The EDUCAUSE Teaching and Learning Snapshot Series is a quarterly webinar event highlighting real practices, emerging approaches, and lessons learned from higher ed professionals working at the intersection of teaching and learning, technology, and data.
Each 60-minute Snapshot webinar:
Note: Each TL Snapshot requires individual registration. Don’t miss out—secure your spot for each webinar.
Great learning experiences don’t happen by accident. This session of the TL Snapshot series highlights innovative approaches to instructional design across in-person, hybrid, and online learning environments. Professionals across six different institutions will share how they design engaging, inclusive, and effective learning experiences while responding to changing technologies, learners, and institutional priorities.
At Coppin State University, faculty in social work, special education, and visual arts are using Blackboard's AI Conversations to give students a low-stakes space to practice, role-play, and reflect. In this snapshot, I'll share how we design these activities with experience first and assessment second, what students revealed when we stopped asking for polished answers and started listening, and practical design moves you can adapt for your own courses. Every discipline has a conversation waiting to be designed. What would you want to hear your students talk about?
GAIT (Generative AI Techniques) is a pedagogically grounded approach to helping instructional designers use generative AI with purpose rather than simply adopting new tools. Through practical job aids and design strategies, GAIT positions AI as a partner in the instructional design process while keeping human judgment, learning goals, and context at the center. This snapshot shares how GAIT can help instructional designers guide responsible AI use, support faculty decision-making, and design learning experiences that prioritize critical thinking and intentional engagement.
How can we design learning experiences that use AI to support students while keeping their reasoning, discernment, and growth at the center? Through a concrete example of a case-based learning activity, this snapshot will explore how students can develop an initial interpretation, use AI to examine alternative perspectives, and deepen their thinking through peer dialogue and reflection, with practical design questions participants can apply to their own teaching.
Instructional designers rebuild the same components every term. This snapshot shows how design standards became a reusable AI "skill" — decision rules, accessibility requirements, and verbatim content protections — that turns narrated PowerPoint lectures into accessible, SCORM-packaged Canvas modules with transcripts and interactive practice blocks. Using a 60-slide epidemiology module as the worked example, we walk through the skill's structure, the automated checks that confirm every source sentence survived, and where faculty judgment still decides: alt text, copyright, and approval of every practice item.
We present a collaborative, pedagogy-first model that bridges the roles of faculty, instructional designers, and instructional media team in preparing effective online learning content for Generation Alpha. Grounded in and extending ADDIE, the model is based on an implemented experience at the American University of Beirut and demonstrates how clearer roles, collaborative workflows, and purposeful media integration can enhance online learning design.
To extend instructional design support beyond regular working hours, one researcher is developing a Chrome extension that serves as a virtual instructional designer. SmartID is grounded in online pedagogical best practices, institutional quality guidelines, and course development resources. SmartID will coach faculty by answering questions in a secure environment while keeping human instructional designers central to curricular decisions and approvals. All final design and content decisions and approvals will involve human IDs and relevant stakeholders.
EDUCAUSE provides real-time AI captioning for all online events, in the main room and also in breakout rooms. To request any additional accommodations and/or services, please send an email to [email protected] or call (303) 449-4430 for assistance.
Please review the EDUCAUSE Virtual Event Policies and Expectations for detailed information. View EDUCAUSE Virtual Event Policies and Expectations→