Overview
The AI Exploration Zone is an interactive, hands-on experience at OLC Accelerate 2026 designed to help educators, instructional designers, administrators, and digital learning leaders explore the evolving role of artificial intelligence in teaching and learning.
Inspired by this year’s conference theme, “Illuminate the Future: Envisioning our Next Era of Digital Learning,” the AI Exploration Zone invites participants to move beyond simply seeing what AI tools can do. Instead, attendees will explore emerging possibilities while connecting those possibilities to their own teaching or work. Participants will leave with practical ideas they can continue developing after the conference.
This year’s experience is organized around a simple process:
Illuminate emerging possibilities in digital learning.
Envision how those possibilities might apply in your own context.
Apply what you discover through practical, hands-on experimentation.
We want to not only explore the possibilities of this technology, but also examine how it opens the door to new kinds of teaching and learning experiences that were not possible before. Whether you are new to generative AI or already using it in your work, the AI Exploration Zone gives you space to build confidence through hands-on exploration. The experience is designed to help you move from curiosity toward a clearer sense of how AI might be able to help shape the learning experiences you design.
What to Expect
When you enter the AI Exploration Zone, you will be invited to begin with your own context. What challenge are you trying to solve? What part of teaching, learning, or educational work do you want to improve? What are you curious about?
Participants will receive a Lab Notebook to guide their experience. The notebook will help you identify a goal, choose a zone to explore, record what you tried, and reflect on what you discovered. You might focus on student engagement, course design, accessibility and Universal Design for Learning, feedback, assessment, content creation, or another challenge from your own work.
The goal is not to master every tool in a single visit. Instead, the AI Exploration Zone is designed to help you run small, meaningful experiments. At each zone, you will encounter practical prompts and guided activities that help you create or revise something you could use in a course or within your classroom..
You will be encouraged to ask:
What did I create?
What worked well?
What surprised me?
What needs refinement?
What does this reveal about the future of learning?
What might I try next?
By the end of your visit, you will have moved beyond asking what AI can do and begun exploring what it makes possible. The experience is designed to illuminate forms of teaching and learning that may have been difficult to imagine before these tools became available.
Explore the Zones
The Experience Lab
What will learning feel like?
The Experience Lab places educators in the learner’s seat. Instead of beginning with course design, participants experience AI-augmented learning as students and consider how the experience changes their sense of what learning can feel like. Rather than evaluating a tool from a distance,we will be exploring how the learning experience shifts as we incorporate AI intentionality with attention to our learner’s needs.
Participants will choose a topic they have always wanted to understand (quantum physics, jazz harmony, bird migration, underwater basket weaving, origami mathematics, or another area of curiosity) and use AI to explore it in a way that feels responsive rather than a static resource. As we move through the experience, pay attention to how the interaction supports their curiosity and where the tool still falls short. This reflection helps participants think less about the novelty of AI and more about the conditions that make learning feel meaningful – as well as the limitations and opportunities ahead of us.
The goal is to help participants develop a felt sense of how AI may change the texture of learning itself. Rather than only asking how educators can use AI to create materials, this zone asks what it feels like when AI becomes part of our learning experiences. Participants leave with a clearer sense of how future learning environments might respond more directly to the needs of the learner.
Sample activity:
Become the student. Pick a topic you want to better understand and spend five minutes exploring it with an AI tutor or multimodal learning tool. Record what engaged you, what frustrated you, and what this experience reveals about the future of learner support.
Possible tools:
NotebookLM for audio overviews, ChatGPT or Claude voice mode for tutoring dialogue, Suno for memorable concept songs, ElevenLabs for narration, and Khanmigo.
Participants may leave with:
A clearer sense of how AI-supported learning feels from the student perspective, along with ideas for designing more responsive, engaging, and multimodal learning experiences.
The Educator’s Makerspace
What will educators do differently?
The Educator’s Makerspace focuses on the changing shape of teaching, design and educational work. This zone invites participants to bring a real task from their own context and reimagine it with AI support. Rather than treating AI as a replacement for the educator’s work, we will explore how the work itself shifts when AI becomes part of an intentional process.
