SUNY Effective Online Practices – 2026 Entries

Butler Library has created asynchronous learning modules to assist students with library research methods. These modules are hosted in a Brightspace organization and all students and faculty have access to them at any time. Badges and credits are available for each module so students can display their achievements in their Brightspace profile. Faculty can assign these modules or use them within their own course shells and the content is openly licensed through a CC-BY license. As always, librarians are available to meet with students to assist them. In order to earn the badges, students will have to review all content in the module, watch the tutorial videos, and answer quizzes at a passing rate. Each module address a different library research competency and the amount of time to successfully complete a badge will vary by student and by module. These modules also serve as an asynchronous delivery of typical in-person library information literacy workshops. Through this method, the library can serve online programs and courses.

Stony Brook University’s Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT) offers the Online Teaching Course (OTC), a research‑based, 15‑hour asynchronous program that prepares instructors to design and facilitate high‑quality online learning experiences. The OTC immerses faculty in the student perspective while modeling evidence‑based online teaching practices aligned with OSCQR course quality, accessibility, and RSI expectations. Participants engage with core concepts such as the Community of Inquiry framework, Regular and Substantive Interaction (RSI), backward design, online syllabus development, assessment strategies, instructional resources, course alignment mapping, generative AI in teaching, educational technologies, findability, and OSCQR course quality standards.

Throughout the course, instructors complete learning tasks including VoiceThread introductions, discussion board interactions, knowledge‑check quizzes, course alignment mapping, recording a welcome video, and reviewing the OTC using a modified OSCQR rubric. They also participate in FeedbackFruits interactive activities to enhance engagement throughout the course. Redesigned in March 2020 and continuously updated, the OTC has received consistently positive feedback, with more than 680 faculty completing the course. The OTC now serves as a high‑impact professional development model that strengthens online teaching across disciplines at Stony Brook University.

This effective online practice describes a scaffolded instructional design approach embedded in a graduate-level online course that develops students’ AI literacy and fluency while reinforcing their role as skilled human designers in the instructional process. Through a carefully sequenced series of persona-based assignments, students move from low-risk experimentation with AI tools to higher-stakes, ethical application in instructional design.

Students first construct and evaluate a learner persona of themselves, using AI optionally to build awareness of how AI generates, represents, and sometimes misrepresents learner characteristics. They then apply these evaluation skills to construct and iteratively refine three learner personas for an instructional microteaching project, addressing learner background, goals, and disabilities. Throughout this process, students are required to act as the human in the loop, critically reviewing AI outputs, correcting assumptions, and making informed design decisions.

In the culminating phase, students design a single learning experience that serves all three diverse learners and justify how their lessons, materials, and activities are scaffolded, accessible, and differentiated within a shared instructional context. Assessment emphasizes instructional reasoning and reflection rather than AI-generated output. This transferable, tool-agnostic approach models ethical, inclusive, and pedagogically sound AI use in online graduate education.

Grounded in the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework, EduAlly is an AI-powered tutoring tool emerging from interdisciplinary collaboration between Special Education and Computer Science at SUNY Brockport. Designed to provide immediate, formative, and constructive feedback, EduAlly aims to support learners across disciplines in revising their work, deepening content understanding, and engaging in reflective learning.

The EduAlly project also offers high‑impact practice opportunities to undergraduate Computer Science students and members of the ACM SIGAI Student Chapter. Students form teams and engage in hands-on activities such as application development, refinement, problem-solving, and troubleshooting, during which they gain experiential learning experience.

In 2024–2025, 74 pre‑service teachers piloted EduAlly in Special Education courses, while faculty closely monitored the process and provided ongoing support. Results demonstrated statistically significant improvement in assignment resubmission and positive perceptions of the clarity, specificity, immediacy, and usefulness of AI‑generated feedback.

Initially expanding to three faculty across three disciplines in Fall 2025, EduAlly has now scaled up to seven faculty across six disciplines on four SUNY campuses. It aligns with the AI in information literacy competence SUNY General Education Framework recommends, offers innovative online practice through equitable access to AI-powered feedback, and is flexible, scalable, and impactful.

Cortland Apple is a gratitude project started by Cortland’s Center for Teaching and Learning. We use the Brightspace Announcements to solicit thank you notes “Apples” from students at the end of the semester. Positive student feedback has been shown to increase instructor performance. The thank you notes introduced our new Center for Teaching and Learning to faculty and filled a perceived appreciation gap, for free!

Hudson Valley Community College (HVCC) ensures quality and accessibility in online course design through its 7‑week Online Instructor Training course, which embeds accessibility as a core principle. Each module highlights ADA compliance components relevant to the week’s topics, such as introducing Universal Design when faculty begin working in the Brightspace LMS. Throughout the training, instructors use the materials to guide accessible course development, and upon completion, they undergo an OSCQR review to confirm quality and accessibility standards. This accessibility‑first approach has since been expanded to other campus workshops, including Brightspace Basics, video creation, and digital learning tools.

HVCC has maintained formal ADA compliance protocols since 2009, requiring instructional designers to train faculty in universal design principles and accessible web content creation. In 2015, the college redesigned its training programs to integrate accessibility by design across all tools and instructional strategies. The addition of LMS accessibility auditing tools further supports faculty in evaluating and improving their content.

The college’s practices have effectively increased faculty awareness and resulted in an average LMS accessibility score of 88 percent. Collaboration among instructional designers, faculty, and the Center for Access and Assistive Technology ensures quick resolution of concerns. This strong foundation has positioned HVCC to meet updated ADA Title II regulations with revised training materials and expanded compliance workshops.