Teaching and Technology Collaborative

Enriching Scholarship Conference, May 4 – 8, 2026

Enriching Scholarship is free to all members of the U-M community. In celebration of the University’s Future of Learning initiative, our conference theme this year is Life-Changing Education. The first day of the conference will be held in-person at North Quad on Central Campus in Ann Arbor. Coffee and donuts, as well as a boxed lunch, are on the schedule, as well as a dozen sessions led by U-M instructors, researchers, students, and staff. The rest of the week will be held remotely, with a dozen more sessions each day. Check out a preview of our sessions below.

We use Canvas as our conference website.
To register for the conference, simply self-enroll in our Canvas site (click the big Register button).

Once the Canvas page loads, select “Enroll in Course.”
After you enroll, you can revisit the site any time from your Canvas Dashboard.

Questions? Need help? Contact teachtech@umich.edu

Keynote Speakers

The value added of college education in the twenty-first century is students’ ability to learn in new ways. This is difficult to provide in a context where technological development and sociopolitical challenges come so fast that we can’t know what will be new in a year, let alone a decade or two. This is further complicated by the decline of college as American society’s “great equalizer”: instead of offering life-changing education for all, elite colleges such as the University of Michigan risk becoming sites of advantage-accumulating education for some. This talk cuts through current debates in higher education about the purpose and value of college as well as about the nature of specific technologies, pedagogies, and policies: they should not be evaluated in isolation, but by investigating whether they foster student autonomy or impede it. The “sage on the stage” has already been de-staged; the talk concludes with optimistic observations about collaborative trends in college education where non-faculty staff and students are also all teachers and learners, just as long as universities entrust them with the autonomy to do so.

Mika LaVaque-Manty is an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and Associate Professor of Political Science in LSA. He is currently the co-chair of Campus of the Future project, which is part of the Year of Life-Changing Education, and also chairs U-M’s AI in Education Working Group. He is a political theorist with a focus on human agency in institutional structures.

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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.

Peter Felten is a professor of history, executive director of the Center for Engaged Learning, and assistant provost for teaching and learning at Elon University. He has published nine books about higher education, including Connections are Everything: A College Student’s Guide to Relationship-Rich Education(2023) and The SoTL Guide: (Re)Orienting the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning(2025). Both of those co-authored books have an open-access online version free to all readers. He is on the advisory board of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and is a fellow of the Gardner Institute.

Alphabetical List of Accepted Proposals

Congratulations to our colleagues who submitted the following proposal titles. Dates and times are still being finalized, but we share this list as a preview of the depth and breath of sessions that will be available this May 4-8 (and later via recording).

• AI as a Teaching Partner: Using U-M’s Maizey to Support Student Collaboration, Reflection, and Leadership
• AI Conversation Partner
• Best Practices for Fostering Safe and Supportive Learning Communities…
• Beyond AI answer engines: Using scalable socratic scaffolding to drive productive struggle and promote student success
• Beyond the Bot: Cultivating Human-Centered Innovation with U-M ITS AI Services
• Blending the best of Michigan, Industry, & AI into a new course
• Bringing Learner Personas “to Life” with AI 
• Bringing the Library to Your Students
• Built for U-M, Built for Learning: Exploring Instructor Tools in Canvas
• Computational Analysis on Generative AI in Higher Education
• Course Accessibility Checklist & Templates for Faculty
• Cultivating Critical Data Skills for Lifelong Impact through Data Information Literacy
• Designing EECS 498 AASE: Building a Course About AI Agents, Using AI Agents
• Engaging Learners in the Experience of Change
• Enhancing Canvas Course Design and Navigation with DesignPlus
• Essential Skills Refresh: Scaffolding and Embedding Essential Skill Workshops to Reach All UMSI Students
• Evaluating AI responses and results
• From Awareness to Action: Findings from the ITS GenAI Instructional Practices Collaborative
• From Canvas Chaos to Clarity: Using DesignPLUS to Improve Course Design
• From Framework to Practice: Using GenAI to Support Professional Communication for Graduate Students
• From Word Counts to Real Conversation: Reimagining Discussion Boards with VoiceThread
• Learning with GenAI: Empowering Ethical and Critical AI Literacy at U-M
• Leveraging Low-Stakes Technology for a High-Impact Classroom Wellness Intervention 
• Lost in Translation? Bridging the Auditory Gap in University Lectures
• Planting Seeds and Making Things
• Practicing Performance Under Pressure: Using Mixed Reality to Help Music Students Manage Performance Anxiety
• Promoting Wellness Through Participation: Designing a PC CARES Adaptation with Students
• Radical Care in Higher Education: African-Centered Strategies for Sustaining Black Student Leaders in Anti-Black Academic Systems
• Safe Spaces for High-Stakes Conversations: Virtual Mock Encounters for Pre-Health Professional & Sport Management Students
• Searching Sustainably: Optimizing the Daily Use of AI
• Social Annotation Tools to Foster Equity and Belonging
• The Lifecycle of a Firm: A Case Study in Multi-Stakeholder Integration in the Ross Online MBA
• Transforming the U-M Experience with Gemini and NotebookLM
• Using a Backwards Design to Improve Student Engagement, Learning, & Outcomes in an Asynchronous Nursing Course (RN-BSN) 
• Using Generative AI to Practice Difficult Conversations: Human-Centered Deliberate Practice for Therapeutic Communication

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What is the Teaching and Technology Collaborative?

U-M has a community of instructional support professionals who can help you understand the technology and achieve the best results in your teaching. Our goal, no matter where you start, is to connect you to the right support group at the right time to get your questions answered.

How to get started? Consider one of these next steps:

• Email us at teachtech@umich.edu
• Fill out the ITS Instructional Support interest form
• Browse the list of U-M Instructional Support Groups
• Visit our MIVideo site to see recordings from recent conferences

Attend Workshops Throughout the Year

Workshops are offered throughout the year at various locations. Click Upcoming Sessions above, or enter a topic of interest in the search box.  TeachTech workshops are intended to be accessible to all participants. If you require an accommodation to fully participate, please contact teachtech@umich.edu in advance of the workshop. All Teachtech workshops are free.