Generative AI raises complex issues for education. To meet this challenging moment at SF State, we are prioritizing campus relationships and community over top-down policy. We believe in shared governance, faculty-student partnerships, and community sensemaking around GenAI. Through this symposium, we seek to build community amongst CSU campuses by sharing three initiatives sponsored by our Center for Equity and Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CEETL) and creating space for an exchange of ideas and practices. The first initiative CEETL shares is the Discussion Circle, which brings faculty, staff and students together to explore GenAI with an ethical and critical lens. Discussion Circles have focused on equity issues in AI, academic integrity, AI detection tools, and student perspectives. The Discussion Circles meet faculty where they are, and work with faculty, students, and staff toward ground-up AI policies. Second, CEETL and Academic Technology partnered to create an AI Task Force, composed of faculty, students, and staff, to run needs assessments and vet new AI educational technologies. Third, we created a website that, like many across the country, provides AI resources and guidance, but also engages faculty to share AI teaching ideas, respond to resources, and discuss perspectives on emerging technologies.

Online courses in the CSU system today are shaped by the pandemic, generative AI and demographic shifts. These interconnected, yet distinct phenomena have induced drastic shifts in how we approach teaching and learning in theory and in practice. What are the necessary skills of online educators in a post-pandemic era? How can faculty incorporate AI while deterring dishonest uses? What online teaching practices appeal to and retain a diverse student body? And, at the heart of this presentation, what does this all mean for online learning and faculty development?

This presentation engages CSU campus members to consider these questions by sharing a newly-revamped asynchronous course for faculty on teaching online sponsored by SF State’s Center for Equity and Excellence in Teaching & Learning. The course, called the “Online Learning Lab,” was originally created during the pandemic to train faculty in the CSU QLT-framework. The revamped course builds from the QLT-framework to reflect critical approaches to digital pedagogy, humanizing and culturally responsive pedagogies, and scholarship and findings related to the phenomena discussed above. In addition to sharing the course, the presenter will engage participants to reflect on how we might stay astride the shifting landscape of online higher education.