As online learning continues to expand across K–12 and higher education, instructors face the ongoing challenge of designing virtual experiences that remain meaningful, interactive, and deeply engaging. Student attention can fade quickly in digital environments, and traditional approaches to Zoom-based instruction often fall short in fostering active participation. This session introduces educators to the power of live-streaming workflows and studio-quality presentation techniques that transform online teaching into dynamic, student-centered learning experiences. 

The workshop demonstrates how tools such as Ecamm Live, iPads, digital pencils, and built-in device cameras can be integrated to create lessons that resemble interactive broadcasts rather than static screen-shared lectures. Participants will see how live annotation, scene switching, document camera views, and layered instructional visuals allow educators to explain complex ideas with greater clarity while maintaining a strong teaching presence. These techniques enrich synchronous instruction, making real-time sessions more immersive, and also enhance asynchronous video lessons, turning them into compelling learning resources students are more likely to revisit.

A key focus of the session is accessibility and practicality. Educators will learn how to leverage everyday devices to build professional-quality workflows without requiring advanced technical skills or expensive equipment. The emphasis is on adopting simple studio practices—such as intentional framing, consistent lighting, and organized visual design—that help reduce the sense of distance students often feel in virtual classrooms. These strategies help learners feel seen, included, and actively involved rather than passive spectators.

By the end of the session, participants will understand how thoughtful visual design, purposeful technology integration, and live-streaming strategies can rehumanize online learning. Educators will leave with practical techniques for supporting diverse learners, strengthening instructional presence, and bringing renewed energy and authenticity to both synchronous and asynchronous online teaching.

"Diving into SchoolAI 2.0" is a hands-on build session designed for distance educators. In the first half, you’ll create real, ready-to-use materials for your course, like a lesson outline aligned to your outcomes, a project idea with clear milestones, and a rubric with performance descriptors you can drop into your LMS right away. In the second half, you’ll design a Student Space that encourages authentic engagement and minimizes AI misuse through clear prompts, scaffolded steps, and transparent guardrails.

Expect short demos, focused creation sprints, quick peer feedback, and time to refine your work. You’ll walk away with classroom-ready resources, a student-facing activity you can launch immediately, and a plan to track impact on both engagement and workload.

School culture is the foundation of student success and staff well-being, yet cultivating and sustaining a positive climate requires intentional leadership. This interactive workshop invites principals, aspiring leaders, and teacher-leaders to explore practical strategies for fostering a thriving school environment. Participants will examine the role of trust, communication, and shared vision in shaping culture, as well as strategies for addressing challenges such as resistance to change or low staff morale. Through case studies, collaborative activities, and reflective dialogue, attendees will learn actionable leadership practices that strengthen relationships, support professional collaboration, and create conditions where both students and educators can flourish.

By the end of the session, participants will walk away with a toolkit of strategies to build and sustain positive school culture and a personalized action plan to bring back to their own “playgrounds.”

Every data point tells a story, but it’s what we do with that story that drives literacy growth. In this interactive session, teachers, coaches, and leaders will learn how to move from simply collecting literacy assessment data to confidently using it to design lessons that meet real student needs.

Participants will explore how to interpret a range of literacy assessments, including digital tools, to uncover what students know, what they need next, and how to plan targeted instruction that sticks. The session connects data analysis to daily practice, focusing on actionable steps educators can use immediately to strengthen phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, and comprehension instruction.

Using real-world examples and a ready-to-use template, attendees will see how data can streamline lesson planning, make differentiation more manageable, and ensure every learner receives the right level of support, whether teaching in person, online, or in a hybrid setting.

By the end of the session, participants will be able to:

Analyze student data to identify literacy priorities, Design engaging, evidence-based lessons aligned with the Science of Reading, Use data to drive small-group instruction and intervention decisions, and Build confidence in making data-informed choices that boost literacy outcomes.

This session is for anyone ready to make assessment data work for them, not against them, and to transform information into instruction that inspires reading success.

