This session explores human-centered re-skilling, renewal, and reintegration in workforce development including how emerging technologies can be intentionally shaped to expand opportunity, accelerate skill development, and strengthen community resilience. This session highlights a human-centered model for integrating artificial intelligence (AI), immersive extended reality (XR) tools, and culturally diverse mentoring into workforce pathways that prepare learners—regardless of background—for the rapidly evolving future of work.

Participants will examine how inclusive immersive environments support underserved scholars, returning citizens, and adults seeking re-skilling by providing safe practice spaces, competency-based learning, and real-world simulations that build hope, confidence and agency. The session will demonstrate how AI-driven personalization, accessible XR design, and culturally responsive content can bridge equity gaps and create adaptable ecosystems that schools, workforce boards, and community partners can sustain.

Through examples, case scenarios, and a discussion of implementation frameworks, attendees will learn how immersive technologies can cultivate essential technical, digital, and human skills while maintaining a strong focus on creativity, purpose, and belonging. The session emphasizes ethical design, community co-creation, and the alignment of immersive learning with workforce needs so that learners not only adapt to the future—they help shape it.

Join us for an insightful panel discussion on “Main AI Drivers in Education,” where leading experts, educators, and innovators from the European Digital Education Hub AI Squad will discuss how artificial intelligence is shaping the future of teaching and learning. This session focuses on the critical role of teacher training, public-private partnerships, and the active involvement of teachers in building AI-ready education systems.

As AI becomes increasingly embedded in classrooms, the success of its implementation depends on empowering educators with the right knowledge, tools, and confidence. The panel will discuss strategies for developing AI and data literacy among teachers and students, ensuring they can navigate, interpret, and use AI responsibly and effectively.

We will also examine how collaboration between the public and private sectors can accelerate innovation, support the creation of high-quality AI tools, and ensure equitable access to technology across different education systems. Panelists will highlight successful examples of teacher-centered initiatives, training programs, and partnerships that place educators at the heart of AI integration.

Attendees will gain valuable insights into the main technological and human drivers behind AI in education — from machine learning to ethical frameworks — and explore how to align innovation with pedagogy. Join this timely discussion to learn how we can build a future where AI strengthens teaching, empowers educators, and enhances learning for all.

AI tools have become an instructional designer’s best friend for accessing multimedia for course design. If we step back, “Does AI’s quickly generated content align with quality multimedia content? Is including multimedia in a course as simple as prompting, downloading, and uploading? This session explores how Mayer’s principles of Multimedia can be a framework to guide and evaluate AI-generated multimedia.

Participants will critically analyze four AI-generated multimedia samples using Mayer’s principles of Multimedia as an evaluation framework.

• Scripts: ChatGPT (Coherence & Personalization Principle)
• Visuals: DALL-E 3/ MidJourney AI (Spatial Contiguity & Signaling Principle) 
• Audio: ElevenLabs (Voice Principle)
• Video/ animation: Synthesia (Segmenting & Modality Principle)

Participants will then explore prompt engineering, learning strategies to design better prompts to generate quality multimedia that aligns with Mayer’s Principles of Multimedia.*

This session uses the instructional strategies Compare and Contrast, Concept Attainment, and Inductive learning to design the content and interactive activities.

Session Objectives:

By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

• Evaluate AI-generated multimedia using Mayer’s Multimedia Principles as a framework.
• Compare and contrast AI-generated content to recognize quality vs. poor quality multimedia.
• Apply prompt engineering strategies to improve the quality of AI-generated multimedia.

Interactive elements and technology:

• Lucid whiteboard/ Miro: for multimedia compare and contrast activity.
• Chat feature and emojis: to share responses and vote.
• Live AI demo tools

AI Acknowledgement: Portions of the interactivity section were created with support from OpenAI. All AI-generated material was reviewed and refined by the author, Pattiya Shenila Peries to ensure alignment with my personal ideas for the topic of the proposal.

Public debates about digital platforms often focus on blaming technology companies for declining online service quality, data breaches, and so on. This process is frequently described as “enshittification.” While these critiques are valid, they risk positioning users as passive victims waiting for regulation or corporate reforms. This lightning talk shifts the focus from blame to agency by examining five widely held myths that discourage people from refusing or resisting dominant digital platforms.

