Draft Preliminary note on identifiability and PII review · click to expand

This appendix is being circulated to the committee as a draft. It contains material that has not yet completed a final review for personally identifiable information. Before the appendix is finalized for submission, every mention of a named individual will be reviewed against the taxonomy in §B.6.5: students named in instructor-produced materials will be anonymized unless explicit written consent for educational use is documented; named guest speakers will be retained as public professional identities with their professional context attached; Luma-platform workshop feedback will be reviewed for anonymization; and external journalism is retained as already published and consented.

Index
§D.3

Learner Choice · dialogue with informants across channels

The main document's second curriculum-design principle, learner choice, names the property that lets learners select among tools, formats, and topics within the curriculum's structure. This section elaborates the principle from the practitioner-pioneer's reflexive position. What I add is the autoethnographic record of how learner choice operated across multiple contexts and audience types — and the analytic naming of the underlying pattern as multi-channel teaching practice.

D.3.1 Learner choice as a multi-context phenomenon

The DBR analysis develops learner choice as a within-classroom property: students in a course choose among assignment formats, tool variants, presentation modes. The autoethnographic supplement extends the principle outward. My pioneering practice did not unfold in a single classroom. It unfolded across multiple delivery contexts simultaneously, and learner choice operated between contexts (which channel learners encountered the curriculum through) as well as within contexts (what they did inside each).

This wider reading of learner choice is what the autoethnographic position makes possible to see. The DBR within-classroom view of learner choice is correct as far as it goes; the autoethnographic view adds that the same four-theme architecture was simultaneously available through eight contexts of varying duration, audience, and depth, and that the heterogeneity of contexts is itself a form of learner choice.

D.3.2 The eight contexts documented

The architecture's appearance across these eight contexts is documented as follows. The trajectory of the four iterations across the six concurrent delivery channels is visualized as the opening figure of Appendix C (§C.1, Figure 1); the eight contexts of learner choice intersect that timeline, with the for-credit semester courses and the compressed online workshops appearing along the iteration spine, and the HCI graduate series, K-12 outreach, public-facing reflection, and federal-research webinar appearing in the other four channels.

Context 1 · Iteration 1 (CTD undergraduate course, Spring 2024)

The CTD pilot at the ATLAS Institute, fifteen weeks, approximately twenty-five students.

Context 2 · Iteration 2 (Mixed Engineering undergraduate course, Spring 2025)

GEEN 3830-001 Special Topics, fifteen weeks, approximately twenty-five students of mixed engineering backgrounds.

Context 3 · Iteration 3 (CEAS-sponsored online workshop, August 2025)

First cohort of GenAI in Five, five days at one hour per day, 129 live attendees out of 411 registered (LR-3).

Context 4 · Iteration 4 (GenAI Works partnership, September 2025)

Second cohort of GenAI in Five, YouTube delivery to a globally-distributed audience. Approximately 4,731 registered on the Luma event page (LR-4); the Day 1 broadcast drew 2,654 live online participants (LR-4.D1); Luma feedback aggregated to 256 ratings averaging 4.2 of 5 (LF-4).

Context 5 · HCI summer 2024 guest series

Ten guest lectures delivered for an HCI course at CU Boulder, covering the four themes across HCI applications.

Context 6 · K-12 outreach

STEAM Festival mural workshop with 50+ Colorado children using DALL-E 2; UW KidsTeam and Youth Advisory Board co-design sessions with elementary, middle-school, and high-school students.

Context 7 · LinkedIn newsletter and AI by Hand podcast

Three episodes of Keep Up Newsletter and two episodes of Keep Up Podcast.

Context 8 · Federal research webinar via CU RMACC and NAIRR Pilot

56-minute webinar on "Unleashing Creativity with Generative AI."

A note on what "eight contexts" should and should not be read as. The eight vary substantially in duration, audience size, depth of engagement, and institutional embedding. Two are fifteen-week semester courses with ~45 hours of formal class time each; two are five-day workshops with ~5 hours; one is a ten-deck graduate guest-lecture series; one is a single-event K-12 outreach activity with continuing children's-research collaboration; one is a newsletter-plus-podcast pair; one is a single 56-minute federal-research webinar. Treating these as comparable units would overstate their similarity. What the elaboration documents is the appearance of the four-theme architecture across this range of contexts, not equivalent depth of engagement at each.

D.3.3 The sub-claim · multi-channel teaching practice

The autoethnographic analysis surfaces a pattern within learner choice that I name multi-channel teaching practice. The pattern is that the practitioner-pioneer's practice operates as a network of simultaneous delivery contexts rather than as discrete classroom delivery, and that learner choice in such a configuration extends to choice of context itself.

