SIDLIT 2026

Adult learners bring rich experiences, varied education levels, competing responsibilities, and different learning preferences into asynchronous online courses. Designing in Canvas requires more than uploading content. It requires intentional structure, multiple modalities, and authentic application. 
 
This session will explore practical adult learning strategies for designing asynchronous Canvas courses that engage diverse learners. Participants will leave with a clear understanding of how adult learning principles inform asynchronous course design in Canvas. 

Each of us has perhaps thousands of images in our cell phones, but what are we doing with them once they have been taken?  Do they just remain dormant in our cloud platforms? Let's use those intriguing images to be the driving force to create a very short story of six words or less.


A legendary tale has it that famed 20th century author, Ernest Hemingway (1970), is credited with creating this story writing technique. Yet, this poster presentation will elevate this writing technique by adding impactful images to each short story.


This workshop will have participants use their critical thinking skills to choose an image and craft six words or less to tell a complete story.


Be inspired to use this story writing technique as a team building activity for your next upcoming team project!


Last, preview a vetted set of images and very short stories from Emporia State University students, faculty, homeschool students, the Midwest, and other regions. Ultimately, these images and very short stories that were showcased at the Emporia Art Center this past April and May.
 
Participants will be charged with the following tasks:
--Be concise; remember you have up to six words maximum.
--Only select words that are meaningful; critical thinking skills are required.  ;-)
--You must share a complete story.
--Consider adding conflict, action, or a resolution.
--Again, carefully, choose your words.
--Evoke an emotion, surprise, smile, curiosity, or challenge the reader’s imagination to fill in the gaps of a larger narrative not told, but implied.
--Let the readers create a bigger ending in their minds.  There is power in what is NOT being said.

Ever feel like your classroom assessments and your course learning objectives are speaking two entirely different languages? It’s a common trap: we plan fascinating weekly lectures and activities, only to realize at midterms that our exams don't quite match what we actually expected students to master.


In this hands-on, 90-minute workshop, participants will use the framework of backwards design to build courses where every assignment, quiz, and lecture serves a distinct purpose. You will learn how to align your course with the spectrum of broad institutional goals and program standards down to measurable, daily course competencies. Using Bloom’s Taxonomy as our compass, we will analyze the cognitive levels of our objectives to ensure our summative assessments actually measure higher-order thinking (applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating) rather than just rote memorization. Providing clear evidence of student learning is essential for instructional improvement and accountability.


This is not a passive lecture. Come with a course in mind to create a concrete learning plan. You will walk away not just with theoretical knowledge, but with an actionable blueprint for a course unit that guarantees alignment and drives student success.

Don’t Miss the SIDLIT 2026 Scavenger Hunt—Only for In‑Person Attendees! 
Want a fun, interactive way to meet new colleagues and experience Emporia beyond the conference sessions? Join our SIDLIT Scavenger Hunt, an exclusive in‑person activity designed to spark connection, curiosity, and a little friendly competition!
Team up with fellow attendees from different institutions, follow clues, and uncover hidden gems along the way. But the real reward? The first three teams who complete the hunt will win dinner in downtown Emporia, giving you the perfect opportunity to continue conversations, build meaningful connections, and enjoy the local food scene together.
This is more than just a game—it’s a chance to network in a relaxed, memorable way and experience the community that’s hosting you.
 Come for the conference. Stay for the adventure. Leave with new connections.

The rapid growth of technology is a catalyst for changes in pedagogies. Traditionally, instructors create sequential, linear learning modules.  However, what are the important considerations when incorporating innovative technologies? 

               The driving factor for using any emerging technology should be supporting learning objectives, not showcasing exciting, novel functions.  The SAMR model (substitution, augmentation, modification, and redefinition) proposed by Dr. Ruben Puentedura provides a useful framework for adapting any technology.  When instructors first begin incorporating technologies into courses, they often focus on substitution and augmentation. For example, converting materials to a digital file (substitution) or creating a fun Kahoot game (augmentation).  The primary goal of the substitution and augmentation stages is to use technology to enhance learning.  The last two stages, modification and redefinition levels, aim to incorporate technology to transform learning.

