SIDLIT 2026

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.

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.

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.

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.