Collaborate + Create: AI Agent in a Day Workshop (Fall 2026)

October 23, 2026

In-Person Workshop

Location: Minnesota State System Office (St. Paul, MN)

Join us for a one-day, in-person workshop (8:00 a.m.–4:30 p.m.) at the Minnesota State system office in St. Paul. You will work in a small group (3–4 people) to design, build, and test a simple AI agent using Microsoft Copilot. Groups will focus on high-priority topics that are useful across disciplines like Accessibility, Academic Equity, Open Educational Resources, and more. To support this work, all participants will be offered a Copilot Premium license through July 2027. After the workshop, the agents will be shared with all of Minnesota State to try out and give feedback. 

In this workshop you will: 

1. Clearly describe what your group’s agent should do (its requirements). 
2. Include equity practices in your agent’s design. 
3. Build a first draft of your group’s agent based on your requirements. 
4. Test and improve your agent. 

Note: Registration closes September 2 or when we reach maximum registration (30 participants)

Workshop Learning Objectives 

After completing the course, participants will be able to: 

• Explain the difference between Copilot chat and a Copilot agent.
• Clearly describe what your group’s agent should do (its requirements).
• Include equity practices in your agent’s design.
• Build a first draft of your group’s agent based on your requirements.
• Test and improve your agent.

Agent Topics

Join one of these groups to build and share an agent by the end of the day!

• Accessibility Assistant: Provides support and ideas to create accessible content, meetings, and more, especially for low vision and Blind students and colleagues. Generates accessible HTML code for D2L Brightspace Content Pages from Word, PDF, and other shared files.
• D2L Brightspace Quiz Assistant: Generates effective multiple choice and true/false questions on a specified topic that can be imported as a CSV into Quizzes.
• Digital Accessibility Coach. Coaches individuals in effectively applying digital accessibility. Offers checklists, tips, resources, and more.
• Equity Data Analysis Coach: Coaches users to format, analyze, and interpret equity data to make data-informed decisions in teaching, advising, and beyond.
• Learning Activities Designer: Generates effective classroom assessment techniques and discussion prompts for in-person and online classes.
• Open Education Resources Curator: Curates human-created OER across multiple academic and peer reviewed sources for easy import into courses.
• Wise Feedback Coach. Through a series of guided questions, transform your rough notes into learning objectives/rubric aligned, plain language comments that apply Wise Feedback for equitable, effective, and efficient individualized feedback.
• Propose a topic: I would like to propose a group topic idea to work on! We may not be able to include all topics but we want to learn about all your awesome ideas.

Suggested Audience 

Faculty (Full-time and part-time), Instructional Designers and Technologists, Faculty Developers/Trainers, and Concurrent Enrollment instructors. 

We recommend you have some experience with generative AI to join (for example, the NED Teaching with AI workshop or equivalent and/or regular, exploratory use of generative AI).

Machine generated captions are available in real-time for all Zoom events, however human generated CART (live caption) service and ASL interpretation can be requested with advanced notice (2 weeks) to make the event more accessible.

Please, let us know of any disability-related accommodations that will facilitate your full participation.