In virtual and hybrid learning, the “room” is invisible, but the tension isn’t. Misread tone, uneven participation, chat pile-ons, camera-off ambiguity, and cultural/generational divides can turn discussion into either silence or conflict. Many facilitators respond by over-controlling (policing tone, narrowing dialogue) or avoiding hard topics altogether. Both approaches shrink learning.
This session offers a practical framework for building Brave Online Rooms: learning environments that protect people from harm while still supporting honest dialogue, feedback, and intellectual risk. Participants will learn a clear distinction between discomfort (the normal sensation of growth, challenge, and difference) and harm (a breach of dignity, safety, or access), plus a simple decision tool to respond proportionally when tension shows up in Zoom, Teams, or asynchronous forums.
Attendees will practice designing a “container” for online learning: shared agreements, participation norms, and role clarity (facilitator, learners, moderators), and will leave with ready-to-use language for real-time intervention: how to pause a thread, name impact without blame, redirect participation, and re-open dialogue. The session includes a lightweight repair protocol for what to do after impact occurs, so trust can be rebuilt rather than quietly lost.
You’ll walk away with a one-page checklist and implementation plan you can apply immediately to live virtual sessions, hybrid classrooms, and online discussion boards, because online learning needs more than engagement strategies. It needs conversation infrastructure.
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All sessions, including workshops, are included in your registration fee. You do not need to sign up for specific sessions, although we will send a survey out a few weeks before the conference to ask which workshops you plan to attend so we can make appropriate room assignments and set ups. Additional sessions are still being added to the schedule so check back frequently for the most up-to-date information.
2026 USDLA National Conference
Welcome to Cleveland! All times listed below are Eastern Standard Time.
This schedule was last updated 2/9/2026
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.
This session explores the broader compliance landscape by examining two areas that exemplify this hidden labor. First, we will share findings from a recent survey focused on professional licensure compliance workload, highlighting where institutional effort originates, how responsibilities are distributed, and how regulatory complexity creates operational strain that is rarely reflected in policy discussions.
Second, we will turn to global compliance, where institutions face an additional and distinct set of expectations as they enroll students across borders. These responsibilities may include authorization requirements, consumer protection laws, and other regulatory frameworks that do not necessarily align with U.S. regulatory structure and often lack clear guidance.
By intentionally distinguishing between these compliance domains, this session will illustrate how layered requirements accumulate and interact. Attendees will gain insight into the unseen work supporting digital programs and why recognizing this effort is essential to building more aligned, sustainable, and student-centered compliance approaches.
"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.
Participants will explore how gratitude transforms relationships, builds stronger teams, and improves well-being across educational, corporate, and community settings. The session includes a live interactive exercise that helps attendees experience the impact of saying “thank you” with intention.
Attendees will leave with three practical tools for integrating gratitude into their teaching, leadership, or workplace culture. Each tool is designed to strengthen connection and foster inclusion.
If you want a session that restores perspective and provides tangible ways to make appreciation part of daily communication, this workshop will help you start right away by saying it now.
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.
This hands-on certification takes you through the 5-Quest, trademarked and proven process of gamifiying your corporate training, HR compliance, or adult education program. By following the 5-Quest plan, you are essentially assured a successful outcome. The concept is simple… create a course just like you would a game, with an intriguing storyline, stunning graphics coupled with drop-dead aesthetics, then add gameplay elements like obstacles, levels, unlocks, boosters, and rewards. As your learners overcome obstacles, achieve level ups, and unlock boosters, they’ll be learning and testing their skills. Throw in some in-game currency and your learners will be hooked on learning and earning as the feel-good hormones of dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, and oxytocin are released. Leverage the same techniques perfected by the gaming industry to captivate audiences by setting clear goals through game-like thinking, engaging stories, effective triggers, and continual feedback, recognition, and reward structures. These techniques boost motivation and engagement.
“Harmony in Action” reflects how SAIS EDT synchronizes Student Services, Instructional Technology, Admissions, and Instructional Design to create a seamless and personalized experience for online learners. This session will highlight how these departments collaborate to provide curated offerings from student-led journals and podcasts to taster lectures, hybrid residency planning, specialized help desks, and academic support roles that strengthen both instructional quality and community connection.
Participants will gain insight into how a harmonized services model enriches student engagement, enhances operational efficiency, and strengthens program identity. The session will showcase replicable strategies, examples of boutique services, and lessons learned that other institutions can adapt to build their own coordinated, learner-centered distance education ecosystems.
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.
Through rapid activities, visual annotation, and micro-design challenges, attendees will learn how to redesign traditional LMS prompts into high-impact learning experiences aligned with adult-learning principles and key Quality Matters standards. Instead of listening to a lecture about engagement, participants will feel it for themselves, then immediately apply the method to their own instructional context.
This session is designed for faculty, instructional designers, and administrators seeking practical strategies that increase authentic engagement, reduce AI misuse, and strengthen instructor presence without adding workload. Participants will leave with ready-to-use templates, a redesigned activity they created during the session, and a clear blueprint for elevating online learning with multimodal and Action-First learning.
