Pedagogy without Borders: New Frontiers of Teaching and Technology

This session describes a recent collaboration between the University of Glasgow and the University of Washington that explored and celebrated creative teaching practices. Inspired by the spirit of #AcWriMo, the project aimed to create a small community of educators passionate about reimagining the traditional classroom. We believed that by sharing personal stories, innovative classroom techniques, and creative approaches to teaching, we might both inspire and empower faculty to embrace risk-taking and classroom experimentation. That was the goal.

We worked through collaborative writing and reflection, and we had the opportunity to not only meet colleagues from another university, but to develop and share new pedagogical insights and strengthen our teaching practice. The resulting work took various forms, such as reflective essays, case studies, podcasts, videos, or interactive online tools.

This session shares how we got started, the structure of the collaboration, what we learned, and how we will improve it next year.  The aim is not only to describe our event, but to help others learn how they can offer a similar experience for their faculty and staff.

Digital transformation (DT) is often perceived as a technological challenge, but what it is really about is effective leadership and change management. Successful DT requires empowering people to adapt, thrive, and lead while riding the post-secondary merry-go-round of digital uncertainty. This talk reframes digital transformation as a fundamentally human endeavour, focusing on the pivotal role of culture, leadership, and care for individuals while undertaking institutionally necessary DT.

Post-secondary institutions are traditionally heavy investors in technology, believing that tools and platforms can deliver transformation. However, many initiatives falter not due to technological shortcomings but because they fail to address human stakeholder needs. Education stakeholders are many and can include staff, faculty, students, administrators, and external partners who must learn and re-learn the use of new technologies. Concerns about change, lack of alignment with strategic goals, and insufficient communication can be tremendous barriers to the success of DT initiatives. This presentation explores strategies for overcoming these barriers and consultative, collaborative methods for putting people first.

The importance of ongoing support, clear communication, and iterative feedback loops to ensure long-term success for DT initiatives will be explored. Participants will leave with actionable frameworks for embedding change management principles into their DT work, ensuring these efforts resonate deeply with teaching and learning stakeholders. By shifting the narrative from technology-first to humans-first, this session highlights the power of supporting people to be technology transformers.

The emergence of ChatGPT and other Large Language Models (LLMs) has created challenges for educators seeking to assess student writing skills and critical thinking abilities. This presentation describes the experience of an educator at a community college who implemented choice in reflection assignments, consistent with the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL).

Several assignments in general education electives were augmented to offer a choice between text or video submissions. Using a learning analytics approach to track completion rates across multiple terms, an initial default bias was observed, with the dominant format shifting as the default option was adjusted. Following the introduction of ChatGPT, there was a notable shift towards text-based submissions, raising important questions about the influence of AI on student behavior.
This presentation will explore the implications of these findings for educators designing assessments, including the need to balance UDL principles, authentic assessments, and the use of AI tools. The trends observed in the data will be reviewed, and questions for future research will be posed, aiming to foster a deeper understanding of how to navigate these new frontiers in teaching and technology.

Since the advent of the digital-interactive era of communication, new educational technologies have transformed higher education, increasing both the possibilities and the challenges related to learning. While the internet and hypertext are the core elements that underpin remarkable educational resources, such as Wikipedia, the copy&paste function noticeably facilitates plagiarism. And with the advent of generative artificial intelligence (AI), higher education has been transformed yet again; because generative AI allows for assignment prompts to generate texts from a bank of texts (ie. new data from training data) thus by-passing a student’s learning curve altogether. While some courses and instructors permit the use of generative AI tools on an ad-hoc basis or for specific tasks and activities, others strictly prohibit it pursuant to Trent University’s Academic Integrity Policy 1.5 that explicitly includes “the presentation of work from an AI generator” (2024:p.640) its definition of Plagiarism.  

For teaching and learning, the core issue derives from the technological asymmetry between infraction and detection, because the same AI technology that facilitates plagiarism does not correspondingly facilitate the detection of plagiarism. It is a fact that popular plagiarism detectors, such as Turnitin or SafeAssign, have at best limited success in detecting plagiarism accurately let alone demonstrating plagiarism conclusively. This difficulty is in no small part compounded by the availability of free paraphrasing software that can transform machine-generated text into text that “appears” to be written by humans.

Thus, from a pedagogical perspective, the main challenge is neither the detection of plagiarism nor the application of appropriate penalties, but about prevention. As the “Pedagogy without Borders: New Frontiers of Teaching and Technology” conference asks how faculty are “navigating challenges in teaching and learning”, it is an ideal forum to present the preliminary findings of my research project on analog learning methods in the digital age. Ever since a sudden and dramatic use of ChatGPT was detected in a first-year course in the fall of 2023, I have carried out an experiment in my courses, substituting digital assignments with analog assignments in the following three terms (winter 2024, spring 2024, fall 2024). I have collected data on student performance, adherence to instructions, and feedback. And I have analyzed the data. And therefore, I would be happy to present the preliminary findings on the role of analog assignments in the digital age at the KTT conference in the “contemporary issues related to educational technologies” conference track. And I look forward to the feedback and comments fellow faculty members can provide.

The value of moving away from traditional exams and toward alternative forms of assessment is well established in the literature. Indeed, alternative assessments have been shown to relieve students’ anxiety about exam conditions, encourage them to be more invested in the outcome of the assessment, and promote higher-order thinking and reflection (e.g. Sulzinski, 2021; Williams & Wong, 2009). However, some faculty rely on traditional exams due to concerns about the feasibility and reliability of alternative assessments as well as the time demands of crafting quality alternative assessments.

