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Idea to Pilot-Ready in Under a Week: slide text

Think Bigger About AI. Jon Fila, Founder and AI Strategist, Inclusive AI Strategies. Every slide’s text and a description of each animation.

Slide 1 of 23

Idea to Pilot-Ready in Under a Week

Think Bigger About AI

Jon Fila, Founder and AI Strategist, Inclusive AI Strategies™.

Animation, on its own and repeating every few seconds while the slide is up: the grid of thirty cards starts scattered and tilted, like separate tasks, then snaps into six columns while a yellow cap grows above each column.

Get these slides: iais.us/ideadlac26 (opens in a new tab)

Image: QR code for these slides, in a white card at the lower right.

Slide 2 of 23

Where AI training stops

Valuable as a starting point. Being treated as the destination.

Animation: the three prompt cards rise in one at a time, then the closing line.

Slide 3 of 23

Task level vs. system level

Task level

One artifact. One prompt. One reviewer.

System level

A full course, aligned to standards, with UDL, SEL and WCAG built in.

Animation, two clicks. The grid moves beside the text and empties to dashed outlines. Click one: a single card in the middle lights up yellow; the rest stay empty. Click two: cards fill outward from that one card until the whole course is full, the yellow unit caps (labeled Standards) fill in, and three small marks appear in every card: a circle for UDL, a triangle for SEL and a square for WCAG. The first card keeps a yellow ring.

Slide 4 of 23

Building one online course

  1. Over a decade ago, by hand: 800+ hours
  2. Two years ago, with early AI tools: 350+ hours
  3. Now: about one week

AI didn’t build it. I did.

Animation, four clicks. Three empty course grids sit side by side. Click one: the first grid fills one card at a time over several seconds, with plain cards only. Click two: the second grid fills the same way, faster, each card flashing as it lands, and about a third of its cards get the UDL, SEL and WCAG marks. Click three: the third grid gets all six unit caps at once, then every card fills in one sweep, with the UDL, SEL and WCAG marks in every card. Click four: a yellow band rises with the line.

Slide 5 of 23

Course wish list

What I have always tried to build into a course

Animation: the twelve items rise in quickly, one after another, each with a check mark.

Slide 6 of 23

Creative Writing Through Dungeons & Dragons

The course. Students want to tell stories.

Six units, in order

  1. World Building
  2. Character Development
  3. Narrative Structure
  4. Dialogue and Voice
  5. Campaign Design
  6. Collaborative Storytelling and Capstone

Grades 6–12. Common Core ELA. NSQ aligned. Built to WCAG 2.2 AA. CC BY-NC 4.0.

Free course: iais.us/dndcourse

Course details from inclusiveaistrategies.com/dnd-writing-course and the course’s unit pages. Dungeons & Dragons is a trademark of Wizards of the Coast. This course is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Wizards of the Coast.

Animation: the six units appear one at a time from left to right while a yellow line draws through them; then the course details and link.

Slide 7 of 23

How I designed the course to make AI shortcuts unappealing

  1. Personal connection: Every major assignment is rooted in the student’s own place, memory, or voice.
  2. Metacognition: “Why did you choose this?” is embedded in every assignment.
  3. Compounding work: The character from the backstory returns later. AI can’t fake continuity it didn’t make.
  4. Capstone synthesis: The final project weaves together the learner’s own creative work from across the course.

Animation: the four cards rise in one at a time.

Slide 8 of 23

What students are told they may do

AI guidance, written into the assignment.

You may ask an AI tool to ask you questions about your hometown to help you remember details.

Assignment 1.3: Hometown Fantasy Setting, Creative Writing Through Dungeons & Dragons

Animation: on arrival, the label, heading, quotation mark, quote and source rise in one after another.

Slide 9 of 23

Built for WCAG 2.2 AA

Visual

Structural

Content

Applied consistently across every HTML page in the course.

Standard: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2, W3C Recommendation, w3.org/TR/WCAG22

Animation: the three columns rise in one at a time, then the closing line.

Slide 10 of 23

What changed, and what stayed constant

Changed

Stayed constant

Animation, two clicks. The slide opens on one finished course grid. Click one: the finished course moves to the right and its two earlier versions appear beside it (the first with plain cards, the second with the marks on about a third of its cards, the third with the marks on every card), and the five changes appear below them in large rows. Click two: the change rows drop away and five equal blocks rise beneath all three courses as their foundation, one block for each constant. Then every card in the three courses turns over, while the foundation stays still.