                     Alan Carrington’s Padagogy Wheel (Pedagogy Wheel for apps, so it is spelled as “Padagogy Wheel”) is another useful framework to incorporate technologies to support learning, which incorporates Bloom’s taxonomy, SAMR model, and popularly used tools. The traditional learning design is usually linear and step-by-step. Some simulation and virtual reality settings allow learners to explore several avenues from multiple entry points. Therefore, the modules are now interconnected and require redesign.  Focusing on learner experience (UX), which includes focusing on meaningful, engaging, and inclusive class experiences, is another key consideration.
                     In addition to aligning with course learning objectives, utilizing theoretical frameworks such as SAMR and the Padagogy wheel, prioritizing learner experience, and adjusting pedagogy to the type of technology, it is also important to maintain accessibility compliance.

                     Every class is different, and each instructor is unique. Participants will draft their own personalized technology integration and collaborate by sharing ideas and resources.

Instructional designers constantly face challenges at their job. Given the interdisciplinary nature of the field and the considerable variances from position to position, it is vital to understand the instructional design (ID) professionals’ own experiences. This paper reports voices from novice ID professionals on the essential requirements of their ID work, and essential ID professional characteristics. From analyzing interviews with seven ID professionals from a variety of work contexts, the study reveals that the variety of key responsibilities fall onto four dimensions on contradictory ends, indicating four sets of characteristics that ID professionals need to learn to balance well. The findings present the four sets of characteristics in a spider web form with an instructional design at the center, promoting a shift to taking a holistic approach when developing competencies. This paper bears practical implications for aspiring and novice instructional designers, faculty who provide education for ID students, and employers who aim to look for the best fits for the positions, making contributions to the education of instructional designers, hiring and further professional development of ID professionals.

As generative AI becomes increasingly embedded in online and blended education, instructors face a difficult question: how can learning be supported and assessed when students can quickly generate polished answers, explanations, lesson materials, and multimedia products? Much of the current conversation focuses on academic integrity, prompt writing, tool adoption, or AI-use policies. While these issues are important, they do not fully address a deeper instructional question: what does meaningful learning look like when AI-generated output becomes part of the learning process? This work-in-progress session begins with a dialectical autoethnographic inquiry into a 24-turn interaction between the presenter and a generative AI system. Although the interaction began with a personally meaningful problem related to IRA planning, the focus of the analysis is not financial decision-making. Rather, the episode is used as a situated case for examining how learning unfolds within a human–AI–artifact system. Preliminary analysis suggests that AI-generated outputs should not be treated as final answers, neutral tools, or authoritative explanations. Instead, they function as epistemically unstable learning materials that require human verification, revision, justification, and synthesis. Building from this analysis, the session translates the emerging theoretical insight into practical strategies for online and blended teaching. The presenter will introduce assignment and assessment structures that foreground process evidence rather than only final products, including prompt archives, revision logs, delta reports, AI feedback loops, AI defense activities, peer process audits, and reflective synthesis prompts. These strategies are designed to help instructors evaluate how students define problems, examine AI-generated output, verify information, revise their thinking, justify decisions, and produce a defensible final synthesis. Participants will leave with a conceptual vocabulary for understanding generative AI-mediated learning and a set of adaptable strategies for designing assignments that make student judgment visible. The session is intended for educators, instructional technologists, online program leaders, and educational technology researchers interested in moving beyond AI-use compliance toward more rigorous, reflective, and assessable forms of AI-supported learning.

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) avatars—digital representations of human instructors driven by synthesized speech, natural language processing, and advanced kinematic video generation—represent a structural shift in how asynchronous educational content is designed, delivered, and consumed. This session will provide introductory material for the design, implementation and sources for generating these technologies in higher ed.

