Collective Intelligence through Multimodal Pedagogy: Lessons from Human–GenAI Co-Creation in Open and Distance Education

The arrival of Generative AI (GenAI) has sparked intense debates in Higher Education, particularly within open and distance learning (ODL), where digital mediation shapes how students and educators engage with knowledge. Much of this debate remains focused on regulation or instrumental use, leaving less space for creative, multimodal, and collaborative approaches that position GenAI as a learning partner. This paper draws on People, Places and Pasta or Uncreative Explorations as Collective Intelligence (Nerantzi et al., 2025), a project developed during and after the EDEN 2025 conference. The project wove together scholars’ notes and reflections into four creative outputs: a pedagogical recipe, a Socratic dialogue, a collective poem, and a mosaic of visual metaphors. Each functions as a pedagogical instrument that opens new pathways for integrating GenAI into ODL in inventive ways. These creative, critical, and multimodal processes are especially relevant in distributed, asynchronous environments that demand autonomy, collaboration, and multimodal fluency. We argue that these approaches can foster critical GenAI literacy, creative and critical expression, and student agency. They invite educators to embrace human–GenAI co-creation not as a substitution, but as a catalyst for thoughtful, critical, and collective intelligence for their own professional development and their students.