What if you could transform passive learning materials into interactive, engaging experiences that captivate learners and bring content to life? Let’s reimagine teaching, learning, and collaboration through the power of H5P. Together, we’ll explore how H5P was strategically integrated as a professional development (PD) opportunity for faculty and staff, and its evolution towards becoming available to all faculty and staff across the University of Hawaiʻi (UH) system of seven community colleges and 3 universities.

By the end of this session, participants will:

1. Discover the capabilities,benefits, and possibilities of H5P for creating engaging, interactive content.
2. Explore the growth and evolution of H5P at UH, including professional development opportunities, system-wide collaborations, scale-up and expansions.
3. Gain hands-on experience with H5P through live activities and examples of its integration into real-world courses.
4. Obtain free resources to learn, create, and engage with H5P.

Join this session for some creative ideas to enhance teaching and the learner experience and get hands-on with some H5P fun! Plus, gain insights on a unique PD model that not only motivates participants to actively use H5P, but also evaluates learners for iterative improvement, fosters collaborations across disciplines, contributes to an open-repository of resources, and so much more.

Whether you’re looking to spice up your teaching or explore the possibilities for educational technology integration, this is your chance to dive in. Bring your curiosity and open-minds, and let’s reimagine learning, TOGETHER!

Emerging technologies and virtual reality are becoming more common place in libraries and beyond. This is largely a reflection of the changing educational landscape. The presenter will discuss a student and librarian led research initiative at a four-year public university. Inspired by projects such as “Back Up Ukraine”, the librarian sought to explore tools and technologies that could be utilized in preserving archival collections and making them more accessible. The project centered on creating an interactive virtual archive. By 3-d scanning objects from the library archives and creating an immersive, interactive experience through virtual reality, the team created new channels for users to engage with these historical artifacts. Research participants in this project explored how emerging technologies, and virtual reality can foster empathy and improve contextual understanding around library collections. One of the takeaways from this session will include an introduction to free or low-cost tools that can be leveraged for 3-d modeling. Additionally, attendees will strategize ways in which virtual reality can improve accessibility to library resources to increase student engagement. This project not only fostered research initiatives, but also created strong partnerships between librarians and students through technological experimentation. Explore lessons learned in project management, technical development, preservation, accessibility and engagement through this three-year project. How might these technologies inspire creative endeavors at your own institution? Attendees will be invited to engage in an interactive discussion while brainstorming how they could leverage emerging technologies to enhance student engagement at their own organizations.

This presentation examines how participatory culture, a concept popularized by Henry Jenkins (2009), can be used as an effective educational tool for fostering creativity, using Disney's Zootopia (Moore Howard & Bush 2016) as a case study. Zootopia, a widely acclaimed animated film, serves as a powerful platform for exploring participatory culture in educational settings. The participatory culture active engagement, collaborative creation, and community-driven content sharing.

In this study, a classroom activity inspired by participatory culture invited students to act as creators of Zootopia 2, challenging them to reconstruct the story while incorporating two aspects of American culture. Additional activities included discovering Easter eggs within the original film and reflecting on societal biases through creative writing. These activities stimulated students' imagination and storytelling skills while promoting critical thinking about societal themes like prejudice and diversity.

This presentation highlights the potential of integrating participatory culture into teaching practices, offering practical strategies to transform passive learning into an interactive, creative process. The presentation will show bridging popular media and educational innovation, and how educators provide engaging learning experiences for students’ creative and analytical abilities.

Last year, I presented on how generative AI can be leveraged to foster student learning in online environments. Specifically, I introduced the concept of using generative AI as a tutor to support students’ understanding. This session focused on a general overview of how AI can enhance education. Drawing on my experience teaching Japanese online since 1999, I highlighted how AI tools can improve asynchronous learning in particular.

This year, I aim to build upon this topic by focusing on a more specific and practical application: the creation of generative AI prompts designed to encourage students’ critical thinking in a way similar to human tutoring. These carefully designed prompts do not provide direct answers to students. Instead, they offer clues, hints, and guidance to help learners arrive at the correct answers themselves—just as a skilled human tutor would.

My prompts are specifically tailored for language learning, particularly for addressing the challenges faced by learners of Japanese. For example, understanding the correct usage of Japanese particles (which are somewhat analogous to English prepositions) can be difficult for many students. The prompts I have developed guide students through this learning process without simply giving away the answer. Instead, the prompts provide explanations, ask guiding questions, and encourage reflection. Once students arrive at the correct answer, the system offers positive feedback to celebrate their achievement.

In this session, I will demonstrate these prompts in action. Although the topic is Japanese language learning, I recognize that most participants may not be familiar with Japanese. Therefore, I will use examples based on English prepositions to illustrate how the prompts function. Specifically, I will showcase how the process of providing clues, hints, and suggestions can facilitate deeper learning.