This session explores how NotebookLM can transform both studying and content delivery in higher education. Participants will see a demonstration of how NotebookLM can be used to create and manage Open Educational Resources (OER). The session will also highlight its value as a student learning tool, including features such as interactive chat, AI-generated podcasts, quizzes, slides, flashcards, infographics, study guides, and mind maps. Because NotebookLM is grounded in user-provided materials, it offers a reliable and focused AI experience for both instructors and students.

Canvas is packed with powerful features that can save instructors time, improve course quality, and enhance the student experience, yet many of these tools remain underutilized. In this session, participants will explore practical Canvas tips and hidden gems, including targeted messaging in the Gradebook, content recovery tools, accessibility features, page design enhancements, and AI-supported workflows. Attendees will leave with actionable strategies to streamline course management, create more accessible and engaging content, and make better use of Canvas’s built-in capabilities.
Participants are recommended to attend with a laptop and try these tips during the presentation. 

Have you ever suddenly found yourself in charge after your supervisor moved on to a better opportunity? That happened to me in October 2024, and I was left to keep our tech systems running smoothly.
Over the past year-and-a-half, I’ve tackled everything from failing server drives to submitting board and credit card reports. It’s been a steep learning curve, but also an incredibly rewarding one.
I’d love to share some of the lessons I’ve learned—and hear about your experiences too. What challenges have you faced when stepping into a leadership role unexpectedly?

Current work in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) emphasizes partnership with students as a high impact practice that can reshape curriculum design and review, especially in online and hybrid environments. Instead of treating students primarily as sources of survey data, partnership models invite them to co-formulate questions about learning, interpret evidence, and redesign assignments, policies, and syllabus language. This session introduces SoTL as systematic, context sensitive inquiry into student learning that is informed by prior scholarship and made public, then focuses on what changes when students and colleagues are invited into that inquiry as partners rather than recipients in distance learning contexts.
 
To make this concrete, the session highlights two simple online activities that instructors can adapt in their own courses. A feedback partnership map helps faculty move beyond sole reliance on end of course surveys by identifying alternative, dialogic ways to invite students into ongoing conversations about assignments, criteria, and learning experiences in virtual spaces. A mini-partnership studio shows how students can act as co-designers of an assignment or rubric in a shared digital space, suggesting revisions, surfacing bottlenecks, and helping articulate SoTL questions about the impact of the redesign on learning at a distance. Generative tools may appear as optional aids for organizing feedback or exploring alternative wording, but they are not the center of the work. The emphasis is on collaborative SoTL practices that deepen learning, enhance belonging, and build sustainable cultures of shared inquiry about teaching online.

An OER faculty stipend grant program was created in 2024 at a community college. This presentation provides an overview of the stipend program, how librarians marketed, engaged with stakeholders, and shared efforts implemented across campus to introduce faculty to the benefits of using OERs within the classroom. The current status of accepted faculty OER projects, challenges experienced in the creation of this campus initiative, and planned future improvements will be addressed.

SIGs are a networking opportunity to allow professionals to collaborate on relevant topics. These are held over the lunch hour. Hosts prepare questions and facilitate a discussion on the topic of their choice.

As generative AI becomes easier for students and educators to access, many institutions are responding with policies, permissions, restrictions, and detection tools. While these conversations matter, they often miss a central instructional design question: What learning is the assignment supposed to protect?
This session reframes AI guardrails as a learning design issue rather than a compliance checklist. Participants will examine how AI can support learning without replacing the thinking, decision-making, practice, and evidence students are meant to develop. Using practical examples from classroom and online learning contexts, the session will introduce a guardrails audit that helps educators identify which parts of a task may be AI-supported, which parts must remain student-owned, and what evidence can make student thinking visible.
Attendees will consider how guardrails can support academic integrity, accessibility, student agency, and meaningful engagement without relying only on surveillance or tool bans. The session is designed for educators, instructional designers, faculty/staff support professionals, and technology leaders who are helping others make responsible decisions about AI use in learning environments.
Participants will leave with adaptable questions they can use to review assignments, discussions, projects, and assessments at their own institutions or organizations.

By the end of the session, attendees will: 


Understand the core principles of micro lecture design. 