Get ready to roll up your sleeves and have fun with course design. This upbeat session turns online teaching into a 4T Design Challenge where participants work together to solve mini-puzzles, uncover clues, and remix familiar course elements using the 4T Framework of Topics, Tasks, Tools, and Trends. You will move through a series of quick challenges that reveal hidden alignment issues, spark creative ideas, and show how small adjustments can make online learning more engaging and flexible. Each challenge is inspired by real situations from faculty development and digital learning projects, but delivered with a playful twist that makes the work feel fresh and inviting. You will collaborate with others, test out ideas, and collect insights you can take back to your own courses. By the end, you will walk away with a redesigned course element, a simple framework you can reuse, and a renewed sense of curiosity about what is possible in distance learning. If you enjoy learning by doing and want a creative way to energize your online teaching toolkit, this session is for you. Come ready to explore, solve, laugh, and design.

How can artistic thinking create harmony in distance learning? 

This session bridges foreign language education and the visual arts to show how creativity can enliven virtual classrooms. Drawing on both research and artistic practice, Antonios Draganis, PhD Candidate in Education at Frederick University (Cyprus) and practicing artist, presents findings from 110 foreign language teachers in Greece. Teachers completed the Teacher Visual Arts Integration Questionnaire (TVAIQ), which measured use of artistic methods, student motivation, and teacher attitudes. Regression analysis revealed that prior arts related training, rather than experience or gender, was the strongest predictor of classroom innovation (B = 0.56, p < .001).

Beyond the statistics, participants will explore how simple, low tech creative tasks such as using everyday images, color associations, and short visual story prompts can boost learner engagement in digital environments. Examples from the presenter’s own studio illustrate how principles of composition and visual symbolism translate naturally into online teaching design. Attendees will leave with ready to use ideas for integrating visual creativity into any learning platform, achieving a practical balance, a universal harmony between art, technology, and pedagogy.

If you work in instructional design, you’ve likely heard the terms ADA compliance, 508 compliance, and accessibility.

But what do these terms actually mean?  Do they apply to your project?  Should you be doing something about them--and if so, what?  What benefit can you expect from the time you'll need to spend and, perhaps most important, how do you get started?

This session explains all these terms in plain English, accompanied by examples, breadcrumbs, and how-tos for making your online materials more accessible. (Bonus: Applying accessibility guidelines simultaneously makes instructional materials delivered online more engaging and easier to consume for all audiences, not just those with hearing or sight impairments!)

As AI becomes increasingly integrated into our daily lives, online students continue to seek instructors who consistently appear, genuinely care about them as individuals, and provide guidance, challenge, and support. AI tools can help with speed and structure, but human-centered leadership keeps connection and meaning at the forefront of the learning experience. 

This interactive workshop invites online instructors and faculty leaders to explore how human-centered leadership can support their teaching in the middle of rapid technological change.

Grounded in a six-pillar leadership model that encompasses conscious self-awareness, relational intelligence, ethical influence, adaptive growth, transparent communication, and empowered action, this session translates leadership principles into practical teaching strategies. We will examine how these pillars can shape lectures, announcements, feedback, discussions, and group work, enabling students to experience clarity, structure, and care.

Participants will engage in polls, short case scenarios drawn from real online teaching experiences, and small group discussions. They will also participate in a brief chat and reflection on what they wish institutional leaders understood about the current realities of teaching online. Each attendee will complete a short online leadership presence plan that they can apply in their next term.

This session is designed for online instructors, adjunct faculty, program leaders, and instructional designers who want technology to support learning while maintaining a human-centered leadership approach at the core of their practice, all while upholding academic rigor.

In recent years, the instructional design community has been consumed with curating “best practices” to ensure quality learning experiences. But when the foundation is shaky, the scaffold is bound to crumble. The traditional definition of instructional design is morphing into something unrecognizable—shaped by the influence of instructional technology, stringent accessibility protocols, rigid quality standards, and pervasive AI tools which threaten to slowly deconstruct the essence and meaning of instructional design- creating meaningful, learner-centered experiences. Has the field lost its identity in the race toward technology-driven solutions and standardized protocols? Is the foundation disintegrating leading to a collapse of the course development scaffold? In this 45-minute interactive session, I will share personal experiences and invite participants to revisit the traditional foundations of instructional design, examine how external pressures have altered its meaning and value, and collaboratively craft an adaptive, future-ready definition. Through personal anecdotes, group discussions, and real-time polling, attendees will explore critical questions: What does instructional design truly mean today? How do we preserve its core principles while embracing innovation? Participants will leave with actionable insights and a co-created definition that reflects both the enduring values and evolving realities of instructional design.

Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming the skills students need and the way educators design learning. Traditional Bloom’s Taxonomy, while foundational, no longer fully addresses the cognitive and ethical challenges of an AI-driven world. This session introduces a reframed Bloom’s Taxonomy that expands beyond Create to include a new Transform layer, empowering learners to apply knowledge for real-world change and social impact.

Drawing from the newly published white paper Reframing Bloom’s for the Age of AI, this session will demonstrate how institutions can move from fear to framework, using AI not as a threat but as a catalyst for deeper learning. Attendees will explore practical applications of the taxonomy and examine strategies for embedding AI literacy, fostering critical thinking, and cultivating adaptability across disciplines.

Join us to discover how reframing Bloom’s can help your institution strengthen pedagogy, support faculty innovation, and prepare future-ready graduates.

Online proctoring platforms promote strong exam integrity through identity verification, lockdown browsers, environmental monitoring, and participation tracking. Our field assessments show that these controls often fail under real-world conditions. Through replicated testing, we have demonstrated how individuals can complete proctored assessments with little or no genuine participation, and how AI tools now make these exploits more accessible, faster, and more reliable for learners intent on bypassing requirements.

In this session, we present validated findings from controlled replication of techniques actively shared within online learning communities and gated user groups. These exploits include scenarios where a learner with no language comprehension achieves a perfect score, where “multiple monitor” restrictions are bypassed using readily available configurations, and where protected exam content is captured or retained despite the presence of anti-copying controls. We also show how prompt engineering and basic AI models can produce accurate answers in real time, enabling users to appear compliant while contributing no meaningful engagement.

These outcomes create a significant disconnect between what digital learning systems report and what learners actually do. Institutions may unknowingly rely on assessment results that look legitimate but do not reflect true competence, participation, or readiness.

Participants will explore how identity assurance breaks down after authentication, why traditional proctoring methods fail to detect AI-enabled impersonation, and how online communities accelerate the spread of bypass techniques. Through interactive scenarios and guided analysis, attendees will learn how to validate their own assessment environments, detect indicators of compromised integrity, and apply practical due-diligence methods that improve defensibility. This evidence-based session equips distance learning professionals to protect assessment quality, strengthen verification models, and ensure that digital learning outcomes remain trustworthy in an era where AI can easily “become” the learner.

Understanding adult learners is a complex endeavor, akin to discerning what lies beneath the surface of a tree. Aligned with the USDLA 2026 Conference theme, “Exploring the Melodic Chords of Distance and Digital Learning,” Dr. Doran will present a multidisciplinary perspective on adult learning informed by his background as a forester, natural science educator, and assistant professor of adult and higher education. His insights are grounded in formal academic training, extensive professional experience with adult learners, and a longitudinal analysis of twelve years of graduate student learning autobiographies. These narratives reveal learners’ internal and often unarticulated experiences through reflective writing. The session will draw connections among the foundational assumptions of andragogy, transformative learning theory, asynchronous and synchronous learning modalities, and both historical and contemporary theories of adult learning. This interactive session will examine the challenges and opportunities associated with engaging adult learners in online environments. Participants will collaboratively explore key theoretical frameworks, including Malcolm Knowles’s andragogy, John Dewey’s experiential education, and Parker Palmer’s concept of instructor identity, to identify the diverse needs of adult learners. Building on this analysis, the session will review current research and evidence-based strategies for fostering meaningful and sustained connections with online students. Establishing strong online learning relationships is not only feasible but essential; educators must intentionally implement practices that promote deep engagement and meaningful learning experiences.

• Evaluate student understanding and misconceptions
• Identify recurring keywords, theories, and student interests
• Combine summaries across multiple boards to uncover thematic connections
• Build a semester-over-semester strategy for evolving discussion prompts
• Design a discussion board strategy that scaffolds ideas across a course

Building a centralized online learning unit in a historically decentralized university requires more than structure—it requires harmony. In this session, we share how Ohio University orchestrated a consultative, relationship-driven approach to unifying online learning operations across colleges, faculty, and student-facing teams. Rather than mandate change, we launched a sustained “charm offensive,” meeting partners one by one, listening deeply, and co-designing solutions that honored local needs while building toward a cohesive institutional vision.