AI didn't hand us a script. It handed us a jam session.
The organizations struggling with AI are the ones waiting for sheet music — clear instructions, defined processes, predictable outputs. But that's not how this works. AI is a collaborator that riffs, responds, and surprises. The question isn't how to control it. It's how to play with it.
Theater director turned AI strategist Josh Penzell shares what 20 years of live performance taught him about leading when the script runs out. How do you create harmony when everyone's improvising? How do you conduct a band that's making it up as they go? The answer isn't more control — it's better rehearsal.
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.
This approach is particularly transformative for those currently transitioning jobs, especially educators moving out of teaching into the corporate sector. These career changers often possess immense instructional expertise but struggle to translate classroom experience into the language of business results. By following this structured roadmap, they learn to reframe their pedagogical skills into core L&D competencies like stakeholder management and performance analysis. The first half of the sprint focuses on establishing a professional identity and organizing a project hub to manage digital assets effectively.
As participants move into the middle weeks, the focus shifts toward selecting high-impact projects that prove return on investment and selecting the most effective delivery platforms to house their work. During the final stages, the sprint emphasizes the integration of visual design elements and the use of AI as a co-pilot for refining project descriptions and improving content clarity. The session culminates in a peer-review phase with accountability buddies to ensure all links and interactions are functional and professional.
By the end of the six weeks, participants have transitioned from simply collecting files to possessing a dynamic living portfolio that acts as a primary interview tool. This strategy ensures that every professional, regardless of their starting point, has a validated vessel to showcase their brilliance and navigate the competitive hiring landscape with confidence and clear evidence of their capabilities.
The session will explore how instructional designers and faculty can use the tool to:
- 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.
What if every educator had a ready-to-use toolkit that made accessibility easier, faster, and fully aligned with WCAG 2.1/2.2 AA and the new Title II regulations? This session introduces Mission Accessible, a practical framework for building an accessibility toolkit that integrates templates, automated checkers, and AI-powered supports to reduce barriers and amplify learner voice across digital learning environments.
Participants will explore real templates for accessible course design, compare the strengths and limitations of leading accessibility checkers, and experiment hands-on with AI tools that generate captions, alt text, transcripts, and simplified content. Through interactive “Fix This Barrier” challenges, attendees will practice identifying and correcting accessibility issues using multiple approaches; from templates to automation to AI refinement.
This session is designed for faculty, instructional designers, accessibility specialists, and anyone seeking a streamlined approach to accessible digital learning. Attendees will leave with a customized Accessibility Toolkit Starter Pack, a clear workflow for integrating accessibility into course development, and practical strategies to help their institutions meet evolving accessibility requirements.
Join us for a fast-paced and fun-filled networking and demonstration session. Build your playlist of new ideas and tools by gathering insights from our exhibitors, award winners, speakers, and board members.
AI Can’t Fix Your Imposter Syndrome: How to Build Steady Confidence During Rapid Tech Change
AI is moving at internet speed—and a lot of really smart, capable people are quietly freaking out trying to keep up. Not because they can’t learn. Because the pace, the visibility, and the comparison are messing with their sense of safety.
In this TEDx-style talk, I’m naming what’s actually happening: AI didn’t create imposter syndrome—but it absolutely supercharged the conditions that trigger it. When everything is new and everyone’s “so excited to share,” your brain starts treating uncertainty like proof you don’t belong.
We’ll break down the confidence gap—the space between what you’re capable of and what your nervous system feels when tech changes fast. You’ll see the imposter loop in real time (trigger → body → story → behavior), why “just be confident” advice is basically useless, and what actually works when your chest gets tight and your brain goes blank.
And yes—we’re doing the tool. You’ll learn a simple 90-second reset you can use before high-stakes meetings, during a live demo, or anytime new tech lights up your self-doubt.
Because the goal isn’t to outrun AI.
The goal is to stay steady, stay human, and lead anyway.
Our system begins with an Instructor Credential that provides the skills, confidence, and strategies needed to succeed in virtual learning spaces. Instructors then complete a course review to prepare as subject matter experts before moving into teaching with the support of a mentor and fidelity tracking. Feedback is embedded at every step through course implementation reviews, standards-based evaluations, and tiered calibration of practice. To sustain growth and consistency, instructors engage in regular check-ins that blend elements of technical assistance and Community of Practice (CoP), as well as collaborative professional learning opportunities designed to foster innovation and shared success.
Participants will gain practical strategies for aligning the practices of onboarding, evaluation, and professional development into one cohesive framework. Together, we’ll explore how data-driven PD can create not just competent Instructors, but ones who bring energy, joy, and authenticity into every online classroom.
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.
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.
From creating secret competition judging systems to managing grade catastrophes, each scenario represents an authentic challenge that required us to push our LMS beyond its intended design. Make critical decisions through interactive Google Forms—choose wisely and become an LMS hero, choose poorly and experience hilarious (but educational) disasters.