Learn how to integrate micro lectures into their own teaching or training programs. 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming higher education, yet many instructional implementations position students as passive consumers of AI-generated content rather than active participants in the learning process. Emerging research suggests that excessive reliance on AI tools may reduce learner autonomy, weaken self-regulated learning behaviors, and contribute to what scholars describe as “metacognitive laziness.” While AI-powered systems can improve academic performance and provide adaptive support, little research has examined instructional approaches that require students to critically engage with and improve AI-generated outputs.


This study proposes a human-AI co-design instructional model in which students actively evaluate, critique, and revise AI-generated content rather than simply accepting AI responses. Using a convergent mixed-methods research design, the study will investigate how this approach influences learner agency, cognitive load, and academic performance among undergraduate students in higher education. Approximately 40–60 students will participate in a quasi-experimental comparison between a traditional instructional environment and a human-AI co-design learning environment. Quantitative data will be collected through pre- and post-assessments, learner agency surveys, and cognitive load measurements, while qualitative data will be gathered through interviews, written reflections, and learning management system interaction logs. 


The study seeks to address three important gaps in current literature: the limited examination of students as active evaluators of AI outputs, the lack of understanding regarding cognitive load in AI co-design environments, and the unresolved tension between AI-driven personalization and learner autonomy. Findings are expected to provide practical guidance for educators, instructional designers, and higher education institutions seeking to integrate AI in ways that enhance critical thinking, learner engagement, and meaningful learning outcomes.

In this presentation I will share the results of a recently completed study of graduate students' lived experience of a pedagogy of care in an online asynchronous learning environment. The results are compared to the experiences of undergraduate students reported in the scholarly literature.  The study focused exclusively on graduate students and aims to current research on the application of Noddings’ (2013) model of care to online contexts. Using an interpretative phenomenological approach, we analyzed participant-generated documents within an online, asynchronous course. Findings revealed few differences between graduate and undergraduate experiences of care pedagogy. Results support two proposed extensions to Noddings’ framework: Robinson et al.’s (2020) division of modeling to two contexts, course design and teaching, and Byrd et al.’s (2025) concept of anticipation. Although limited in generalizability, this exploratory qualitative study contributes to understanding an understudied population and reinforces evidence that care-centered pedagogy can mitigate negative aspects of asynchronous learning, such as feelings of isolation and disempowerment (Burke & Lamar, 2021), which are associated with reduced learning success.

This session explores how instructors can use Microsoft Copilot to re/design course assignments and rubrics to better align with course- and program-level learning outcomes and increase student autonomy; we will also discuss using Copilot in creating and revising rubrics. Drawing on examples from undergraduate psychology courses, we will consider and practice how to use Copilot to create or revise SLO-driven assignments while maintaining flexibility and supporting student autonomy.
 
Participants will work through examples of assignment revision using Copilot and see how those changes shape the development of clearer, better aligned rubrics. By looking at concrete before-and-after examples, we will explore how small adjustments in assignment design (i.e., language, weight, adding examples and models) can improve student understanding of expectations and help make assessment more straightforward, which can also increase student performance.
 
This session focuses on practical uses of Copilot, and by the end, participants will have had the opportunity to redesign an assignment or rubric implemented in their own courses using Copilot. The focus is not on adding more work, but on using Copilot as support that helps instructors create assignments and rubrics that fit more strategically and intentionally within the course arc.

High engagement doesn’t come from expensive tools; it comes from intentional design. In this session, we’ll share how our nonprofit team builds highly engaging Canvas professional development for adult learners ages 14–70+ by thoughtfully selecting and layering the right tools for the right purpose. 
You’ll see real examples of how we use Canvas with interactive slides, flip cards, embedded activities, and structured discussions; alongside aligned objectives, reflection, and knowledge checks; to create meaningful learning experiences. More importantly, we’ll unpack the “why” behind each choice: how we match tools to learning goals, cognitive load, application, and desired levels of interaction. 
Leave with practical engagement strategies and tools that are purposeful, scalable, and budget-conscious; no premium integrations required.