The Teaching Exchange supports the development of alternative assessments by providing instructors with an online platform to share, search for, and find concrete exemplars of assessments that have worked in their courses. For example, if an instructor was considering adopting a new assessment, such as a video essay or poster presentation, they would be able to search the Teaching Exchange for exemplars, guidance, and inspiration.  The collaborative nature of the exchange provides ways for faculty to learn from one another and promotes discussion of creative and effective assessment in higher education.

In this presentation, we will discuss our process for creating the Teaching Exchange, including defining our goals, collaborations between eLearning Designers, Education Developers, and instructors, and creating and seeding the site. We will also showcase key elements of the Teaching Exchange and discuss our ideas for its future growth. Participants will also be invited to share their own submissions.

This theme focuses on the return on investment (ROI) for accessible online learning, highlighting how inclusive design benefits not only students but also faculty, institutions, and society. It invites faculty to explore how accessibility improves course quality, enhances student success and retention, and broadens reach, all while fostering innovation in teaching and learning.

The rapid adoption of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools, such as ChatGPT, has created new opportunities for transforming the learning experiences of graduate students. Drawing on my personal experiences as a graduate student and a graduate teaching assistant in Big Data Analytics, this presentation will explore the integration of AI as a "study partner”, and the ethical considerations of using AI in academic work.

I’ll discuss how these resources are used to summarise and simplify complicated ideas, automate research processes, and interact with the academic content in a more engaging way. The discussion will focus on practical applications of AI in learning, ethical considerations, and strategies for responsible use of AI in graduate learning.
AI technologies provide enormous benefits, but the ethical issues surrounding its application are severe, ranging from over-reliance, the risk of academic dishonesty, and the challenges of unequal access. The conversation will aim to establish a healthy equilibrium in which students can use AI responsibly while maintaining academic integrity.

This talk will look at what is possible and unfavorable about generative AI and add to the conversation around how higher education should deal with the new frontiers of teaching and technology. Insights gained from this session will ensure that AI’s utility is maximised, and the moral risks are mitigated.
 

Digital distraction has become a chronic behavior problem for university students that interferes with their attention and learning within personalized learning environments. Applying a randomized control block trial with a counterbalanced experimental design, we investigated the effect of note-taking strategies and time pressure on students' task-irrelevant browsing behaviors and online search performance. Students were randomly assigned to a matrix note, conventional note, or note-free condition and then to one of the four experimental blocks, counterbalancing the order of online search topics and time pressure. Results of the study showed that 44 out of 60 participants (73.33%) conducted at least an irrelevant browsing. Students in the matrix note condition and those under high time pressure exhibited a lower task distraction rate. Moreover, students taking matrix notes demonstrated better online search performance. Note-taking strategies and task distraction rate were significant predictors of participants' online search performance controlling for their prior knowledge. Study results are consistent with the load theory of attention and cognitive control and have implications to reduce student distraction and improve learning effectiveness.

Scenario-based learning asks learners to exercise judgement while applying knowledge. This approach gives a certain freedom to students to engage in realistic decision-making relevant to their study, in a low-stakes environment. In this presentation, we will walk through how decision-based branching scenarios, developed using tools like H5P, enhance critical thinking and reinforce procedural knowledge in a veterinary medicine class.  

Through a collaborative design process involving instructional designers and faculty, we developed branching scenarios that shift from traditional knowledge recall to decision-based questioning. These scenarios allow students to practice applying the knowledge and skills developed in classes and labs, offering immediate feedback and emphasizing the consequences of their decisions. Narrative elements, realistic feedback mechanisms, and the integration of characters further immerse learners in simulations that mirror professional practice.

Often, digital simulations may be cast as individual learning experiences. While our scenarios are available for students’ independent review, the transformative teaching practice developed involves group participation, reflection and debriefing discussions, and student feedback. Following the pilot, refined features such as a ‘how-to tutorial’ and animations illustrate the iterative design process and the value of collaboration between IDs, a subject matter expert, and user testing.

By sharing lessons learned and our “top tips” for adopting branching scenarios into teaching practice, we will invite educators and designers from various disciplines to consider adopting such scenarios in their own teaching contexts. This instructional method not only promotes critical thinking and provides a means of authentic formative assessment, but also supports self-directed and collaborative learning.

This session will be co-presented by:

• Jen Loewen, DVM, DACVECC, Western College of Veterinary Medicine (WCVM)
• JR Dingwall, Instructional Designer, MacEwan University
• Julie Maier, Instructional Designer, University of Saskatchewan

The increasing prevalence of mental health challenges among students in K-12 and other spaces has placed a renewed focus on the role of technology in supporting well-being within these varied educational environments. This presentation, titled Technology-Enhanced Classroom Supporting Mental Health, explores the integration of digital tools in K-12 classrooms to foster mental health and resilience. Drawing from current research, the presentation highlights how technology can be harnessed to identify at-risk students, deliver mental health interventions, and promote social-emotional learning (SEL).

Key technologies such as mental health applications and adaptive learning systems can provide real-time monitoring of student well-being and offer personalized support. Moreover, classroom technologies that support mindfulness and gamified learning programs create engaging and accessible methods for students to develop mental health skills, strategies and emotional awareness. By leveraging digital technologies, educators can also tailor interventions to meet diverse student needs, improving both mental health outcomes and academic success.

This presentation will also address the challenges of digital equity, the importance of educator training in using these tools effectively, and considerations around student privacy. Ultimately, the goal is to demonstrate how technology-enhanced learning environments can create more supportive, inclusive, and mentally healthy classrooms in the K-12 space and beyond.