This presentation highlights how we blended strategy, diplomacy, and community-building to strengthen trust; how we stitched together faculty, staff, and student voices; and how we built belonging for our 7,000 online students through intentional communities, virtual engagement spaces, recognition events, and shared identity. The result is an online ecosystem that resonates—where governance, quality, and student success operate in tune rather than in silos.

Attendees will leave with practical approaches to leading organizational change without positional authority, building distributed coalitions, and creating authentic community at scale in distance education. Through discussion and interactive polling, participants will reflect on their own institutional “melodies” and identify the relational strategies that can help them move toward greater harmony in their digital learning environments.

Educators across sectors are witnessing a rapid shift in how students engage with assessment as AI tools become commonplace. From AI-assisted drafting to copy-pasted responses, these changes are prompting deeper reflection on what assessment is meant to reveal, how thinking becomes visible, and how learning is authentically demonstrated in digital environments.

This interactive session invites participants to rethink assessment design for AI-rich contexts by centering intention, alignment, and professional judgment. Rather than focusing on detection or prohibition, the session emphasizes how well-designed assessments naturally surface reasoning, decision-making, and critical thinking, regardless of the tools learners may use.

The session opens by surfacing shared observations and tensions through live polling and facilitated discussion. Participants then engage with short instructional scenarios to examine how different assessment structures shape the kinds of thinking students are invited to demonstrate. Attention is given to how prompts, task design, and evaluation criteria either clarify expectations or unintentionally obscure learning goals.

Working in small groups, participants analyze an assessment element from their own context and identify opportunities to make thinking more explicit, purposeful, and aligned with intended outcomes. These design cycles occur more than once, allowing participants to refine ideas, learn from colleagues across sectors, and strengthen their thinking through comparison and reflection.

Participants leave with a clearer understanding of how assessment practices can evolve alongside AI, a concrete starting point for revising one aspect of assessment design, and shared language to guide ongoing conversations within their organizations.

At a time when technology, learning environments, and student needs evolve faster than institutions can adapt, educators often find themselves preparing for futures they cannot fully predict. UNESCO’s Futures Literacy (FL) offers a transformative approach: instead of forecasting the future, FL equips educators to use the future as a tool to better understand the present.

This interactive workshop introduces participants to the core principles of Futures Literacy and guides them through hands-on activities inspired by UNESCO’s Futures Literacy Laboratory (FLL) model. Educators will investigate their own assumptions, explore alternative futures for teaching and learning, and uncover new pathways for innovation, digital learning, and student success.

Participants will leave the session with actionable strategies for integrating Futures Literacy into curriculum design, strategic planning, digital pedagogy, and student support initiatives—empowering them to lead change rather than react to it.

Learning Objectives
By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to:
1.Define Futures Literacy and describe its role in helping educators think differently about change, uncertainty, and innovation.
2.Explain how assumptions about the future influence today’s instructional choices, technology adoption, and policy decisions.
3.Apply futures-thinking tools to examine scenarios involving digital learning, instructional design, and student engagement.
4.Use the structure of a Futures Literacy Lab to support planning, strategic visioning, and classroom innovation.
5.Identify ways Futures Literacy can promote equity, digital access, and student success across K–12 and higher education.

AI has changed what’s possible for learning teams—but most organizations are still using it like a fancy autocomplete tool. This session introduces Vibe Coding, a practical approach to using AI as a collaborative build partner for creating interactive learning experiences. Participants will see how conversational prompting, lightweight HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and existing authoring tools can be combined to prototype games, simulations, and interactions—without memorizing code or changing platforms. The focus is not on tools, but on thinking like a builder and designing interactions that actually support learning. Attendees will leave with repeatable patterns they can apply immediately inside the tools they already use.

As AI reshapes every professional field, from clinical care to financial analysis, institutions face growing pressure to prepare students with more than introductory exposure. Graduates need discipline-specific judgment: the ability to determine when AI outputs can be trusted, how to navigate messy or incomplete data, and which tools are appropriate in high-stakes professional contexts. Achieving that level of fluency requires industry-relevant, applied learning experiences that mirror the real demands of the workplace.

In this interactive workshop, Dr. Rachel Chung, Clinical Professor at William & Mary; Danielle Wozniak, Vice President for Global Strategy and Business Development at Yeshiva University; and Kathy Groth, Senior Vice President of Learning Design at Everspring, combine market-level insight, curriculum expertise, and learning design strategy to offer a comprehensive path forward. 