Slide 11 of 23

AI doesn’t replace expertise. It operates at the speed of it.

Animation: the second sentence rises in while a yellow bar fills across the slide.

Slide 12 of 23

How AI use may affect experts and novices

Sources: Kendeou, Greene, Nixon et al., “Ways Generative AI Can Support and Threaten Learning in K-20 US Education: Expert Consensus Report,” University of Minnesota, October 2026; Shen and Tamkin, “How AI Impacts Skill Formation,” arXiv:2601.20245, 2026 (preprint).

Animation: each card rises in on its own step. A decorative row of bars climbs on the experts card; the novices card shows the two quiz scores as bars.

Slide 13 of 23

What AI won’t do by default

Animation: the four cards rise in one at a time.

Slide 14 of 23

Check the work in passes

  1. Generate. Treat the first output as a draft.
  2. Check mechanically. Run the tools that measure: accessibility and contrast checkers, link checks, standards alignment against the actual documents.
  3. Review adversarially. Ask a second model, or a colleague, to look for errors. Compare the two reviews.
  4. Read as the learner and the expert. Open it the way a student will, and read it the way a subject expert will. Automated checks cannot do this pass.

The slides for this talk were built with AI and an explicit WCAG 2.2 AA requirement. They were reported as compliant. A rendered contrast audit still found failures, including bullet markers that were nearly invisible.

Animation: the four passes rise in one per click, left to right, with an arrow between each.

Slide 15 of 23

Designed in, not applied after

Applied after

Designed in

Animation: each column rises in on its own step.

Slide 16 of 23

Testing Claude on a course team’s quiz review

A fall 2026 cohort of online course designers. One dot per run.

Runs in which Claude did each thing
CheckResult
Caught all six planted quiz problems9 of 10 runs
Applied the team’s question-bank depth rule without being told0 of 4 runs
Caught the platform’s 150-character field limit0 of 6 runs
Named the team’s approved accessible alternative0 of 6 runs
Once given the team’s rules: every run flagged all six activity problems3 of 3 runs

A detailed step-by-step prompt caught no more than “Check these quiz items for problems.” Adding the team’s rules is what changed the results.

Source: Jon Fila, pre-test built for the cohort, October 2026. Claude Sonnet run from the command line with a minimal system prompt; 3 to 10 runs per check; scored against an answer key and checked by hand. Results in the chat app may differ.

Animation: one row at a time, its dots pop in from left to right. Filled dots mean yes; hollow, hatched dots mean no. The first row appears, then the three rules the model missed, then the result once it was given the rules, then the note about prompts.

Slide 17 of 23

The training gap

Task-level PD (what most AI PD teaches)

Prepares educators for individual classroom use.

System-level PD (what full-course AI design needs)

Prepares educators for course and program design.

Animation: each column rises in on its own step.

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Three barriers to system-level work

The tools are ready for system-level work. What’s stopping institutions from getting there?

  1. Expertise depth: Institutions assume AI replaces instructional design expertise. It doesn’t. It requires more of it, earlier in the process.
  2. Quality framework: Without standards designed into the workflow, AI reproduces the field’s default mediocrity, faster.
  3. PD scope mismatch: Task-level training cannot prepare educators for system-level course design. We need a different PD.

Animation: the three cards rise in one at a time.

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Three concrete next steps

  1. Audit your current AI PD. Task-level or system-level? If it’s all task, name it and plan the next layer.
  2. Map one course to quality standards. Pick one. NSQ, QM, WCAG at the outline stage. Feel where the work actually is.
  3. Identify one system-level pilot. One course. One quarter. System-level from day one. Measure against task-level comparables.

Animation: the three steps slide in one at a time.

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Effective and efficient LLM use

Handout: iais.us/aiworkflow

Animation: on arrival, the six cards and the handout line rise in one after another.

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The Default Sucks.

What customizing means here:

Animation: on arrival, the heading rises in, then the three takeaways one after another.

Slide 22 of 23

Questions?

Animation: on arrival, the heading and a decorative pair of speech bubbles rise in.

Slide 23 of 23

Jon Fila

Founder and AI Strategist, Inclusive AI Strategies

Photo: Jon Fila in a navy blazer and white shirt against a gray background.

Sign up for my newsletter: inclusiveaistrategies.com/#newsletter

Logo label: Inclusive AI Strategies™

Get these slides: iais.us/ideadlac26 (opens in a new tab)

Image: QR code for these slides, in the large yellow frame on the left. The photo of Jon Fila is now a small circle beside his name.