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.

Dr. Albrecht teaches in an online accelerated program (AOP) with an average of 85 students per class. In collaboration with Jiayi Wang, Learning Designer in Learning Technologies at Emporia State University, Dr. Albrecht has introduced innovative pedagogy for optimal student learning. Come and learn how she engages students for a face-to-face learning experience in an online course! Here is what students say about their learning experiences in these classes:

• "I really enjoyed your video lectures and the way you connected the learning content to real-life situations. I especially appreciated the examples you shared from your own experiences, as they made the concepts more meaningful and relatable. Another aspect I truly appreciated in your course was the thoughtful feedback on my assignments. Your comments were always encouraging and reflective, and they were written in a way that helped me grow as future leader while also building my confidence. Thank you."
• "This course was truly eye-opening. Completing the field experiences and intentionally reflecting on each one was extremely beneficial to my growth as a future school leader. The opportunity to shadow administrators at multiple levels allowed me to see firsthand the complexity of the principalship and the balance between instructional leadership and building management. These experiences helped me connect the coursework to real-world practice, especially in areas such as communication, decision-making, and supporting staff. Observing different leadership styles also helped me reflect on the type of leader I aspire to be and the importance of building trust and strong systems within a school. I also appreciated that the grading feedback was consistently positive, specific, and encouraging. Your feedback affirmed my thinking while also helping me deepen my reflection and consider additional leadership perspectives. Overall, this course has been one of the most valuable experiences in my program because it allowed me to learn directly from practicing administrators while reflecting on my own leadership development."
• "Dr. Albrecht is a great professor. She connects course content to real-life situations, allowing students to directly apply concepts that are taught. Dr. Albrecht provides thorough, meaningful feedback that allows students to think about what comes next, following each course assignment. Overall, I have thoroughly enjoyed working with Dr. Albrecht and taking this course."
• "Dr. Albrecht is a professor who clearly wants to help students. She is genuinely invested in their success and works hard to support them in achieving their goals. Thanks for a great course."
• "I appreciate your clear communication and quick turnaround time getting assignments graded. Thank you!"

 
Learn how to increase connectivity among and between students and instructor for more engaged online learning in Accelerated Online Educational Administration graduate courses.  For example, peek in on how weekly Zoom meetings are organized and used to conduct collaborative team decision-making as students work together live to solve problems building principals encounter through case scenarios. Rubric design and how to grade assignments using this innovative instruction and much more will be shared.  You do not want to miss out on how to organize and grade this advanced pedagogy.  Come learn how successful this strategy is in meeting learning outcomes for students.

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.

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.

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.