Schedule

Faculty mentorship is often cited as essential to teaching excellence, yet few campuses have a structured plan for building a teaching-focused mentorship program from the ground up. This hands-on workshop gives participants a practical framework for designing one at their institution, college, or department.

After a brief opening on core design decisions, program models, and pitfalls to avoid, participants will spend most of the session in guided work time. They will draft the key components of a mentorship program tailored to their own context: purpose and goals, structure, participant selection and matching, mentor preparation, tools that keep the relationship non-evaluative, and a simple plan for evaluation.

Real-world lessons from Virginia Tech’s New Faculty Mentoring Program will ground the framework in practice. Participants will leave with a working draft and one clear next step for bringing a teaching-focused mentorship program to life on their own campus.

Facilitator: Wendy Glass, Adjunct Professor of Practice

In this hands-on pre-conference workshop, we'll look at what changes when we move from using AI as a chatbot to using an agentic workflow system, one that runs on standing projects and context documents that grow with your work. Before building anything, we'll consider the decisions anyone working with agentic systems should make from the start: what the collaboration with the model should look like, how you want to relate to the tool, and how to protect your own cognitive effort. You'll sketch those guardrails for yourself, then design a first workflow drawn from your own teaching, research, or administrative life, mapping it step by step. We'll close with a tour of what a mature system can become: a dashboard that sequences several workflows, and an attribution convention that keeps your ideas distinguishable from the machine's. I'll demonstrate throughout in Claude Cowork, but the principles carry over to other agentic systems such as ChatGPT Work and Gemini Spark. A Cowork account (Claude Pro or higher) is useful but not required; we will do most of our own design work on paper and in conversation with each other. You'll leave with your guardrails sketched, a first workflow ready to build, inspiration for larger workflow systems, and a clearer sense of what's safe to hand off and what should stay yours for the intellectual work that most matters to you.

Facilitator: Ivonne Wallace Fuentes, Assistant Director of Professional Development

What if your students could work alongside peers across the world without leaving campus? This workshop introduces Virtual Global Collaboration (VGC) and Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL), strategies that bring global experiences directly into your courses.

At Virginia Tech, VGC connects students with peers at partner institutions worldwide through online activities, shared projects, and cross-cultural dialogue, all within an existing course. COIL, a common VGC approach, pairs courses at different institutions for structured, technology-enabled collaboration. In any discipline, these strategies help students build intercultural communication and collaboration skills that matter well beyond the classroom.

Whether you want to add global learning to your own courses or start a virtual global learning initiative at your institution, this session is for you. No background in international education is required.

Facilitators: Tiffany Shoop, Director of Special Programs, Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning; Theresa Johansson, Director, Global Education Office; Larry Cox II, Senior Instructional Designer, Technology-Enhanced Learning and Online Strategies; Emily Sarver, Stonie Barker Professor, Graduate Program Director; Kathy Miller Perkins, Professor of Practice, Career Coach