In five short provocations, the talk challenges assumptions that platform decline is solely a leadership problem, that leaving is impossible because “everyone else is there,” that platform use is driven by genuine enjoyment rather than engineered compulsion, that users can freely modify or resist technologies they dislike, and that surveillance is an unavoidable price for safety, efficiency, or education. Drawing on critical perspectives from digital culture and education research, the talk argues that these myths normalize dependence, surveillance, and compliance,- often from an early age.

The session frames refusal not as technophobia or withdrawal, but as a form of digital disobedience and responsible digital citizenship. The goal is to encourage participants to reconsider their own everyday digital practices and recognize the power embedded in seemingly small choices.

Discussion will be generated through a closing challenge that invites participants to identify one platform, tool, or practice they could fully or partially refuse, starting immediately.

Applying quality assurance (QA) models to online and hybrid programs can be time-intensive and challenging for faculty and course designers. What if Artifical Intelligence (AI) could make QA testing more automated and scalable for online learning units? This lightening talk shares a year-long pilot study that explores how AI can enhance, rather than replcae human expertise in the QA process. It examines the development of an AI-assisted QA process based on established quality frameworks from Quality Matters (QM), the Online Learning Consotrium, and CAST Universal Design for Learning (UDL).

Attendees will observe a rapid demonstration of the pilot workflow, lessons learned, and early findings, followed by an interactive Q&A exploring how AI can be intentionally integrated into QA processes while preserving human creativity and pedagogical judgment. Participants will leave with practical considerations and adaptable strategies for responsible AI use in course review and instructional design.

Learning Outcomes

Participants will be able to:

• Identify opportunities and challenges of using AI-assisted tools in online course quality assurance.
• Describe key learnings from comparing human and AI review results across multiple tools.
• Discuss strategies for ethically and intentionally integrating AI into QA workflows at their own institutions.

In this lightning talk, I share an innovative, human-centered workflow for transforming Open Educational Resources (OER) into dynamic, multimodal language-learning content using artificial-intelligence–generated avatars. By leveraging HeyYen’s AI-driven avatar technology—capable of producing natural body movement, facial expression, and authentic voice output—I converted a traditional OER Spanish textbook into a complete library of more than sixty short instructional videos. These micro-lessons (approximately two minutes each) deliver grammar explanations, vocabulary readings, pronunciation models, and cultural notes in a format that is highly accessible to diverse learners.

This project demonstrates how instructors can repurpose static text into engaging, culturally relevant media without requiring video-production expertise or expensive studio tools. The resulting videos provide consistent modeling of target-language input, reduce cognitive load through micro-learning design, and support students who benefit from repeated exposure, multimodal instruction, and flexible pacing. Importantly, the process foregrounds “human-by-design” principles: instructors maintain full control of content, sequencing, and pedagogical approach while using AI only to enhance clarity, engagement, and access.

Participants will gain insight into the workflow used to convert OER text into avatar-based micro-videos, including practical steps, design considerations, and examples of how these videos can supplement in-person, hybrid, or fully online language courses. The session highlights an affordable, scalable method for creating high-quality instructional media that expands accessibility and supports learner autonomy, especially in ESL and Spanish classrooms serving multilingual, multicultural students.

As a DBA navigating the demanding landscape of higher education, I have personally witnessed and experienced the pervasive effects of imposter syndrome (IS) among students and friends. While traditional discussions often focus on intellectual competence, this lightning talk delves into the emotional dimension of IS – the feelings of inadequacy, fear of exposure, and persistent self-doubt that can hinder academic progress and well-being.

This talk will explore common emotional triggers for IS in higher education, such as performance anxiety, social comparison, and the pressure to succeed in a competitive environment. It will then offer practical strategies, grounded in self-compassion and cognitive behavioral techniques, for addressing these feelings and building a more resilient mindset. These strategies include mindful self-reflection, challenging negative thought patterns, and cultivating a supportive community.

This lightning talk also serves as a prelude to an upcoming study examining the lived experiences of women in business with imposter syndrome. The goal is to gather data and insight on potential triggers of IS and the effectiveness of different strategies for coping. We anticipate generating a more detailed understanding and creating targeted interventions. The aim is to initiate a conversation about emotional well-being and its impact on academic excellence and professional growth. Your questions and experiences will help to shape this upcoming work.

