AI can do a lot of the heavy lifting in course improvement—but what happens when efficiency starts eroding the nuance that makes teaching effective? This session uses a real-world case study of 17 social work learning materials to explore the tension between scaling instructional design work with AI and preserving the human judgment that gives courses their integrity. Through a brief before-and-after example and structured discussion, participants will wrestle with questions that don't have easy answers: What must stay fully human? How do we keep AI from standardizing the complexity out of courses? Leave with one concrete guardrail and a framework for thinking more critically about where AI belongs—and where it doesn't—in course improvement work.
