Upper Peninsula Teaching & Learning Conference - 2026

As colleges and universities are held more accountable to gainful employment metrics, many institutions are increasing their focus on career exploration and essential skills development. In More Essential Than Ever: Community College Pathways to Educational and Career Success, Davis Jenkins, et al. make a compelling case for intentional educational pathways that provide students with the tools, skills, knowledge, and career planning for successful, living-wage careers. As a seasoned writing instructor and college administrator, I wanted to experiment with embedding these skills in a general education course to align with our college reform goals. I practiced "pedagogical adaptability" and revamped the final research and persuasion project in my English 101 class to focus on career exploration (Giordano et al.). Students learned about themselves and their chosen career while practicing key rhetorical and information literacy skills through assignments. This assignment proved to be meaningful for students and supported our college's key goals around post-graduation student success. In this presentation, I will share relevant research, front-line insights, and a template for how I structured this project.  
 
Giordano, Joanne Baird, et al. Reaching All Writers: A Pedagogical Guide for Evolving College Writing Classrooms. University Press of Colorado, 2024.  
 
Jenkins, Davis, et al. More Essential Than Ever: Community College Pathways to Educational and Career Success. Harvard Education Press, 2025. 
 

How can you support your students as they navigate today’s evolving, chaotic, information ecosystem? Part of an instructor’s role is to introduce students to the disciplinary literature and conversations in their field. As the breadth of scholarly publications, tools, and resources grows, this becomes increasingly challenging. Additionally, students are entering the classroom familiar with generative AI research tools that interact with traditional resources in new and unexpected ways. In short—chaos barely begins to cover it! 


Given all of this, it’s important not to focus solely on teaching students specific tools that will rapidly change. Librarians at Michigan Tech have a stated goal to support students as they become well-rounded seekers, users, and creators of information who can go beyond tools to ask critical questions of information sources, including generative AI. In this session, learn how to incorporate those skills into your assignments and learning outcomes, helping students succeed in the course and future challenges they will undoubtedly face. 
In this session librarians will share best practices, lead a discussion about collaboration, and introduce brief activities that will help you rethink your own assignment outcomes. As academic librarians, our work is heavily informed by the Association for College and Research Libraries’ Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, so participants can also expect a brief primer on this excellent resource as part of the session!

As artificial intelligence becomes an integral part of the higher education landscape, the focus often shifts to student usage. However, for faculty, the most significant potential of Generative AI lies in its ability to reduce administrative overhead and accelerate course design. This hands-on workshop introduces participants to Gemini Gems, customizable AI Personas within the Google Workspace ecosystem that act as private, subject-matter experts.
Unlike standard chatbots, "Gems" allow faculty to anchor AI responses in their own professional materials, such as syllabi, lecture notes, or research papers. In this session, we will demystify the process of "programming" an AI without code. Using the "OER Content Creator" as our primary case study, we will demonstrate how faculty can transform dense academic texts into student-friendly study guides, summaries, and retrieval-practice questions in seconds.
Special attention will be paid to data privacy and institutional security. We will explore "student-data-free" workflows, ensuring that faculty can leverage AI power while maintaining strict boundaries around student IP and FERPA-sensitive information.
What to Expect: Participants should bring a laptop and a digital sample of their own teaching materials (e.g., a PDF article or lecture notes). Through a live demonstration of Gemini’s "Magic Wand" feature, attendees will see how a rough idea is transformed into a sophisticated system prompt. By the end of this 50-minute session, every participant will have designed and saved the first draft of their own custom Gem, ready for immediate use in their teaching or research workflow.

Good course design starts with one clear question: what must students actually be able to do? Competency-based education is built on that question. When the answer is clear, something else happens too: students leave with language for what they learned, not just a grade that summarizes it.

This session offers a beginner-friendly introduction to CBE: what it is, what it is not, and what it actually requires of a course. New to CBE? Good. This session starts from the beginning.

