LDDI Summer Institute

Accessibility Panel Discussion

Hazel Ryan-Sheehan (facilitator), AC Deger, Jody Billingsley, Dayna McCracken, Marcus Lau

A candid conversation on accessibility and inclusion as shared responsibilities across higher education. Panelists reflected on everyday experiences, common misconceptions, and what true belonging looks like in practice, leaving participants with practical actions to take starting tomorrow.

Accessibility Lightning Talks

Dr. Joanna Cannon, Marcus Lau, Fatemeh (Emma) Arian Nejad & Abby Dalmacio, Nathalie Adriana Funes Serna & Farah Sadek, Mariam Nasir

Fast-paced presentations offering one key accessibility idea or concrete practice you can put to use right away. Topics included captioning, inclusive syllabus design, UDL for early childhood education, and more. Participants came away with practical, actionable tools for making their teaching and work more accessible.

Presentation Slides

• Benefits of Using Captions Everyday, by Dr. Joanna Cannon [PDF]
• Inclusive Syllabi: One Thoughtful Change That Supports All Learners, by Marcus Lau [PDF]
• UDL Fellows - ECED 406, by Fatemeh (Emma) Arian Nejad & Abby Dalmacio [PDF] 
• Embedding Student Feedback in Course Design, by Nathalie Adriana Funes Serna & Farah Sadek [PDF] 

Accessible and Inclusive Content Design for Multilingual Students

Dr. Nasrin Kowkabi & Dr. Alison Li

This presentation shared principles and strategies for designing accessible and inclusive online learning resources that support multilingual students' success. Drawing on a recent collaboration, Dr. Kowkabi and Dr. Li showcased examples of online materials developed to help new students navigate academic life. They reflected on how accessibility and inclusion informed their content design decisions and discussed considerations for creating equitable digital learning environments for multilingual learners.

Accessible Canvas Design

Dr. Terry Taylor

Co-created with input from UBC Rural and Remote Education (RRED) teacher candidates, EPSE 317 colleagues, and support from LDDI, the latest course design template for Rural and Remote Education aimed to make Canvas more accessible for students. Consistent and responsive, the design template embeds POUR and EDID principles, making it easier to use for students and instructors. Dr. Taylor shared the template and student responses to it, and invited participants to consider their own learning design and resources through the lens of accessibility, inclusion, and equity.

Presentation Slides

• Accessible Canvas Design, by Dr. Terry Taylor [PDF]

Indigenous Pathways Through Social and Emotional Learning: Designing an Online Course Through a Four Directions Framework

Dr. Johanna Sam, Ellen Nielsen & Ashley Bueckert

This session shared the redesign of EPSE 588: Indigenous Pathways Through Social and Emotional Learning, a graduate course in UBC's Faculty of Education for students working across education, healthcare, and community settings. Guided by a Four Directions framework (mind, heart, body, and spirit), the curriculum team reimagined the course and Canvas learning environment to support relational, experiential, and accessible online learning grounded in Indigenous ways of knowing and being. Through a guided walkthrough of one course module, Dr. Sam, Ellen and Ashley shared their design process, key pedagogical decisions, and lessons learned. They also discussed the opportunities and challenges of translating Indigenous pedagogies into online learning spaces, including moments of accessibility friction and the ongoing work of balancing relational learning, digital design, and universal design for learning.

Beyond Functional Competence: Designing Critical AI Literacy for Graduate Researchers

Dr. Leah Macfadyen

In this session, Dr. Macfadyen took the position that although AI literacy is an urgent educational priority, it should not be reduced it to a checklist of technical competencies. Instead, she framed it as a complex social, epistemic, and ethical practice. Graduate and professional learners are an underserved population in AI literacy education, and Dr. Macfadyen shared design details of an interdisciplinary AI literacy course at UBC that foregrounds metacognitive awareness and disciplinary ethics. This 90-minute participatory workshop included small group discussions to unpack what "critical AI literacy” might means across disciplines, as well as whole-group conversation to collaboratively envision how we might best prepare emerging scholars for an AI-entangled future.

Presentation Slides

• Beyond Functional Competence: Designing Critical AI Literacy for Graduate Researchers, by Dr. Leah Macfadyen [PDF]

The (un)Slop Game: Designing the Conditions for Meaningful Outputs

Dr. Rachel Horst

This session introduced creative architecture: the practice of designing the conditions through which meaning is made, with and without AI. Through a short talk and a hands-on card game, participants became agents in a human-run multi-agent system. Together, they first manufactured slop from a shared prompt, then attempted to resist it, and finally redesigned the system itself. Along the way, the session explored why fluent, fungible “slop” is so easy for LLMs and other AI systems to produce, why it is so difficult to prevent through computational means alone, and what becomes possible when we shift our attention away from outputs alone and toward designing the conditions through which outputs and meaning might emerge differently.

Presentation Slides and Resources

• The (un)Slop Game, by Dr. Rachel Horst [PDF]
• Play the (un)Slop Game
• Access the (un)Slop Game on GitHub

Where Does AI Think It Lives?

Manisha Tripathy

This workshop explored two experimental provocations using AI image generation to explore unexpected questions: Where does AI think it lives, and what language does it speak and stumbles in? Through playful prompting experiments, Manisha presented two provocations.

Presentation Slides

• Where Does AI Think It Lives?, by Manisha Tripathy [PDF]

Panel Discussion - AI in Higher Education: Teaching, and Learning

Dr. Kedrick James (facilitator), Dr. Ron Darvin, Dr. Ramon Lawrence, Dr. Peter Arthur

As artificial intelligence reshapes how students learn and how educators teach, higher education faces new opportunities and challenges. This panel brought together UBC faculty members with expertise in artificial intelligence to explore how AI tools are transforming teaching and learning.