This high-energy, hands-on workshop transforms mundane platform limitations into creative problem-solving opportunities. You'll discover how rubrics, release conditions, and gradebook settings can be combined in unexpected ways to solve "impossible" requests.
Perfect for anyone who's received a Friday afternoon emergency email and thought "there has to be a way." Leave with practical solutions, cross-institutional connections, and renewed confidence that no LMS challenge can defeat you. Come prepared to laugh, learn, and level up your creative problem-solving skills!
Participants will gain an inside look at the team’s process and explore practical strategies for responsibly and effectively incorporating GenAI into their own course design practices. Through guided, hands-on prompting exercises, attendees will experiment directly with GenAI tools, building confidence and beginning to compose their own “AI-assisted score” for upcoming curriculum development projects.
Consistent with the conference theme of “Universal Harmony,” we emphasize the structures that create institutional coherence—sprint calendars with backward-design checkpoints; WCAG/UDL-aligned quality gates; faculty collaboration and governance; and responsible-AI guardrails for transparency, bias mitigation, and privacy. Within that coherent frame, we also show how AI-assisted prototyping and light gamification (branching scenarios, progress loops, and low-stakes challenges tied to outcomes) expand design creativity without sacrificing rigor. Participants will examine concrete artifacts—templates, checklists, RACIs, and a KPI dashboard linking quality, equity, cost, and throughput—and apply them to their own contexts.
Attendees will leave with actionable strategies to unify digital initiatives, scale without sacrificing academic standards, and sustain long-term financial health. The session is designed for academic leaders, online learning leaders, instructional design directors, and student-success teams seeking to orchestrate stronger alignment across their online ecosystems.
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.
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
L/IDs possess crucial skills in online learning theory, course alignment, accessibility (Universal Design for Learning), media selection, activity design, and technology integration. Their involvement ensures coherence, consistency, and clarity while adhering to Quality Assurance standards, resulting in a strong focus on the Learner Experience (LX).
This collaborative partnership facilitates a "faster, better build." While the SME focuses on creating and refining content, the L/ID manages complex tasks like learning alignment, technical course build, and scaffolding. Working together significantly saves time for the faculty member and preemptively eliminates common problems. This collaboration results in a more engaging and accessible course that is purpose-built for the online environment. Don’t go solo—work with a L/ID producer to help mold your vision into a chart-topping course.
Given this demand, NC-SARA is considering expanding their annual data collection and reporting. This session will explore what data elements might be useful for institutions, states, and external researchers, and engage the audience in a conversation around what they would like to know about today’s distance education learners. Attendees will have the opportunity to influence NC-SARA’s future data collection and publicly available data dashboards.
The Center offers in-person opportunities such as internships, field trips, job shadowing, and school collaborations. It also provides teachers nationwide with immersive experiences through Connected Career Rounds. This virtual program brings teams of Cleveland Clinic caregivers into K-12 classrooms via Zoom. Each episode follows a clinical scenario, highlighting 4–6 professionals with varying degrees and certifications. The sessions feature clinical simulations and demonstrations where professionals explain their roles and share their career journeys, followed by a live Q&A.
For classrooms unable to attend live, episodes and additional resources—such as video spotlights on in-demand careers—are available on the program’s learning platform. This session will discuss the program’s structure, logistics, and recruitment strategies. Attendees can expect an interactive experience involving polling, resource exploration, and discussion.
In higher education, instructors and instructional designers collaborate to create quality online courses. What if there were a tool that could assist with the design of your online course modules? There is! Use AI (ChatGPT) to help design course-level learning objectives, or to design a performance-based assignment, or to design the module learning activities, or all of the above.
Using AI based on ChatGPT, there is a tool form that will generate all of the above without the need to learn how to prompt.
Attendees will unpack the Four-Quarters Recovery System—a rhythmic framework blending decisive action, Ivy Lee prioritization, and calm leadership—to rebound stronger after intense deliverables. Through engaging polls, group reflections, and practical tools, you'll gain strategies to sustain enthusiasm, prevent overwhelm, and elevate online learning from memorable to mission-changing. Join this interactive session to empower your leadership, fostering resilient teams that drive USDLA's vision of quality, flexible digital education.
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!
This session presents a research-informed case study from Southwest University at El Paso’s (SU) partnership with HHS, LLC. This partnership illustrates how academic institutions can partner directly with employers to create mutually beneficial student/employee-centric initiatives. These partnerships help establish enrollment pathways that double as internal mobility pipelines.
Through this pilot collaboration, SU and HHS, LLC have co-designed undergraduate online degree tracks in healthcare and business that directly align with employees’ and employer’s professional advancement goals. The initiative integrates employer supported academics, customized learning, and faculty mentoring that bridges industry expertise with academic rigor.
Attendees will gain insight into:
- 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.
The session focuses on instructional intent first, followed by practical AR design patterns that work in mobile environments. Attendees will learn how to translate learning objectives into spatial interactions, layer digital content onto the physical world, and deploy AR experiences that are realistic to support and scale inside organizations.
No prior AR or coding experience is required.
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