One of the most significant features of movies is their ability to provide access to authentic and dynamic conversations and interactions in a second language. Many researchers have looked into working with movies in ESL classes, especially in Korea. However, if learners perceive movies just as a tool only for language learning, they may become less active, focusing too much on the linguistic aspects rather than the story. Thus, before explicitly teaching language, the need to allow learners to actively participate in conversations and to connect the story to themselves has been raised. This study aims to analyze the impact of Narrative Transportation—the process of immersing oneself in a narrative structure, engaging emotionally, and connecting it to personal experiences—on second language acquisition. Specifically, it investigated how this process enhanced learners’ ability to memorize and retain expressions in long-term memory and how it influenced their perspectives on language learning (Mackey & Sachs, 2012). The movie Coco (Disney, 2017) was chosen as the material for this research, with four Korean English education graduate students participating in this case study in six weekly sessions. In this presentation, the presenter will show as follows. 1) How six selected scenes illustrate the film's theme and character relationships, 2) The process of finding and analyzing emotional vocabulary and expressions, 3) Learners connected them to personal experiences through reports, 4) How story maps presented for each scene enhanced learners' understanding of narrative flow and emotional shifts. Finally, weekly reports and a final test, including interviews, revealed positive effects on language retention and insights into second language acquisition.

A continuation of last year’s TCC session on Merrill’s First Principles of Instruction (FPI), this workshop will focus on using FPI and artificial intelligence (A.I.) to redesign a course or professional development session. You will learn to implement best practices from FPI and leave with useful tips and tricks to use A.I. to change your own instruction.  This is a workshop held in two parts.

Before arriving, think of a course, workshop, or training session that you want to change from topic-centered to task-centered. In the first part of the workshop, participants will examine their own courses or professional development sessions and compare them to Merrill's First Principles of Instructions (FPI).  Participants will then brainstorm possible strategies to change their courses or sessions from topic-centered to task-centered.

In the second part, participants will design a Hierarchical Task Analysis (HTA), creating a series of subtasks that lead up to the main tasks they want their own learners or trainees to master.  However, in this iteration of the workshop, participants will use ChatGPT and draw.io to assist with composing their HTA.  In the end, participants will leave with a roadmap for redesigning their course or professional development session. If time permits, the presenters will share a preview of their research in A.I. and course design, which they plan to present at the AECT conference in October 2025.

It is no surprise that television commercials target certain demographics. Home improvement stores feature rugged-looking spokespersons who are clearly excited about remodeling their kitchens, and the people in Medicare supplement commercials look, act, and mention concerns one would expect of someone who might purchase such a plan. Family dynamics are featured in other commercials, with attention paid to a variety of household combinations. Likewise, online course development may begin with developing "personas" to cultivate empathy in the development team and ultimately help students meet their educational and career goals. These may take into consideration race and ethnicity, age, gender identity, military affiliation, economic backgrounds, family situations, previous college experience, and other factors for the current student population expected to enroll in a course. Far too often, however, these profiles are left in the development process. Personas introduced into the classroom itself can help students concentrate, connect to the topics better, and become more involved in their learning. In this session, Q methodology, learner archetypes, delivery possibilities, and other concepts such as how AI generation might be used and where it should not will be explored to help bring a "human touch" to delivering course content through the use of personas.

While 26% of U.S. college students take classes exclusively online (Hamilton, 2024), and 18.7% of college students identify as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer or Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, or Two-Spirit (LGBTQIA2S+) (AAU, 2020) little is known about the specific challenges that online LGBTQIA2S+ students face and how the online environment itself impacts them, nor what steps can be taken to improve the environment for these students. LGBTQIA2S+ students struggle disproportionately with the residual impact of prior trauma, and their sense of belonging and ability to make meaningful connections with classmates and faculty may be hindered. They also have higher rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide ideation than their non-LBGTQIA2S+ counterparts (Brant & Willox, 2020).

To learn more about instructor attitudes towards teaching LGBTQIA2S+ students as well as the lived experiences of these students, a seven-member research team has been conducting a mixed-methods longitudinal study of faculty and students at a major online university. Stage 1, analyzing online faculty attitudes towards LGBTQIA2S+ students, was completed in November, 2024. Stage 2, learning about the lived experiences of LGBTQIA2S+ college students in the online learning environment, is ongoing. This presentation will share the results from stage 1 of the study and preliminary findings from stage 2. In addition to sharing the findings, strategies for supporting LGBTQIA2S+ will be discussed.

The advent of large language models (LLMs) and AI tools presents a groundbreaking opportunity to transform teaching methodologies in today’s classrooms. This presentation will explore how educators can effectively leverage LLMs and various AI technologies to enhance their instructional practices, promote student engagement, and support differentiated learning.

Participants will gain insights into practical applications of LLMs, such as generating personalized learning materials, facilitating interactive discussions, and providing instant feedback on student writing. We will also examine AI-driven tools that assist in curriculum design, lesson planning, and assessment, allowing educators to streamline their workflows and focus more on student interaction.

Through real-world case studies of instructors successfully integrating AI into their teaching, attendees will discover innovative strategies to utilize these technologies in their own classrooms. This session will empower educators to harness the capabilities of LLMs and AI tools to create more dynamic and responsive learning environments.

Conference participants will leave with actionable techniques to incorporate AI into their teaching practices, fostering a more personalized and engaging educational experience. By embracing these technologies, educators can better address diverse student needs and enhance learning outcomes. Join us to explore the potential of LLMs and AI in education, and learn how to elevate your teaching methodologies for the future.