University of Waterloo Teaching & Learning Conference

The University of Waterloo’s teaching conference is happening in a very 2026 way. Day one ran online on Wednesday, April 29. Day two is in person on Thursday, April 30, spread across the Science Teaching Complex, Biology 2, and Federation Hall. But the real story is the theme — Waterloo has built this year’s conference around AI, not as a shiny tool demo, but as a live question about how universities should teach, assess, and care for students when machine help is everywhere. (uwaterloo.ca) ### What is this conference, exactly? This is Waterloo’s 17th annual Teaching and Learning Conference, organized by the Centre for Teaching Excellence with support from the Office of the Associate Vice-President, Academic. It is aimed at the people who actually design and run education on campus — faculty, staff, and others involved in teaching support a(uwaterloo.ca) ### What happened on each day? The format is split on purpose. Wednesday, April 29 was an online workshop day. Thursday, April 30 is the in-person conference day on campus. That matters because it tells you Waterloo is not just staging a single keynote-and-networking event — it is mixing practical sessions with a bigger campus conversation. The public event listing pegs the full run from 8:00 a.m. Wednesday to 6:00 p.m. Thursday. (uwaterloo.ca) ### Why is AI the center of it? The 2026 theme is “The Human Factor: Shaping the Role of Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education.” That framing is doing a lot of work. Waterloo is not asking whether AI exists or whether people will use it. Basically, the university is asking who gets to shape the rules around it — instructors, support staff, and stud(uwaterloo.ca)grity, foundational skills versus higher-order learning, student belonging, and bias in large language models. (uwaterloo.ca) ### What does “human factor” mean here? Turns out it means Waterloo is trying to drag the AI conversation back to pedagogy. A lot of campus AI talk gets stuck at detection, cheating, or productivity hacks. This conference pushes a broader question: how do you use AI without flattening judgment, connection, accessibility, or inclusion? That is why the the(uwaterloo.ca) it. (uwaterloo.ca) ### Who is giving the keynote? The keynote speaker is Susan McCahan from the University of Toronto, who holds digital strategies and undergraduate education leadership roles there. Her talk is titled “Navigating a Jagged Future: Teaching in the Age of AI.” Even the title signals the mood — not smooth adoption, not panic, but uneven terrain. Waterloo also scheduled a Q&A right after the keynote, which suggests the organizers expect debate, not just applause. (uwaterloo.ca) ### What are people actually discussing? The session list makes the conference feel concrete. Topics include creating an AI agent for the classroom, using AI responsibly in teaching, helping instructors navigate generative AI, making sense of student feedback at scale, and centering the human experience in academic settings. There is even a note on schedule changes, which is a small but telling sign that this is a working conference, not a static showcase. (uwaterloo.ca) ### Why does this matter beyond Waterloo? Because universities are now in the messy middle. They cannot ban AI out of existence, but they also cannot pretend every use case is harmless. Waterloo’s conference reflects the broader shift in higher education from “Should we allow this?” to “How do we redesign teaching a(uwaterloo.ca)d of practical answer-sharing. (uwaterloo.ca) ### Bottom line What changed this week is simple: Waterloo turned its annual teaching conference into an AI governance conversation for educators. Not governance in the legal sense — governance in the classroom sense. Who decides what good learning looks like now, and how do you keep that decision human? (uwaterloo.ca)