[Spring 2026 Workshop] – Collaboration, Co-creation, and Creativity in Ed-Tech: Responding to Change Schedule

This interactive session has two goals related to this tension: 1) to allow for a dialogue amongst participants about the real limitations they see in ed tech in their day-to-day work and 2) to explore how participants may influence a better integration of ed tech at their institution.

The discussions will cover such areas as how ed tech can sometimes be misaligned with pedagogy, the over-reliance on tools, and the growing challenges associated with AI and student engagement.

The Office of Faculty Development in UBC’s Faculty of Medicine (FoM) organized a committee of stakeholders – patient advocates, preceptors, medical learners, and UBC staff (our Office and FoM Digital Solutions) – to explore applying layered learning as a teaching strategy in clinical teaching environments, particularly those in rural and remote family medicine contexts. With support from CTLT’s Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund (TLEF), the Office hired a Project Coordinator/Instructional Designer to support the execution and development of the project.

This talk will explore the project from the perspective of the Project Coordinator/Instructional Designer – what were the enabling factors that supported the success of this project? It will cover how collaboration with diverse perspectives was achieved (learners, EdTech, patients, etc.), how institutional and participant/audience perspectives were balanced in the developed resources, and what dedicated funding and FTE can make possible over 14 months.

The Funhouse draws inspiration from rule-breaking, experimental Vancouver poets from the 1960s and 70s; people like Judith Copithorne, Bill Bissett, and Lionel Kearns.

In this wild and creative project faculty, staff, students and industry have come together to create something unique that really challenges traditional definitions of poetry and assertive compositional claims of AI… all for learning!

We can offer a session with demo time that covers the process, the tech, the literature and the engagement within this very unique and hyper local use case for AI and immersive learning environments.

The pilot was intentionally designed as a collaborative experiment in course design. Participating instructors adapted the PAIRR framework within their disciplinary contexts while meeting periodically to share experiences, challenges, and emerging observations. This process created opportunities for collective reflection on how AI feedback interacts with peer review, student reflection, and disciplinary writing expectations.

The session will introduce the PAIRR framework, first developed by US educators, and describe how it has been implemented across courses at Langara College. It will also share early observations from the pilot and reflect on what faculty collaboration revealed about integrating AI into writing revision. Particular attention will be given to how collaborative experimentation can support instructors in responding thoughtfully to rapidly evolving AI technologies.

The design process for the GENRx platform is grounded in a human-in-the-loop approach, where AI is not situated as an expert, but rather as a communication practice tool shaped by human subject matter expertise. This design anticipates AI confabulations which emulate real-world communication experiences, transforming a technological limitation into a teaching opportunity.

What sets GENRx apart in a crowded landscape of AI‐powered communication tools is its emphasis on co‐creation: students have been active partners in developing both the cases and the platform, and collaboration between the project team and the UBC Cloud Innovation Centre has shaped both technical and pedagogical decisions. Along the way, the team has navigated considerations around scope, usability, accessibility, and the practical limitations of generative AI in authentic learning contexts, resulting in a platform that is user-centered and responsive to authentic practice needs.

This interactive 15-minute presentation will share early pilot data, lessons learned from student‐led case development, and a practical roadmap for experimenting with virtual patients in participants’ own contexts. Attendees will engage in reflection and discussion to assess where similar approaches may hold value in their own settings and will be given an opportunity to use a platform of choice to draft their own virtual patients.

Participants will leave this session with key takeaways for sustaining clear project vision while embracing the fresh directions that come about through collaborative, cross-disciplinary development.

This paper presents the design and implementation of an AI literacy learning module for incoming Master of Physical Therapy students that seeks to cultivate moral agency rather than merely enforce compliance. Drawing on theories of self-regulated learning, desirable difficulty, cognitive apprenticeship, and professional identity formation, the module guides students in recognizing when AI use supports learning and when it risks displacing essential cognitive and ethical work. Through discipline-specific scenarios, everyday ethical analogies, and structured decision frameworks, the intervention situates AI use within students’ existing moral reasoning about responsibility and fairness.

We argue that effective educational responses to AI must move beyond prohibitive or instrumental models toward pedagogies that re-center effortful cognition as both an epistemic and ethical practice. By repositioning AI as a tool that should follow rather than precede human thinking, the project contributes to emerging conversations about sustaining meaningful learning in increasingly automated epistemic environments.

This session explores how the project evolved from a 5-minute experiment into a collaboration to create a community-specific learning tool. Attendees will learn to build their own custom web-based applications for learning, like a language soundboard, or game like Flappy Bird – https://richmccue.github.io/papertowel/ . Use free generative AI tools to turn creative ideas into functional web based software for learning without traditional programming skills. Security considerations will also be discussed.

In this session, a student panel will share their experiences using educational technology in their courses. The panelists will be asked which tools have helped them succeed, where technology has created barriers or confusion, and what kinds of support from instructors, edtech teams, and other resources have made a difference. Our goal is for ETUG participants to gain insight into students’ perceptions of the value and limitations of the technologies we adopt and their thoughts on improving how educational technology supports student learning.

Attendees will hear the story of the ups and downs of a well‐resourced, well‐intentioned collaboration and learn about what happens behind the scenes when designing sensitive, equity‐focused learning experiences in a large institution. The presentation will highlight key lessons learned, surprises along the way, and practical strategies for navigating organizational dynamics while staying true to the project’s values. Participants will leave with insights they can apply to their own cross‐departmental initiatives, especially those involving challenging or emotionally nuanced subject matter.

You start with registering your own domain, setting up hosting an online presence, and then, week by week, developing your own ‘publication of self’ along a variety of axes as the term progresses. Fast-moving development in publishing tools and technology provides a multitude of platforms, formats, and media to build out your personal cyberinfrastructures.

Each week, you’ll report on and share feedback with your peers in the tutorial sessions. At the end of the term, what you’ve created is entirely yours. You know your ‘self’ best, and in this course, you are only limited by your creativity.

I would like to discuss what has worked in this course and what hasn’t, and how the course has changed over time as technology and users’ interactions with it have evolved.