ES 2026 Tues – Fri Virtual Schedule

This session introduces participants to the custom generative AI tools available in Instructor Tools in Canvas. Created at U-M using curated data and carefully designed system prompts, these tools help instructors create content that supports student learning. The tools include an alternative text generator, a learning objectives assistant, a course design assistant, and a multiple choice question assistant. Join us to learn about the tools and discuss their usefulness.

This session explores how custom AI tutors enrich the student experience through personalized learning and deeper engagement. We present Wolverine Tutor, an AI tool that uses Socratic scaffolding and real-world scenarios to guide students toward mastery of course objectives. Unlike answer-generating tools, it prioritizes eliciting student explanations to foster active learning. The project also demonstrates how generative AI enables assessment-driven, personalized pathways that support mastery learning.

Explore a new strategy for learner-centered design. In this session, we’ll examine how AI tools can simulate learner personas throughout the design process, providing feedback on key design decisions. We’ll also critically evaluate the effectiveness and limitations of this approach.

Online discussions often default to “post 300 words and reply twice,’ but that doesn’t guarantee meaningful learning or regular and substantive interaction. In this interactive session, you’ll explore VoiceThread as a learner using a multimodal response to a prompt. You will be challenged to redesign a traditional discussion board prompt into a Community of Inquiry-focused activity that creates critical discourse and reflection.

Peter Felten, Professor of history, executive director of the Center for Engaged Learning, and assistant provost for teaching and learning at Elon University.

Research consistently shows that students’ relationships with faculty and peers are crucial to academic success and personal well-being in higher education. With the rise of generative AI, human connections matter even more for learning, motivation, well-being, and meaning-making. Drawing on almost 500 interviews with students, faculty, and staff at colleges and universities across the country, we will examine how fostering relationships – especially educationally purposeful peer relationships – offers a practical, scalable, and humane path to ensuring that all students experience welcome and care, become inspired to learn, and explore the big questions that matter for their lives and our communities.

In this session, each of the five winners of the 2026 Provost’s Teaching Innovation Prize (TIP) will briefly explain a challenge that their innovation addresses, how they implemented their innovation, and the innovation’s impact on student learning. After these 5-minute presentations, audience members will have time to ask follow-up questions.

2026 TIP Winners:

• Community-Engaged Understandings of Homelessness: Connecting Past Policy to Present Conditions – Ayesha Ghazi Edwin, Clinical Assistant Professor of Social Work

• How Do You Make a Large Class Feel Small? – Jeffrey Koller, Lecturer III, and Alex Shorter, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering

• Opt-In Active Learning in a Large Gateway Course: A Two-Pathway Model for STATS 250 – John Keane and Alicia Romero, Lecturer IIIs in Statistics, Mark Rulkowski, Lecturer II in Statistics

• Problem First, AI Second: Teaching Agency in an Age of Agents – Branko Kerkez, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

• Students Learning From Students: A Change That Makes Exams Engaging and Possibly Even Fun – Regina Baucom, Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Hilary Archbold, Lecturer IV in Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology

With the updated ADA Title II expectations ahead, you may be wondering where to start with course accessibility. In this session, you’ll use a curated Course Accessibility Checklist and ready-to-use templates to take practical first steps. We’ll show how to start creating accessible new materials and improving the accessibility of existing content, using U‑M resources and tools you can apply right away.

Data information literacy (DIL) applies traditional information literacy competencies to data. In an increasingly data-driven world, students must be critical producers and consumers of data in all aspects of their lives, including their education. This session will give an overview of DIL and its competencies, and how we’ve partnered with faculty and administrators to incorporate DIL into a School of Social Work graduate course and the School of Pharmacy’s Research Conduct of Research and Scholarship training.

PC CARES is a community health education program that has been implemented to prevent suicide and promote wellness with remote and rural Alaska Native communities through building capacity for upstream suicide prevention. In working with a steering committee with graduate students in social work, public health, and education, the curriculum is being adapted

Graduate students are already using ChatGPT, Claude, and Grammarly to communicate their research — in resumes, cover letters, and professional emails. As practitioners, we are often the first people they ask for guidance, yet most of us are navigating this without shared frameworks or clear answers. This session introduces a practical, four-stage framework for supporting GenAI use in professional communication and offers space to reflect on how we address this in our own programs.