Participants may begin with something they already use or need to create. This could be a syllabus, rubric, discussion prompt, feedback comment, assignment description or another artifact from their teaching. They will use AI to transform that artifact in a meaningful way. The goal is not to perfect it during the session, but to notice what changes when AI enters the workflow and where the educator’s judgment becomes even more important.
This zone emphasizes practical experimentation. Participants will explore how AI can support the early stages of drafting, revision and instructional decision-making without losing sight of the human expertise that gives the work its purpose. This reflection helps participants think less about AI as a shortcut and more about the conditions that make AI useful, responsible and connected to their actual work.
Sample activity:
Bring one thing. Choose a real teaching or work artifact and use AI to revise, expand, adapt, or reimagine it. Then reflect on what improved, what still needs human refinement, and how the process changed your approach.
Possible tools:
Claude or ChatGPT for general instructional work, custom GPTs, MagicSchool AI, Eduaide, rubric generators, and other AI-supported teaching and design tools.
Participants may leave with:
A revised teaching artifact, a new workflow idea, or a practical strategy for integrating AI into the work they already do.
The Beacon Lab
What becomes possible that was not possible before?
The Beacon Lab focuses on new categories of teaching and learning that AI makes possible. This zone is not about using AI to complete familiar tasks more quickly. Instead, we will explore what becomes possible when educators can prototype learning experiences that may have once felt too difficult to build or too distant to imagine.
Participants may experiment with experiences that respond, simulate, adapt or generate in ways that traditional course materials cannot. They might create a custom GPT for a specific teaching need, design a branching scenario where learners interact with an AI character or generate a podcast-style conversation that helps students encounter a concept from a new perspective. The purpose is not to build a finished product in a few minutes, but to experience the shift that happens when an idea can become a working prototype almost immediately.
The goal of this zone is to create a sense of possibility. Participants are invited to consider how AI can open new forms of practice, interaction and expression within digital learning environments. This reflection helps us move beyond efficiency and toward a deeper question: what kinds of learning experiences can we now imagine that were previously out of reach?
Sample activity:
Build something that did not used to exist. Create a small prototype of an AI-supported learning experience, such as a custom assistant, branching role-play, simulated practice activity, or AI-generated podcast debate.
Possible tools:
Custom GPT builder, NotebookLM podcast feature, scenario builders such as Twine with AI support, Scenario.AI or similar tools, agent prototypes, and simulation tools.
Participants may leave with:
A prototype concept, custom assistant idea, adaptive scenario draft, simulated learning activity, or renewed sense of what may be possible in the next era of digital learning.
Your Lab Notebook
The Lab Notebook is your personal guide through the AI Exploration Zone. It will help you define your purpose, choose where to begin, and capture what you discover.
You may be prompted to complete statements such as:
In my teaching or work, I want to improve: [Student engagement, feedback, course design, accessibility/UDL, assessment, content creation, or another area.]
A challenge I am facing is:
I am curious how AI could help me:
My experiment today is to explore:
After each zone, you can record what you created, what worked, what surprised you, what needs refinement, and what you might try next.
Visit the AI Exploration Zone
The AI Exploration Zone is designed to be practical, welcoming, and exploratory. You do not need to be an AI expert to participate. Bring a question, a challenge, an idea, or simply your curiosity.
The AI Exploration Zone is located in the Atlantic Exhibit Hall, and is open during regular conference hours:
Monday, November 16: 3:00 – 6:00 pm
Tuesday, November 17: 9:00 am – 12:00 pm and 2:15 – 6:15 pm
Wednesday, November 18: 9:30 am-12:00 pm and 1:00 – 3:00 pm
Come illuminate what is emerging, envision what it could mean for your own context, and apply what you discover through hands-on exploration.
Sean Nufer
AI Exploration Zone Co-Chair, TCS Education
Maikel Right
AI Exploration Zone Co-Chair, Florida International University
