You only get one chance to make a first impression. Even the most pedagogically sound course will frustrate learners if they get lost the moment they log in. This session bridges the gap between a built course and a ready course by combining strategic pre-launch user testing with a practical "5-Minute Audit." We will explore how treating your course launch like a software release can drastically improve user experience, accessibility, and learner engagement across any LMS.
- Teacher: Jess Bryant
- Teacher: Sheri Coughenour
Performing any major LMS migration is a considerable change. A journey filled with discovery, decisions, and the occasional unwanted surprise (hopefully well before the go live date). This presentation explores the discoveries and experiences found along the way. From good old change management to stakeholder communication, quality assurance considerations and the final D-Day launch. We will share practical learnings and some common migration hurdles. Attendees will leave with knowledge from the real-world experiences from 40+ OpenLMS migrations over the last 10 years.
- Teacher: Andrew Boag
Most AI conference sessions are built for institutions — full teams, IT departments, and LMS admins. This one is for the independent consultant, the small shop, and the solo practitioner. Darrel Tenter breaks down how he actually uses AI tools day-to-day to run a consulting practice: LMS audits, client proposals, program design, onboarding, light development, and the administrative overhead that can eat independent operators alive. The session covers which tools deliver genuine ROI, how AI is reshaping the economics of independent EdTech work, and what guardrails matter when your name is on every deliverable.
- Teacher: Darrel Tenter
Perhaps you’ve seen the ads: AI-powered tools that promise to find citations supporting “what students already know” so they can do their “research” faster. Is this the next evolution of modern writing and research? Or is it the result of a fundamental misunderstanding about what research is? In this breakout session, we will reframe undergraduate research as a process of discovery and exploration, not the validation of preexisting ideas. Moving beyond nostalgia for the “bad old days,” we will focus on assignment design, including a year-long faculty collaboration that attempted to keep intermediate writing students “in the loop” through video checkpoints. Along the way, we will consider how fair grading, implicit skill expectations, and timing interact with student engagement and the likelihood of AI use. We will also examine text density and the implications of students already using AI to look up, filter, and prioritize information. I will argue that we must be more explicit about our purposes in assigning research and will share scaffolding strategies and micro-assignments aligned with different learning goals.
- Teacher: Rachel Martin
As the use of AI content generation tools accelerate, we risk automating exclusion by overlooking accessibility. This session explores the collision of AI and accessibility, focusing on the wins, woes, and why the Human-in-the-Middle (HITM) is essential. You will learn to act as the bridge, refining AI-generated content to ensure it meets accessibility guidelines before it ever reaches a learner’s screen.
- Teacher: Carli Cockrell