This session will guide participants through a series of structured exercises to map an authentic AI learning plan for their own programs. You’ll identify real-world situations where AI meaningfully impacts your discipline, break down the specific competencies required to perform those tasks effectively, and sketch short, realistic scenarios or exercises that can be adapted for your courses. You’ll also explore how these course-level practices align with broader institutional strategy, enrollment positioning, and long-term program sustainability.

The urgency is clear:
• Graduates without contextual AI competency will struggle to keep pace.
• Faculty who lack strategies for teaching discipline-specific AI risk falling behind.
• Institutions offering surface-level AI training will not stand out in a competitive market.

Participants will leave with field-tested insights, clear next steps, and a program-aligned roadmap to implement scalable, workforce-relevant AI learning that makes a measurable impact.

Writing-based learning tasks are integral to instruction across disciplines, yet the cognitive and behavioral processes underlying these tasks remain largely invisible in online and hybrid learning environments. Decades of research have demonstrated that writing quality is strongly associated with process-level behaviors such as planning, drafting, pausing, and revising rather than the final product alone (Emig, 1971; Flower & Hayes, 1981). Recent studies in writing-process analytics further indicate that even short-term exposure to process feedback can yield improvements in performance comparable to those observed over substantially longer instructional periods (Vandermeulen et al., 2023).

This AI Test Kitchen workshop examines the role of generative AI in supporting post-hoc interpretation of writing-based learning processes. Building on process-oriented feedback models, the session positions AI as an interpretive scaffold rather than an authorship or evaluative tool. Participants will engage with anonymized writing process reports that include drafting timelines, revision-density profiles, and composing-behavior indicators. These data will be used to explore how AI can translate raw process traces, such as prolonged pauses, rapid drafting bursts, and late-stage revisions, into structured explanatory narratives suitable for student reflection.

The workshop emphasizes the pedagogical use of AI as a metacognitive aid that facilitates learners’ ability to identify and articulate patterns in their own writing-based learning behaviors. Participants will examine the affordances and limitations of AI-assisted interpretation and consider implementation strategies appropriate for diverse online and blended instructional contexts. The session concludes with a discussion of instructional guardrails designed to preserve student agency and ethical use of generative technologies.

Too often as content designers, we jump into our PowerPoint or e-learning authoring tool without giving thought to our content's overarching "big idea" and really understanding the goals or "desired results" for our learners. This ends up with a lot of content being shared to an audience that might not exist.

In this interactive session, we'll look at the goal-directed, "backward design" approach to designing as discussed in Understanding by Design by McTighe and Wiggins. We'll work in groups to mind map a topic and determine what the big ideas really are do that the training offering can be more "learner-centric". Come prepared to collaborate with and learn from your peers!

In this session you will learn...

• How to obtain greater clarity around your subject matter.
• How to determine the "must know" information in your content.
• How to challenge the "expert blind spots" that prevent our content from resonating with students
• How to establish the "conceptual velcro" that holds your course content together

In today’s rapidly evolving educational landscape, distance and digital learning are no longer optional—they’re essential. Online experiences that truly engage and support learners require intentional design, not just technology. But how do we design online learning experiences that truly engage, empower, and support all learners? This session, “Curating Best Practices in Instructional Design for Distance and Digital Learning,” will explore proven strategies and frameworks that transform virtual classrooms into dynamic, inclusive learning environments.

Participants will discover:

• Core principles of effective instructional design for online learning.
• Practical techniques for increasing engagement and accessibility.
• Tools and technologies that enhance digital instruction.
• Real-world examples and solutions to common challenges.

Whether you’re an educator, instructional designer, or administrator, this session will provide actionable insights to help you create meaningful, high-quality learning experiences—anytime, anywhere. Join me and take your digital teaching to the next level!

• How employer-university partnerships can address recruitment challenges and retention through career-aligned education and other benefits.
• Leadership strategies for engaging and motivating adult learners in online programs through authentic, human-centered design.
• Scalable models of partnership-based enrollment pipelines applicable to other industries.

Join the Ohio DLA chapter for an inside look at how we build a vibrant professional community through strategic collaborations and webinars. Ohio DLA Chair Michele Carlisle and her team will showcase highlights from successful K-12 projects and provide a practical roadmap for implementing classroom collaborations. We will also explore how our chapter empowers local content providers and uses informational webinars to keep members connected and informed.