91��ý

3 - 3:50 p.m. (2:30 - 3:20 p.m. ADT)

One Educator's (reluctant) AI Adventures

I didn't want to buy a ticket for this roller coaster but I guess I'm in for the ride! If the proliferation of generative AI has left you feeling curious, skeptical, overwhelmed, fascinated, exhausted—or all of the above—you're not alone. Join Dr. Rosales for a candid look at one educator's ongoing attempt to make sense of generative AI without becoming either an evangelist or a doomsayer. We'll talk about what it's like to teach amidst uncertainty, why educators belong in conversations about AI policy and practice, and what happens when technologies challenge our assumptions about what education is for in the first place.

Through stories, questions, resources, and shared reflection, participants will be invited to move beyond reacting to AI and toward making more intentional choices about what we want education—and educational technology—to be.

Presenter(s): Jana Rosales, Associate Professor (Teaching), Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science

Affiliation: 91��ý

Stream: Authentic Pedagogy and Assessment

Session Format: Presentation

Transferable-Skills Development as an Unlikely Corrective in the “Age of GenAI”

Transferable skills, which in some rare contexts are called “human skills,” tend to appear alongside discussions of job or career readiness, while their centrality to who we are as human beings goes overlooked. A transferable skill, though, is something that a learner builds for their own benefit: far from becoming better communicators, better collaborators, more efficient problem-solvers, or more creative people in order to satisfy a grade requirement in a course, learners improve in these ways as side effects of their course requirements and gain skills for themselves accordingly. If we take as a basic premise the fact that students sometimes use generative AI to create more polished outputs than they otherwise could, might it not follow that this is because they have been led to believe that the goal of a university education is simply to deliver the most laudable output? To convince students that this was not the case, that in fact a university education was just as concerned with the development of their transferable skills and their experience, might then be to nudge them away from the very thing causing overreliance on GenAI in the first place.

Presenter(s): Ian Gibson, Instructional Designer, CITL

Affiliation: 91��ý

Stream: The Learning Experience

Session Format: Short Paper (20 Min)

Lowering the Stakes and Raising the Bar: A Case Study for Writing Pedagogy in the AI Age.

My presentation will share the results of an experimental approach to teaching writing to 50 students in Great Books 1006: Great Thinkers and Writers at St. Thomas University in AY 2025 - 2026. I will share how I was able to adopt a wholistic writing pedagogy that allowed students to produce their own written work without the use of AI tools. My theory of the case for why students typically use LLMs to generate written work involved three hypotheses: first, that student use of AI is rooted in anxiety around their academic performance; second, that this anxiety is attributable, in part, to deficits in basic academic skills; and third, that students suffer from a lack of purpose that harms their motivation to learn.

I used three approaches to address these barriers to learning: first, I redesigned the content of the course to focus on great texts about the nature of liberal education itself to help foster students’ sense of meaning and engagement. Second, I instituted specifications grading for about 60% of the course assignments, making it very easy to pass the course, but rather difficult to get “higher” grades. This allowed students to focus on learning without worrying about passing the course. “A” grades required genuine engagement with the course material. Finally, I instituted a series of iterative in-class short writing assignments explicitly designed to equip students with the skills needed to write an effective undergraduate analysis paper. Students received explicit instruction on these skills—everything from “using textual evidence” to “synthesizing ideas”—and were invited to rewrite them should they fail to attain the specifications.

Students self-reported significant gains in learning, satisfaction and performance, and, yields in the second-year courses for the Great Books Program at STU were up 75% year over year.

Presenter(s): Matt Dinan, Ph.D., Associate Professor and Director, Great Books Program

Affiliation: St. Thomas University

Stream: The Learning Experience

Session Format: Case Study

Evidence-Informed Approaches to Developing Teachers’ AI Competencies

Given the rapid proliferation of Generative Artificial Intelligence applications, and their increasing permeation of many sectors of society, the economy, and provincial Education systems, it is vital that teachers develop their competencies with such applications (Bond et al, 2024; Celik et al., 2022; D’Andrea, 2023; DeLaire, 2023; Langreo, 2023a, b; MobileMind, 2024; Shankland, 2024; Wilichowski & Cobo, 2023). Teachers are the front-line leaders who will help society’s youngest members to become wise and capable users of AI technologies. With ever-increasing class sizes and workload expectations, teachers can also benefit from understanding how they can ethically use AI tools in their own practice. In the context of the rapid integration of these novel tools, it is important that Schools and Faculties of Education target both pre-service and practicing teachers as audiences for AI-related skills development. It is also important that the training and supports they provide are evidence-informed and delivered in the most practical ways possible for different target audiences.

This presentation will discuss recent research into the impacts of hands-on experience with AI tools on the perceptions of self-efficacy of participants in a graduate-level Education program (Power, 2024) and the Chat-T survey instrument (Power, 2026). It will also discuss how those findings, combined with the findings of research into technological innovation amongst higher education faculty during the COVID-19 pandemic (Power & Kay, 2023; Power et al., 2023), as well as frameworks such as Karbach and Woodworth's (in review) Build, Evaluate, Apply, Reflect, Adapt (BEARA) and Woodworth et al.'s (2026) Validity Architecture for AI Integrated Assessment (VAAI), can be used to guide AI skills development in pre-service teacher education, graduate Education program curriculum, and professional development for current teachers in Atlantic Canada and beyond. The presentation will highlight the different foci and approaches necessary for each audience. For pre-service teachers, appropriate foci and approaches might include deep, cross-curricular, contextualized integration of AI tools and their pedagogical and administrative applications. For teachers enrolled in graduate programs, this contextualized integration can be expanded into an intensive, dedicated exploration of issues surrounding the ethics and sustainability of AI tools, and leadership in shaping AI policy. But, as demonstrated by Power and Kay (2023) and Power et al. (2023), a more practical, just-in-time approach focused on specific AI-related competencies is required when targeting an audience of practicing teachers. To that end, the presentation will close with an overview of the proposed Professional Certification in Responsible AI and Digital Learning (AI-Empowered Educator), an upcoming competency-based micro-credential program for K–12 educators currently in development as a partnership between Cape Breton University and Digital Nova Scotia (2026).

Presenter(s): Dr. Rob Power, Associate Professor, School of Education

Affiliation: Cape Breton University

Stream: SoTL and AI-Accelerated Research

Session Format: Presentation

Teaching and Learning with Gen AI Tools; Several Approaches & PerspectivesAI uses for course design and teaching

Across many universities we are starting to see professors/instructors more regularly and more openly leverage the improving capabilities of GenAI tools to assist with the creation of learning content items, assessment and evaluation items, teaching aids, study guides etc.

In this presentation and discussion panel, several 91��ý instructors will share their hands-on experiences and approaches to using Gen AI tools in a manner that is considered both pedagogically and academically sound as well as insightful and engaging -- to teacher and student alike. We will look then not simply at What and How different GenAI tools were technically employed and implemented in their courses but also address some pedagogical and philosophical questions pertaining to the very use of this technology in the creation of such learning & teaching items.

Presenter(s): Gil Shalev, Instructional Designer, CITL

Affiliation: 91��ý

Stream: The Learning Experience

Session Format: Panel