Beyond Textbooks
Flamenco Fire: Igniting Passion for Language and Cultural Immersion Through VR and Virtual Escape Rooms
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Elena Mangione, Tatiana Botero
This paper describes a collaborative, multi-platform, flamenco-themed escape room combining virtual reality (VR) and a learning management system (Canvas) to engage students with this culturally significant art form. The escape room incorporates key flamenco elements—compás, palos, instruments, regions, artists, dance, and cantes—using authentic materials like readings, videos, interviews, and interactive puzzles. Initially envisioned as a video-game-inspired project, it evolved into a multi-chamber experience. The Canvas component offers a self-paced, guided learning experience, accessible individually or in groups, remotely or in person. The VR component provides a four-task collaborative escape room for groups of four, completed using VR headsets and requiring target language negotiation. The design fosters language development, communication skills, negotiation, fluency, higher-order thinking, and problem-solving. The immersive, multi-modal experience provides visual and audio richness, sparking curiosity and offering resources for further exploration. Prioritizing enjoyment and engagement, the project team, with Notre Dame’s academic media and XR developers, navigated the challenges of creating an engaging, visually compelling, and educationally rigorous experience. Initial student feedback is overwhelmingly positive, demonstrating success in educational outcomes and user engagement. This session will share the creation and refinement process, discuss lessons learned and initial findings, and outline the potential of immersive technologies in language and cultural instruction. We also highlight the project’s inclusion in Open Educational Resources, making it accessible for the broader academic community.
Open Educational Resources Beyond Textbooks: Transforming Education, Empowering Faculty, Engaging Students - Flamenco Case Study
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tatiana Botero, Elena Mangione
This paper explores the multifaceted benefits of developing and utilizing OER (Open Educational Resources) instructor-created course materials, focusing on advantages for students, faculty, and programs. For students, this approach translates to low-cost, highly accessible, and adaptable learning resources, delivered by instructors with intimate knowledge of the content and a vested interest in its quality. From a faculty perspective, creating their own materials offers unparalleled flexibility and customization, streamlines course updates, and fosters collaborative content creation opportunities, both within Notre Dame and with partner institutions. This model also provides a vehicle for sharing research, authorship opportunities, and a return on investments in faculty development. We highlight a current project: a multi-platform XR/VR, flamenco-themed, collaborative escape room as an example. Furthermore, it creates opportunities to mentor graduate students and leverages the numerous benefits of inter-institutional collaboration. At the program level, instructor-created materials can be tailored precisely to program goals and objectives, integrating individual instructor strengths and experiences. Critically, this approach facilitates continuous curriculum improvement and collaborative curriculum design, ensuring programs remain dynamic and responsive to evolving needs. This study details these advantages and discuss strategies for supporting faculty in the development and implementation of high-quality, instructor-created course resources.
GenAI-by-Design Framework: Human-Centered AI Integration for Feedback and Learning in Higher Education View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Anastasia-Olga (Olnancy) Tzirides, Duane Searsmith, Mary Kalantzis, William Cope, Gabriela C. Zapata
As generative AI (GenAI) tools become increasingly embedded in educational environments, pressing questions emerge around how to integrate them responsibly, balancing innovation with transparency, student agency, and ethical oversight. This paper focuses on the GenAI-by-Design framework, a pedagogical orientation grounded in Human-Centered AI (HCAI) principles and developed through a multi-year, mixed-methods research program examining the use of calibrated GenAI tools in formative feedback across graduate-level education programs in the U.S. Rooted in multiliteracies pedagogy and UNESCO’s AI Competency Framework for Students, this framework positions GenAI not as a substitute for human judgment, but as a dialogic, ethically scaffolded component within a broader feedback ecology. Over multiple iterations of instructional implementation, findings reveal a shift in student perceptions, from initial skepticism to collaborative engagement, as GenAI tools were refined using discipline-specific corpora and integrated alongside peer and instructor feedback. This iterative body of work demonstrates how intentional HCAI-informed design and pedagogy can cultivate AI literacy, support equitable learning experiences, and uphold human values within technologically mediated education. By centering ethical integration and learner agency, GenAI-by-Design contributes to critical conversations on AI-augmented learning, offering a structured yet flexible pathway for embedding generative technologies into higher education without compromising trust, transparency, or academic integrity.
