9:00-9:45AM ET
Teaching with AI: The Need for Mastery of Subject Matter in an Increasingly Artificial World
Presenter: Mark Mattson, SUNY Polytechnic Institute
Description: This seminar will discuss the need for educators to adapt to and address AI models within their instruction. It will focus on teaching within the context of civil engineering problems and provide a framework for use within other paradigms. Two case studies will be used to demonstrate incorrect output from AI models and the need for mastery of subject matter to effectively use AI. Ultimately, the seminar will provide a framework for the responsible use of AI within an engineering context that can be adapted for other focus areas.
10:00-10:45AM ET
AI in the Human(ities): Lessons from a 30-Second Film Assignment for Students and Their Instructor
Presenter: Dr. Mária I. Cipriani, SUNY Old Westbury
Description: Online learning has opened the possibility of college to students managing time poverty, family obligations, and long commutes, and to learners for whom a physical campus is a barrier. Ubiquitous AI complicates that promise. Students stretched thin are tempted to let a chatbot do the work, and many are unsure where help ends and shortcut begins.
This talk presents a History of US Film course that deliberately uses AI in specific assignments. Its first assignment asks students to use AI tools to create an original 30-second film in the style of the silent era. Some student films were genuinely original. Others were near-copies of Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon, or missed how music shapes a silent film’s meaning. Because of the course’s asynchronous format, the instructor waited until students had submitted their first attempts, then released an instructor-created film and the prompt behind it. Attendees will see both. Together they show what AI can produce and what students still must understand for themselves.
The central lesson applies to every online classroom: as students learn new skills with AI, educators must learn new skills too. Attendees will leave with an adaptable assignment model and practical ways to read AI-assisted student work.
11:00-11:45AM ET
Teaching with Intention: Translating Beliefs into Online Practice
Presenter: Michelle Connolly, University at Buffalo
Description: If someone looked only at your online course, what might they assume you believe about teaching and learning? We all hold beliefs about how students learn—through practice, feedback, interaction, reflection, application, or perhaps something else. But how clearly do those beliefs show up in our online teaching?
In a face-to-face classroom, instructors make countless decisions in the moment: explaining something differently when students look confused, prompting discussion, offering feedback, adjusting an activity, or making connections between ideas. Online, many of those same instructional choices must be anticipated and intentionally enacted through the learning environment.
In this interactive session, we’ll explore the relationship between what we believe about teaching and learning and what students actually experience in our online courses. Through reflection and practical examples, participants will examine how teaching beliefs can become visible through choices about structure, communication, interaction, practice, feedback, assessment, and accessibility—and consider where there may be a disconnect between what we believe and what our online teaching communicates. Participants will leave with a simple question they can use to examine their own online teaching and identify opportunities to make their instructional choices more intentional.
12:00-12:45PM ET
11:59: The Last Minute of the Traditional Assignment: Creative Assessment in Asynchronous Courses
Presenter: Katherine A. Dermody, SUNY Empire State University
Description: Every online instructor knows 11:59 p.m. It is the moment students are finishing, uploading, and trying to get something into the submission box before the deadline. For years, asynchronous courses have relied heavily on familiar forms of assessment: papers, discussion posts, quizzes, and written reflections. Generative AI has placed new pressure on those assignments and raised an old question with new urgency: How do we know our students are actually learning?
Drawing from experience teaching more than 120 asynchronous students each term, this session explores a broader assessment toolkit for online teaching. Participants will examine approaches that move beyond dependence on the traditional term paper without abandoning writing altogether. Examples will include reflective journals, VoiceThread, short, recorded assessments, oral interviews and defenses, small-group work through Teams, artifact and primary-source inquiry, student-created presentations and exhibits, Mid Term call in. and challenge-based assessment in which students investigate a problem, make a decision, or defend an interpretation using course evidence.
Student choice is also vital to this approach. Assessments do not always need to take one form. Students may be given options to demonstrate learning through an oral conversation, recorded video, narrated presentation, digital exhibit, or another course-appropriate format. Providing multiple approaches can preserve academic expectations while empowering students to draw on their strengths, encouraging curiosity and deeper learning. The session will also explore creative assessments that are being implemented in Brightspace. Challenge-based methods, including mystery-source challenges, decision rooms, evidence hunts, AI critique activities, and alternative ways students can apply their learning.
John Dewey’s emphasis on experience and inquiry offers an important foundation for reconsidering what meaningful learning can look like in a digital environment. The goal is not to make assignments “AI-proof” or to replace traditional assessment entirely. It is to expand the ways students can think and demonstrate what they know. In a rapidly shifting environment, traditional assessments might change. Here are options that help our students learn by offering them flexibility and opportunities to succeed.
1:00-1:45PM ET
Don’t Catch Them, Watch Them: When Miranda Priestly Walks Into Your Course
Presenter: Loy Gross, SUNY Genesee Community College
Description: Students can use AI to think, not to skip thinking. This session shares a Socratic AI approach that turns any LLM into a thought partner, giving online instructors an intimate window into each student’s process. We’ll run a live sample in which Miranda Priestly questions fashion students through a design decision, then examine real student chat logs to watch that thinking unfold. Participants will gain a prompt framework they can adapt to any discipline and persona.
2:00-2:45PM ET
Disconnects to Decisions: Continuing the Conversation About What Lies Ahead for Online Higher Ed
Presenters: Ron Good & Dr. Jody Blankenship (Alfred State College), Dr. Andrea Gilbert (Monroe Community College) & Michelle Connolly (University at Buffalo)
Description: Online higher education stands at a new horizon. Early glimpses may not reflect the future we once envisioned: shifting student expectations, generative AI, and external pressures can disrupt previously held best practices, exposing gaps between institutional intent and faculty/student experience. This session brings us together to imagine and intentionally shape what comes next. Join us in challenging the status quo, re‑envisioning online design, and forging our own path forward.
This presentation represents the next stage of a conversation that began at a national conference earlier this year. Building on the key concepts from that presentation, this session will highlight the ideas, questions, and perspectives that emerged from higher education leaders across the nation. We now want to bring that conversation to SUNY, inviting our colleagues to consider what resonates with their experiences, where they see things differently, and what additional perspectives SUNY can contribute. Our goal is to continue the conversation, broaden it, and collectively explore what comes next for online higher education.
3:00-3:45PM ET
Advancing AI in Teaching and Learning Across Disciplines Through an AI-Powered Platform
Presenters: Dr. Ning Yu & Dr. Jie Zhang, SUNY Brockport
Description: This webinar showcases how two faculty members from Computer Science and Special Education use an AI-powered platform, developed and monitored by students under faculty mentorship, to advance AI and to support teaching and learning. Recent classroom implementations, research findings, and cross-disciplinary perspectives will be shared to provide an evidence base regarding the effectiveness of the platform and AI-supported teaching. Participants are also encouraged to explore the feasibility of adapting AI-supported approaches and tools to their own teaching.