I claim that this practitioner-pioneer's practice at the technological frontier is most accurately characterized as networked multi-channel engagement rather than as discrete classroom delivery. The pioneer is not a single-classroom teacher who happens to engage occasionally with adjacent audiences; the pioneer is a multi-channel practitioner whose classroom work is one node in a wider network of pedagogical delivery.

I hedge the generalization carefully. Whether non-pioneer instructors of generative-AI courses also operate across multiple contexts, and whether the multi-channel pattern is specific to pioneer practice or is a more general feature of contemporary technology pedagogy, are empirical questions for subsequent comparative work. My evidence base is one practitioner over two and a half years; the claim is documented in this single case and is offered as a starting point for the comparative work that would test its generality.

D.3.4 Dialogue with informants beyond self · the evidence

Learner choice presupposes that learners' voices reach the curriculum and shape it. The autoethnographic supplement supports this through dialogue-with-informants evidence at multiple scales:

The convergence across types — named students, online learners, K-12 children, journalists, public audiences — is what makes dialogue-with-informants-beyond-self a substantively documented criterion across the four-theme architecture rather than an instructor's stray claim.

D.3.5 The Cuenca-to-Soundful flow as concrete instance

One named case anchors how learner choice flows back to shape the curriculum. Slide 13 of the Iteration 1 Week 1 deck (DK-1.W01) names Ethan Cuenca as one of the twenty-three students whose prompt-engineering outputs are displayed in the opening session. The Weekly Updates Prelim Document notes that one student presented on the GenAI music tool Soundful, and that I incorporated the student's discovery into the class assignment. Keep Up Newsletter Episode 3 (KN-EP3-Q1) publicly credits the flow: "I learned about Soundful from one of my students during class." Soundful subsequently appeared in the Iteration 2 curriculum (CV-2), the Iteration 3 workshop deck (DK-3), and the Iteration 4 workshop delivery (TR-4.D3 carries Soundful as part of the Audio-generation day).

I want to be precise about what this is and is not: it is one well-documented case, not a pattern with multiple documented instances at the same level of precision. Other student tool discoveries shaped the curriculum across the iterations (the Iteration 1 Final Project, the Iteration 2 teach-out presentations, the Iteration 3 Luma feedback all surfaced tool suggestions), but they are not documented as precisely as the Cuenca-to-Soundful flow. The single named case is offered as a concrete instance of a broader phenomenon I observed but did not document case-by-case.

D.3.6 Theoretical contribution

The engineering-education and HCI literatures on instructor practice mostly take the single classroom as the unit of analysis. Multi-classroom comparative studies and longitudinal studies of single instructors across multiple courses are familiar; the multi-channel framing I propose is less common.

The contribution has practical implications for the engineering-education literature, calibrated to what this single-case study supports. It suggests that documenting pioneer instructor practice in a specific case requires documenting the full channel network rather than the classroom alone. It suggests that the stability of an instructional architecture, where multiple channels exist, is plausibly measured by cross-channel presence rather than by within-classroom outcome measures alone. It suggests that the K-12 outreach work, the public-facing writing, and the federal-research engagement that pioneer instructors often pursue alongside their classrooms are not extracurricular additions in cases like mine; they are part of the pioneering work and warrant documentation as such.

D.3.7 Multi-channel practice as engaged scholarship

Boyer's (1990) framework in Scholarship Reconsidered distinguishes four kinds of scholarship: discovery (traditional research), integration (synthesis across fields), application (engaged practice), and teaching (the pedagogical work itself). The multi-channel teaching practice documented in this elaboration maps cleanly onto Boyer's scholarship of engagement and the scholarship of teaching: the K-12 outreach (ST-MURAL, KT corpus), the public-facing newsletter and podcast (KN-EP series, KP-EP series), and the federal-research webinar (WB-2026-03-03) are not extracurricular to the dissertation's contribution; they are the scholarship of engagement in operation.

The Boyer mapping helps clarify what kind of contribution this elaboration is. It is not a contribution to the scholarship of discovery in the conventional sense (no controlled experiment, no novel measurement). It is a contribution to the scholarship of teaching and engagement: a documented record of how a pioneer instructor's pedagogical work propagates across multiple audiences and platforms, framed as scholarship rather than as an instructor's professional activity.

D.3.8 Guidelines for documenting and sustaining multi-channel teaching practice

The eight-context network documented in this elaboration is not unusual for pioneer instructors; what is unusual is documenting it as part of the work. Four guidelines drawn from the cross-channel record:

Index