This talk will explore common emotional triggers for IS in higher education, such as performance anxiety, social comparison, and the pressure to succeed in a competitive environment. It will then offer practical strategies, grounded in self-compassion and cognitive behavioral techniques, for addressing these feelings and building a more resilient mindset. These strategies include mindful self-reflection, challenging negative thought patterns, and cultivating a supportive community.

In an AI-saturated learning environment, history classrooms face a new version of an old problem: whose stories get told, and whose lives are flattened, omitted, erased, or remixed into “generic” narratives. This interactive workshop equips educators with a ready-to-use approach for teaching women’s history that uses primary sources to strengthen human creativity, authentic storytelling, and purposeful civic imagination, while integrating AI intentionally as a tool to support inquiry (not to replace human voice). The workshop reinforces the idea that primary sources aren’t just evidence; they’re creative prompts and ethical anchors that help students build authentic stories as well as purposeful civic/activist responses, in a world of erasure and AI-generated sameness.

The workshop addresses the potential use of AI not as a shortcut, but as a tool for inquiry, accessibility, and reflection. Participants will work with a small set of women’s history primary sources (letters, oral history excerpts, news coverage, journalism, protest ephemera, and/or legal documents) and practice a classroom protocol that asks students to: (1) generate questions and emotional/historical “noticings,” (2) test AI-generated summaries against evidence to identify erasure and bias, (3) translate source-based insights into an original creative artifact (micro-memoir, found poem, zine panel, mini-exhibit, or audio script), and (4) connect learning to action through a low-stakes activism extension (community memory project, annotation campaign, local-history map pin, or public-facing exhibit label).

The session models low-barrier tools and includes guardrails for privacy, attribution, and responsible use. Participants leave with a complete lesson plan, student handouts, and a rubric (adaptable across disciplines and online, hybrid, or face-to-face modalities) that assesses evidence-based creativity, ethical AI literacy, and human-centered historical thinking.

Almost overnight, artificial intelligence (AI) has become a topic of conversation and is being implemented in most higher education settings. However, many faculty members and administrators expect aggressive AI-driven changes in the next five years, they believe their institutions are not ready to support those changes, with serious concerns about the ethical issues that will arise from AI implementation. The purpose of this interactive forum is to discuss contemporary ethical and social issues on how AI is currently being used, experienced, and integrated into higher education. Participants will be surveyed on four categories of AI-adoption profiles (Mah & Groß, 2024) and will be provided with a profile description for future reference and professional growth. The Forum will continue discussing how AI was used to create a systematic literature review that isolated eight common AI themes, with a significant overload of ethical themes over perceptions, experiences, assimilation, literacy, challenges, opportunities, and future applications of AI. Data showed ethical issues and concerns related to the AI paradox, academic and digital information integrity, institutional governance, curriculum considerations, professional development, and teaching and learning. This forum will also integrate anecdotal information on current AI-classroom dilemmas and will provide recommendations to approach ethical issues in teaching and learning. Participants will be continually engaged in interactive activities throughout the forum, including engaging in an AI-adoption survey, quick polls, anticipating research findings through different digital games, and discussing their unique institutional experiences in AI adoption and implementation.

Regular and Substantive Interaction (RSI), as defined by the U.S. Department of Education ([DOE], 2020), distinguishes distance education from correspondence-style learning and sets the standard for meaningful online teaching. Research shows that the quality of instructor-initiated, frequent, and academically substantive engagement is a key driver of student satisfaction, persistence, and sense of belonging (Archambault et al., 2022; Cole et al., 2021).

This session uses the University of Arizona Global Campus’s Standard Instructional Expectations (SIE) framework as a case study for operationalizing RSI through individually relevant interaction. Participants will explore strategies for embedding substantive engagement into announcements, discussions, assignments, and grading feedback—moves that align with evidence that dialogic feedback and instructor social presence enhance online learning (Whiteside et al., 2023).

The session will also address sustainability by demonstrating how emerging AI tools and LMS features can amplify instructor presence without replacing it. Practical examples will show how technology can support personalized announcements, discussion replies, and feedback templates while keeping instructors firmly in control of initiating and shaping interaction (Winstone & Boud, 2020; U.S. DOE Office of Educational Technology, 2023).
Attendees will be able to design actionable strategies for meeting compliance requirements, define approaches to improve student engagement, and document methods for creating transparent records, all while maintaining a human-centered approach to online teaching.