As social media influencers increasingly shape public discourse, responsible influencing practices have become critical. The European Influencers Academy (EIA) at NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences addresses this through educational programmes for micro-influencers, yet faces scalability constraints inherent to in-person formats. This session introduces an innovative solution: leveraging virtual influencers (digitally created personas that produce content similar to human influencers) to expand educational reach while maintaining pedagogical integrity.

Virtual influencers represent an untapped opportunity for educational institutions. Unlike human influencers limited by time and geography, virtual influencers can operate continuously across multiple platforms, reaching diverse audiences with consistent messaging. However, their educational application requires careful design consideration beyond commercial or entertainment contexts.

This presentation introduces a framework bridging human educational influencer practices with virtual influencer design. Drawing from peer-reviewed research on how human educational influencers position themselves, create content, and engage audiences, the framework identifies key design dimensions that inform the Virtual Influencer Canvas, a practical tool translating these insights into actionable design elements. Attendees will gain practical insights for applying this framework within their own educational contexts, while addressing critical questions of ethics, authenticity, effectiveness, and implementation challenges.

This session offers valuable insights for educators, communication professionals, and digital strategists interested in scaling educational impact through emerging technologies while maintaining pedagogical rigor and social responsibility.

As AI increasingly steps into roles requiring creativity and logic, narrative cinema provides a crucial space for examining what remains uniquely human. This highly interactive 25-minute Forum explores films about AI not just as entertainment, but as a productive pedagogical tool for ethical and philosophical reflection aligned with the “Human by Design” conference theme.

In this forum, we will use short, provocative clips from films like “Ex Machina” and “Her” as catalysts for immediate audience engagement. Through live polling, collaborative digital whiteboarding, and open-mic discussion, participants will deconstruct how cinema frames concepts of empathy, consciousness, and connection in humans and artificial beings alike.

The goal of this session is to collaboratively develop a description of “human distinctives”—traits that become clearer when contrasted against their artificial counterparts—and discuss how educators can use these narrative anchors to foster purposeful dialogue about identity in an AI-augmented world. This is a collective inquiry; come prepared to watch, react, and share.

A new triad defines educational productivity: Teacher Influencer Educators have come to repurpose learning in ways that are simultaneously more creative, more practical, and more sensitive to the multifarious uses of alternative technologies. In an era of fracture, when neither institutions nor administrators, faculty or facilities can be depended upon, when lives and plans, curricula and course work are changing faster than the speed of understanding, the move toward specialized, technology-enhanced individualization requires the professoriate to comprise individuals who are each and all tripartite deliverers of data.

This presentation defines, explains, and questions the TIE in four ways: First, its individual elements are delineated and described; second, its new existence as a repurposed teaching-learning singleton is set forth; third, examples of its operativity as a newly needed technology-enhanced tripartite in the United States and abroad will be presented; and finally, TIE impact on the educational experience will be discussed and its future for learning queried.

Asynchronous discussion forums remain a core learning space in higher education online courses, yet they frequently struggle with low participation, shallow contributions, or uneven engagement across learners. At the same time, faculty face growing pressure to manage discussion workload while maintaining high-quality interaction. Participants will examine specific, practical AI-supported strategies that improve prompt quality, deepen student responses, support equitable participation, and streamline faculty facilitation. Examples drawn from graduate and undergraduate courses across disciplines demonstrate how AI can be used to scaffold thinking, personalize engagement, and build genuine learning community. The session emphasizes responsible, transparent, and human-centered use of AI aligned with the TCC 2026 theme: leveraging creativity and purposeful design to enrich the online learning experience. The session also directly addresses risks—over-reliance on AI, loss of human voice, academic integrity concerns, equity in AI access, and the potential for biased generative outputs. Participants will learn strategies to mitigate these concerns while supporting faculty workload, student thinking, and classroom community.

Ultimately, this session is not about replacing human discussion with automated text. Instead, it offers a framework for using AI purposefully to enhance pedagogical design, remove barriers to engagement, and deepen the human experience of learning.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing higher education by enhancing student success through personalized learning, efficient resource allocation, and improved engagement. AI tools can analyze students’ study habits and academic performance to provide tailored recommendations for study materials, schedules, and progress tracking, helping students manage workloads and master complex concepts effectively (Sumathy & Navamani, 2024).

Beyond academics, AI fosters holistic student development by integrating data from extracurricular activities, campus services, and social engagement to identify at-risk students and connect them with support systems. This proactive approach boosts retention rates and ensures students find their niche within the campus community. Additionally, AI-powered platforms offer real-time tutoring, adaptive learning experiences, and immediate feedback, empowering students to overcome challenges independently while fostering critical thinking (Klimova & Pikhart, 2025). Institutions can also leverage AI to optimize underperforming programs by analyzing trends in enrollment and engagement. By addressing gaps in campus resources or communication channels, AI ensures that student services remain relevant and effective along with thriving academically and socially.

One of the criticisms instructors often level at the use of generative AI in the classroom is that it subverts students’ ability to “think critically.” This presentation introduces Four Phases of Thinking with AI—Passive, Parallel, Deep, and Generative Thinking—which models the relationship between human cognition and artificial intelligence. Each phase represents a balance between cognitive offloading and students’ intellectual agency.

In Passive Thinking, AI functions as a worker, performing tasks that require little human reasoning. Parallel Thinking invites co-exploration, where humans and AI think alongside each other. Deep Thinking transforms AI into a co-reasoner, supporting synthesis, reflection, and ethical evaluation. Finally, Generative Thinking advances into meta-cognition, as learners design or customize AI for responsible decision-making.

Through this progression, instructors can scaffold assignments that develop both AI literacy and higher-order thinking. The model aligns with Bloom’s Taxonomy and Webb’s Depth of Knowledge, highlighting how cognitive complexity increases as reliance on AI decreases. Ultimately, this framework repositions AI as an intellectual collaborator, one that challenges students not to think less but to think more deliberately and creatively.

We live in a postdigital world—a messy and paradoxical condition shaped by successive waves of technological change. ‘Postdigital’ does not imply that we have moved beyond technology, but rather that it has become inseparable from how we teach, learn, and create. In education, this means it no longer makes sense to draw clear lines between “traditional” and “technology-enhanced” learning; technology is now a fundamental condition of our pedagogical reality.

This presentation, based on the recently published paper entitled “Navigating Creativity, Technology, and Human-Centred Learning: An Open, Collaborative Education Community Reflection”, explores the postdigital classroom as a dynamic space where technology is not simply adopted, but critically and creatively integrated to support equitable, student-centred learning.

Through a series of provocative vignettes drawn from practice, the presenters examine the interplay between digital tools and embodied, hands-on approaches such as making, drawing, and play. Together, these examples illustrate how educators can cultivate spaces of openness, curiosity, and co-creation—spaces where students, teachers, and technologists work collaboratively to balance innovation with empathy.

Ultimately, this presentation invites participants to reimagine the postdigital classroom as a flexible, inclusive, and human-centred ecosystem, where creativity and critical reflection guide the use of technology. It calls for an educational future that moves beyond passive digital transformation toward one that is imaginative, adaptive, and deeply humane.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis  ultricies nec, pellentesque eu, pretium quis, sem. Nulla consequat massa quis enim. Donec pede justo, fringilla vel, aliquet nec, vulputate eget, arcu. In enim justo, rhoncus ut, imperdiet a, venenatis vitae, justo