Beyond Content: Human-Centered Learning Design in the Age of AI

Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping higher education, yet much of the current conversation remains centered on tools, detection, and delivery modalities rather than the deeper conditions that drive meaningful learning. This session explores how AI is transforming the role of faculty from content deliverers to architects of human-centered learning experiences.

Drawing from real-world teaching practice in undergraduate healthcare management and business courses, this presentation examines how learner ownership, authentic engagement, and collaborative course design can increase student connection and participation in both face-to-face and online environments. During an unexpected mid-semester transition to remote instruction, students and faculty collaboratively redesigned aspects of the learning experience, creating opportunities to explore communication, attention, accountability, and peer-supported learning in new ways. Students participated in co-creating learning outcomes, developing assignment rubrics, and building collaborative study structures that strengthened engagement and community despite physical distance.

Central to this approach is the use of student-owned digital portfolios, in which coursework becomes meaningful evidence of growth, skill development, reflection, and professional identity formation, rather than isolated assignments completed solely for grading. By positioning students as active participants in documenting and curating their learning journey, digital portfolios increase ownership, relevance, and long-term connection to the learning process.

This session also explores the use of the “5Cs”—curiosity, creativity, courage, compassion, and communication—as a human-centered framework for working alongside AI rather than competing against it. As generative AI increasingly handles information retrieval and content production,

Speaker Biography

Dr. Pauline L. Stamp is an educator, organizational systems scholar, and former college dean whose work focuses on human-centered learning, workforce readiness, leadership, and emerging technologies in higher education. With experience spanning K–12 administration, healthcare leadership, corporate systems, and higher education, she brings a multidisciplinary perspective to teaching, curriculum design, and organizational transformation.

Dr. Stamp holds graduate degrees from Boston University and Northeastern University, along with a PhD in Human and Organizational Systems from Fielding Graduate University. She currently serves as an Executive Board Member for the MBA Standards Board, contributing to conversations surrounding competency-based learning, workforce readiness, and the future of credentialing.

Her recent work explores how higher education can move beyond content delivery models toward learning environments that cultivate adaptability, meaning, and authentic engagement in an AI-driven world. Drawing inspiration from the “5Cs” framework discussed by Reid Hoffman, her work emphasizes curiosity, creativity, courage, compassion, and communication as essential human capac