Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States •
$1,501 - $5,000
About
I’m Dr. Susan Ray, an Associate Professor of English at Delaware County Community College, and I’ve had the privilege of spending the past two decades teaching composition and literature to college students. My work has always centered on helping students understand and confidently engage with the forces shaping their lives. This philosophy has led me into the realm of artificial intelligence, where I don’t see AI as a shortcut or a threat to be managed, but rather a literacy to be developed. In my classrooms, this means designing process-based assignments, using AI transparency journals, and making the beautiful, messy process of student learning visible rather than hidden behind a final product. This work has expanded beyond my curriculum. I lead the grant-funded “Bridging the AI Gap” initiative at DCCC and serve as an AI Faculty Mentor for the AAC&U and an AI-Aware Faculty Fellow with W. W. Norton & Company. I’m also the author of “The Fourth Literacy,” published in What Education Becomes: Teaching and Learning in a Post-AI World (2026), where I argue that AI literacy now exists alongside reading, writing, and digital fluency as a foundational skill. I regularly lead professional development sessions that help administrators and faculty rethink assessment, academic integrity, and student learning in the AI era. These sessions focus on practical, equity-centered strategies: designing AI-integrated assignments, shifting from surveillance to transparency, and helping students develop the critical judgment needed to work with the tools now reshaping the workforce.
Higher Education in the Age of AI: Platforms, Policy, and Practice
AI has become one of the most contested topics in higher education, and for good reason. Rather than prescribing a single approach, this session offers a grounded overview of how today's AI tools work and the range of ways colleges are responding to questions of academic integrity, privacy, equity, and policy. We'll unpack how large language models generate text and briefly note how image, video, audio, and code tools differ. We'll also examine how emerging AI agents carry out multi-step tasks — including completing parts of online assessments — and what this means for academic integrity and course design. From there, we'll consider broader questions shaping institutional decision-making: hallucinations and bias, changing workforce expectations, and the rapid pace of change. Finally, we'll look at how institutions are responding to AI-related plagiarism, examine the benefits and limitations of AI detection tools, and discuss practical strategies for upholding academic integrity without overreliance on surveillance, including how some institutions are returning to in-person and oral assessments. We'll also look at examples of faculty integrating AI in ways that support learning goals. Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of the AI landscape, ideas for responding to integrity challenges, and a potential starting point for exploring it themselves.
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