course design, teaching practices, and support services allows all learners to benefit, regardless of their place on the ability or access spectrum.

Outcomes

• Identify how community college students are currently using AI tools in their learning and career preparation.   

• Analyze emerging patterns, tensions, and opportunities surfaced from student-led discussions about AI in education.   

• Reflect on how faculty and institutions can incorporate student perspectives when developing equitable policies and practices around AI.

Description

Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing how students study, write, research, and prepare for their careers. Yet many institutional conversations about AI in higher education happen without directly engaging student perspectives.

This session centers the voices of community college students who have participated in recent AI learning labs and listening sessions. Through structured activities, students reflected on where AI appears in their daily lives, how they use it for learning, and how it shapes their expectations about career readiness. Their responses surfaced patterns around opportunity (efficiency, support, access to information), tensions (academic integrity, over-reliance, uneven faculty guidance), and emerging risks (loss of confidence in one’s own thinking or voice).

Rather than presenting a finalized framework, this session invites participants to analyze these student-generated insights together. Participants will review examples of student responses, discuss what these perspectives reveal about the evolving role of AI in learning, and consider implications for teaching, policy, and institutional strategy.

The goal is to move beyond assumptions about how students use AI and instead ground institutional responses in authentic student experience. By engaging directly with student voices, educators can better design equitable approaches to AI that support both learning and career readiness.

Outcomes

• Identify key cultural terms (cultural competence, cultural humility, and cultural intelligence) and their differences.  

• Share your experiences with cultural competence, cultural intelligence, and cultural humility, and, if applicable, describe how you have implemented relevant practices in their everyday work across disciplines.  

• Discuss and identify new cultural research practices to implement in your day-to-day work.

Description

Research has found that teams with higher diversity are more productive and generate more creative and innovative results. The Culturally Competent Research for Library and Information Science (CCRLIS) project empirically examines cultural competence, cultural humility, and cultural intelligence as team-level skills, producing an iterative, practice-based framework and an open-access course grounded in researchers’ experiences to guide culturally competent team research. 

Outcomes

• Identify structural and cultural barriers that affect student participation and success in online learning environments.  

• Examine how communication norms, course design, and technology choices can unintentionally reinforce inequities for diverse student populations.  

• Analyze real classroom scenarios to recognize how bias, identity, and power dynamics influence online learning interactions.  

• Apply practical strategies to foster inclusive dialogue, equitable participation, and belonging in digital learning spaces.  

• Develop one actionable change to improve equity and accessibility in their own online teaching or learning environment.

Description

Equity in online learning is often discussed as a goal, yet many educators struggle to translate equity principles into everyday teaching practices. This interactive session brings together perspectives from higher education pedagogy, social advocacy, and diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) practice to explore how educators can move from awareness to action in digital learning environments.

Participants will examine how inequities can emerge in online classrooms through communication norms, course design, participation expectations, and technology access. The session will explore how assumptions about engagement, language, identity, and academic preparedness can shape student experiences in virtual learning spaces. Through guided discussion and applied scenarios, participants will analyze real classroom dynamics and consider how bias, representation, and cultural context influence student participation and sense of belonging.

The workshop will introduce practical strategies educators can use to foster inclusive dialogue, increase equitable participation, and strengthen connection in online courses. Participants will leave with concrete ideas for supporting diverse learners while building learning environments that value curiosity, cultural awareness, and student voice.

By centering both pedagogy and lived experience, this session invites educators to reflect on their current practices and identify actionable ways to strengthen equity and belonging in online education.

Outcomes 

• Explore different strategies for creating inclusion in the classroom such as activities or engagement ideas. 

• Gain strategies on building belongness and community through the teaching, and learning. 

Description

In this session we will go over ideas and best practices for how we can build a sense of belonging in the classroom climate, in person or virtual, and how we use these strategies to build a sense of community after students feel like belong in that space. Discussions would be lead with researcher Yosso perspective, of Cultural Wealth, that all adult learners already have some cultural wealth that they bring with them to the learning environment. Therefore, the discussion will be focusing on ways to cultivate a sense of belonging for the students, and cultivate community through shared lived experience from a student's centered focused.  

Outcomes

• Explain how the integration of OER, Open Pedagogy, Open Source Software, and AI within the LibreTexts ecosystem supports equitable, learner-centered teaching. 

• Analyze how The Forge enables process-based assessment by visualizing drafting, revision, and student thinking over time. 

• Apply strategies using Discuss-It to foster meaningful, media-rich engagement and Regular and Substantive Interaction (RSI) in asynchronous and online courses.

Description

Just as we were finally helping our students identify “fake news,” a newer and greater threat to the student research paper looms large. While some of the strategies we developed to wean students away from the Google search box still hold, the lure of the ChatGPT chatbox is stronger and its “hallucinations“ more insidious than other forms of online fakery. In this presentation, we (an instructor and a librarian) will present some of the strategies we have developed to help our students work with AI tools in ways that support rather than hamper their critical thinking and writing skills. Our goal is not to prevent students from using AI but rather to teach them how to use these tools more effectively in various stages of the research process from topic exploration to scaffolding the paper, to revising and editing the final version. We will present strategies that we have found helpful and we will lead a discussion to encourage participants to share some of their strategies. Our goal is for everyone to leave our session with some practical suggestions to implement in their own classrooms.