COLTT 2024 Program

Description: The Digital Accessibility Office (DAO) frames digital accessibility as "All people should have the opportunity to access the same information and services in the digital environment without facing undue barriers or burdens." To enhance awareness and create a more inclusive digital environment at CU Boulder, the DAO will discuss platform-agnostic accessibility fundamentals that you can implement into your digital content today! By the end of this session, attendees will better understand digital accessibility and how to proactively make their digital content more accessible.

Description: In part 2 of the Content Accessibility Workshop, attendees will put their learning into practice. The Digital Accessibility Office (DAO) will guide participants as they apply accessible content practices to make an inaccessible Word document accessible. The DAO will also share how to save an accessible Word document as an accessible PDF. Bring a laptop and your questions! Please note: Attendance at part 1 of Content Accessibility Workshop is strongly recommended to participate in part 2 of the workshop.

Description: Are you looking to leverage AI in ways that move beyond design efficiencies and into a true transformation of the learning experience? Then join us for a session grounded in a practical approach to student-driven learning and UDL prinicples that provides structure and clarity for how, when, and where AI can be utilized to empower learners and personalize their education.

Description: Build or Buy is an old school game where you create your ideal online program. MA in Haiku? Dog Studies? Interpretive dance? Sure. You'll make choices for your program, from staffing to IT to partnering with a vendor or OPM, and spend your budget accordingly. Opportunity cards drawn each round will affect each choice differently, and you're off on the exciting journey that is online degrees! With years of online experience informing these "opportunities", you'll laugh, learn, and wonder how we all have done it! It's a game, of course there are winners and prizes!!

Description: As AI increasingly intersects with writing studies, educators face the imperative of equipping students with both the skills to utilize AI tools effectively and the ethical awareness to navigate this evolving landscape responsibly. This interactive presentation explores the integration of AI into writing pedagogy, emphasizing transparency and ethics as foundational pillars for guiding students in harnessing AI's potential while mitigating its risks. Attendees will gain insights into fostering a culture of transparency, empowering students to interrogate AI systems, understand their capabilities and limitations, and make informed decisions about their use in writing processes.

Description: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an exciting new tool in the realm of education, prompting the question, can it be used for Open Educational Resources (OER)? This presentation will cover the basics of what these concepts are and how they intersect, as well as how copyright laws affect these interactions. Current court cases will be discussed with an eye on how they could alter these intersections. Bring your questions and ideas for a robust discussion!

Description: Research abounds on the history of higher education. Anyone can look up teaching trends and find an abundance of information. But not all faculty members can look back on their own pedagogical journeys over five decades. How has the classroom changed, and more particularly, how has the teaching and learning relationship between students and faculty evolved? What has endured, what should we hold onto, what should we discard, and what have we learned? This session looks not only at research on university-level teaching, but it also recounts the first-hand journey of one very long-time faculty member in the University of Colorado system--with an eye toward lessons learned for the future.

Description: As various AI technologies continue to become integrated within education, it is challenging to develop syllabus policies that address its responsible use. However, crafting effective policies is crucial to promoting academic integrity, preventing misconduct and creating a supportive learning environment. This session offers strategies for crafting syllabus policies that foster responsible AI use. Participants will engage in discussions and activities to critically assess or develop policies which translate appropriate limits on generative technologies in their classrooms to students, empowering both students and instructors to feel confident about learning in a world which includes AI.

Description: Our session will involve a live interactive demonstration of how this can change the engagement in the classroom. We will use Mentimeter (and highlight other software that does similar) to engage participant skills in the classroom and feelings about their facilitation skills. We will demonstrate skills and teaching techniques as outlined in the SIOP (Sheltered Instruction Observational Protocols) to provide equity in engagement and foster an environment of curiosity. Participants will be asked to engage with the Mentimeter along with the presentation. Co-presenters are student workers who will help role play scenarios one might encounter and how to use the technology, the SIOP skills, and both in tandem to address them.

Description: Many classes require students to acquire large volumes of factual knowledge while also applying that knowledge to learning difficult concepts. This can lead students to confounding memorization with understanding. In this session, I will present two game-based strategies I have used in my Anatomy and Physiology classes to encourage students to apply their knowledge of terminology to making conceptual connections: “Codenames” and “Escape Rooms”. These activities leverage the memorization process to scaffold the development of discipline specific critical thinking skills and can be adapted for both virtual and physical classrooms.

Description: Are you ready to take your old-school formative assessment methods into the future? Check out the online platform MyOpenMath.com. This free, opensource platform can be used to engage students in class through the use of the LivePoll feature, an updated and expanded rendition of the "clicker" student response system. The platform also provides students with robust practice outside of class with online, auto-graded homework. Myopenmath has a dedicated community of educators who have made vast banks of questions to choose from, or you can utilize the powerful authoring platform to write your own questions.