Using real examples from occupational and technical disciplines, we will look at three questions CBE forces faculty to answer: What must students actually be able to do? What would count as real evidence that they can do it? And how do you clearly define success so that students can name what they have learned?

Attendees will leave with a practical framework they can apply to their own courses and a clearer picture of what a CBE-informed course redesign actually involves.

NMU faculty interested in going further are invited to learn about the summer CBE Workshop Series, launching this summer through the NMU Evergreen initiative.

Geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T) is a system that uses symbols on engineering drawings to communicate a design intent, tolerances, and dimensions. GD&T has many complex concepts that are difficult to understand. Although GD&T is an essential skill for students seeking a career in manufacturing and engineering, many college graduates enter the workforce without a strong conceptual understanding of its principles. This study investigates whether incorporating hands-on physical manipulatives into GD&T instruction elevates student learning outcomes compared to traditional lecture-based instruction. The study will be conducted by dividing engineering students into a control group and a treatment group. The control group will receive only lecture instruction, while the treatment group will be given both hands-on activities to demonstrate the part inspection process for GD&T and lecture instruction. Both groups will be given a pre-test, post-test, and exit survey to measure changes in conceptual understanding and student perceptions of learning. The results from this study will be presented as a comparison of the control and treatment groups, and these findings may provide evidence-based guidance for improving instructional strategies in engineering and manufacturing course design.

Background/Introduction: As nurse practitioner (NP) education increasingly shifts to hybrid and online models, there is a growing need to bridge theoretical learning with hands-on clinical skills and experience. Students often lack in-person opportunities to build procedural confidence before clinical rotations.
Purpose: The objective of this project was to design and implement an immersive, in-person, faculty-led skills camp to improve NP students’ readiness for clinical practice through structured, hands-on skill development and faculty feedback.
Procedures: Faculty at Northern Michigan University developed a four-day in-person clinical skills camp for NP students prior to the start of their clinical rotations. Students engaged in hands-on practice of essential procedures, including abscess drainage, joint injections, removal of foreign bodies from the eyes and ears, dermatologic procedures, and suturing. Clinical Skills USA facilitated specialized training in pelvic and prostate examinations. Students evaluated the camp using a post-event Likert-scale survey and open-ended feedback.
Results: Student feedback demonstrated high satisfaction. Most presenters were rated “Agree” or “Strongly Agree” on knowledge, organization, engagement, and value. Open-ended responses highlighted hands-on practice, particularly suturing, as the most beneficial aspect. A key recommendation was to extend the camp duration. 
Limitations: No pre- and post-evaluations were conducted, limiting the ability to measure objective improvements in skill or confidence. Student feedback was based on a post-camp survey that relied on self-reports and may be subject to bias. Additionally, students had to travel and arrange their own accommodations, which may limit participation or create inequities. Time constraints also limited the number of practice opportunities for certain procedures. 
Conclusions/Implications for Practice: The skills camp effectively addressed gaps in clinical preparedness by offering early exposure to procedures in a supportive, in-person learning environment. Faculty-led immersive training is an impactful intervention for hybrid NP programs seeking to better prepare students for clinical rotations.

Second Life. Wikis. Blogs. Flip video cameras. Interactive DVD courseware.


If you've been around higher ed for the last 10 or 15 years, those are just a few of the educational technology tools that you've seen spike in popularity, then fall into niche usage or go away entirely.  Will AI be the next "revolutionary" technology to have a few shining moments of glory before fading into ed tech history? Those of us who aren't huge fans of AI might hope so . . . but we'd be disappointed.  


In this interactive session, the presenter, a veteran instructional technology advocate and somewhat reluctant AI user, will lead a discussion on why AI is here to stay, and why even non-enthusiasts should carefully consider how it may fit into their teaching and learning processes. Participants will receive worksheets and tools to assist with working through that determination and for communicating AI guidelines to students. You probably won't leave with a new love for AI, but our students don't need AI evangelism. They do need guidance, and it is our responsibility to provide it.