• Lauren Allen, Senior, majoring in Business Administration with a minor in Law, Justice, and Social Change.
• Christina Celeste, Junior, double majoring in Sociology and Social Work
• Taylor Gaines, Senior, majoring in Biology, Health, and Society.
• Hamad Tahir, Junior, majoring in Public Health with minors in Community Action and Social Change (CASC) and Intergroup Relations (IGR).
• Nicky Henry, Junior, majoring in Mechanical Engineering, double minoring in computer science and entrepreneurship

What does it mean to write a professional document with AI, and does it matter who did the writing? This session introduces A Practitioner’s Guide for GenAI in World Languages & Cultures and pulls back the curtain on how it was made: the tools, the workflow, and the decisions involved. It also examines disclosure bias and asks a larger question: as AI masters the detached, authoritative tone of professional writing, will personal voice become the new marker of trust?

UMSI’s Engaged Learning Office transformed essential skill development into a four-tier model (Novice-to-Mastery) for Teamwork, Engagement, and Project Management. By leveraging student-led digital design and embedding curriculum in introductory and capstone courses, we’ve created an accessible, human-centered bridge between theory and practice. Join this session to discuss practical tips for scaffolded pedagogy, our lessons learned, and to explore future ways to use intentional design to empower students for life-changing, ethical careers.

Virtual Exchange, also known as Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL), is a pedagogical approach that connects students for meaningful engagement with partners in other countries as part of their regular for-credit classes. It can disrupt traditional approaches to teaching and learning with respect to dominant narratives, power dynamics, privilege, diversifying content, access, and student agency. Virtual Exchange also offers a valuable global experience to those unable to travel abroad. During this session, you’ll hear from experienced U-M practitioners and have a chance to explore your questions and course ideas.

In Winter 2025, the Ross Online MBA program debuted “The Lifecycle of the Firm,” a course that challenges students to navigate the strategic and financial evolution of a company. During the term, the teaching team identified a critical gap in this simulated investor experience: the absence of the real-time founder interview. To bridge this gap, Ross partnered with Noodle Dialogue to pilot an AI-driven “Founder Bot” that facilitates live conversations between students and the AI-founder. This session details the our collaboration.

In a world where trust is very hard to build and easy to lose. AI tools can amplify that. How can domain experts and new learners evaluate the responses and results of AI tools? In this session we will talk about strategies to verify AI responses such as giving very specific and clear instructions, checking the sources, asking for details and the reasoning for the answer, testing with positive and negative controls) and more.

This session addresses the “invisible labor” and collective grief often borne by Black student leaders at predominantly white, top-ranked institutions. By moving beyond individual self-care toward collective healing and communal resilience (Ubuntu), the session provides a roadmap for faculty, staff, and students to build more sustainable and authentic leadership cultures. It shifts the focus from professional “assimilation” toward “liberation praxis,” ensuring that the most marginalized voices in the learning community can remain whole while advancing justice.

This session will examine how increased Generative AI usage in academia has impacted energy expenditures on a global scale. By discussing how we can use AI more sustainably and being more mindful of our individual impact, we can create an atmosphere rooted in collective action for improving AI sustainability practices. Our goal is to foster a greener campus for students, faculty, and staff, ultimately enriching the educational experience for all members of the community.

Faculty piloted virtual mock experiences using the UM “Maizey” (RAG-based) chatbot, creating safe, low-stakes environments for practicing challenging professional conversations. By leveraging Retrieval-Augmented Generation, these diverse scenarios—ranging from patient interviewing and clinical documentation to sport management sales—allowed for repeatable, high-fidelity skill building. Participants will explore how these AI-driven personas enable learners to rehearse real-world interactions, navigate mistakes, and refine communication strategies in clinical or professional settings.

This presentation explores how AI-assisted “vibe coding” allows educators and instructional designers to create custom classroom tools with little to no programming. Through iterative prompting and rapid prototyping, instructors can transform teaching needs into functional applications. Examples include language-learning games, video editing tools, image resizers, and other small utilities designed to support teaching and learning. The session highlights practical workflows and demonstrates how educators can quickly build solutions when existing software falls short.

Due to the Canvas outage, this session has been canceled.

External tools (also known as LTI tools) integrate with Canvas to enhance the learning experience by providing access to additional resources and functionality.

Discover how Google Gemini and NotebookLM are redefining research and personalized learning. This session demonstrates how faculty, staff, and students can leverage Gemini’s multimodal capabilities and NotebookLM’s source-grounded synthesis to spark creativity and enhance knowledge sharing. Attendees will learn to create custom AI “Gems,” generate dynamic audio overviews, and utilize guided learning modes—all while prioritizing data privacy and academic integrity.