Recordings-2026

A new mom returning to school. A cancer survivor studying under treatment. A Navy veteran training for addiction counseling. Altogether, six online students from first semester to graduate school. They represent different ages, backgrounds, and campus sizes – which means their answers will likely reflect the diversity of students you’re trying to serve.

Transformative change in higher education requires more than innovative ideas—it demands actionable insights and strong collaborative networks. In this session, Tom Cavanagh and Jocelyn Widmer, authors of ”The Chief Online Learning Officers Guidebook“, will explore how distance learning leaders can harness the power of data and relationships to influence institutional strategy and culture. Attendees will learn practical approaches for using data to tell compelling stories, build trust, and foster alignment across campus stakeholders. The presenters will share proven strategies for cultivating partnerships that amplify impact and accelerate change, drawing on real-world examples from their work with online learning leaders nationwide. Join us to discover how data-informed decision-making and relationship-building can position your institution for sustainable success in the evolving digital learning landscape.

Data-driven decision-making is essential for shaping effective online learning strategies, but identifying the right tools and interpreting insights can be challenging. This session offers a practical look at SUNY and external data platforms and analytics that distance learning leaders can leverage to guide institutional planning and improve student outcomes. The speakers will demonstrate how to use key data sources and dashboards to monitor performance, assess impact, and inform strategic priorities. Attendees will leave with actionable approaches for integrating analytics into leadership practices, ensuring that data becomes a catalyst for innovation.

In an era where data is more accessible than ever, how can we harness it to drive meaningful change in online education? This session brings together three SUNY distance learning leaders who are leveraging data to improve online learning across their campuses.

• Kristin Hall will share insights from a pilot project focused on the online course development process including tracking time, effort and resources.
• Judith Littlejohn will explore how annual student and faculty feedback is systematically collected and analyzed to inform operational changes within their department.
• Brandi So will demonstrate how SUNY Online’s data dashboards are being used to guide strategic planning, monitor key performance indicators, and support continuous improvement.

Attendees will leave with practical examples of how data can be translated into action, along with ideas for applying similar strategies in their own institutions.

The future of online education is being shaped by rapid technological advances, shifting policies, and evolving learner expectations. In this special episode of the “Tea for Teaching” podcast, we’ll explore how leadership in distance learning is increasingly defined by the strategic use of data and the power of relationships. Join us for a conversation on key trends influencing online learning, including data-informed decision-making, the rise of artificial intelligence, the impact of the political landscape, and changing federal regulations. Our speakers will discuss how leaders can harness analytics to anticipate challenges, foster innovation through collaboration, and build strong networks that position their institutions for success in an uncertain future.

SUNY’s 25-Point Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Plan and Top 10% Promise program affirm the system’s deep commitment to promoting inclusive education, supporting underserved students, and fostering welcoming environments across all campuses. As we collectively reimagine the future of edagogy—both on campus and online—it is essential to ask: How might we co-construct educational spaces that invite radical openness and social transformation? Building on the sociotechnical philosophical framework, Envisioning Online Learning Spaces in Higher Education as Spaces of Radical Openness, we will aim to inspire SUNY online administrators, instructional designers, faculty, and student-facing staff to consider how radical openness might offer a lens to reframe the design of learning spaces, learning experience design, and pedagogical practices. This lens of the philosophical scaffold challenges our ideas about traditional hierarchies in educational technology and pedagogy, calling for digital spaces that are learner-centered with a focus on learner agency and connectedness.

Grounded in philosophical theories of postphenomenology, assemblage theory, and feminist technoscience, this philosophical scaffold will be introduced in our session to inspire and guide mini design challenges that offer opportunities to consider how dynamic human-technology relationships and sociocultural assemblages might shape experiences in online teaching and learning—often in invisible ways, and how we might harness ideas within this philosophical scaffold to reimagine the design of digital spaces and future possibilities. Postphenomenology, developed from the work of Don Ihde (1934-2024), Distinguished Professor Emeritus of SUNY Stony Brook, describes various ways that technologies mediate our lived experiences (see Ihde, 1979, 1990; Verbeek, 2001). For the context of online teaching and learning, this lens offers a philosophical perspective to reflect on our lived experiences of, with, and through technologies, and how the design of digital tools and spaces might make some ideas more possible and probable than others, for example impacting, constraining, or fostering student agency.

Layered onto postphenomenology, assemblage theory (DeLanda, 2016) offers a lens to explore educational systems as evolving networks of people, technologies, policies, and materials—interacting to produce new possibilities for power, belonging, and self-actualization. Understanding these dynamic interactions encourages the design of systems that might promote learner agency, motivation, reciprocity, and multiple perspectives. The final layer in the philosophical scaffold, feminist technoscience and feminist technology design (Michelfelder et al., 2017) extends these insights by linking design to justice, equity, and social accountability, advocating for technologies that empower students as co-creators of knowledge and as change agents. Kennedy and Michelfelder (2025) suggest that by applying this lens, educators can reimagine how online learning technologies might prepare students to see inequities towards enacting transformative change.

Objectives

• Consider our own lived experiences of, with, and through technologies.
• Play with ideas of radical openness through postphenomenology, assemblage theory, and feminist technoscience, as applied to our own experiences of online teaching and learning, institutional systems, pedagogical practices, and more.
• Co-create sociotechnical imaginaries through mini design challenges to consider opportunities for embedding equity-centered design philosophies across SUNY’s diverse learning ecosystems.

Through dialogue and collaborative reflection, this session invites participants to consider human-technology relations, sociocultural assemblages influencing educational practices, and how we might intentionally design systems that disrupt inequities and foster inclusive, learner-centered digital spaces that inspire self-actualization. During our session, members will co-create mini design challenges informed by radical openness, outlining strategies for equitable and participatory online learning spaces. As SUNY leaders and change agents, we are positioned to use our power for positive system transformation, foster critical awareness, support inclusivity, and encourage transformative action. This session seeds ideas for an upspring of sociotechnical imaginaries to cultivate a future pedagogical culture of radical openness and equity-embedded digital spaces.

Bring your computer or a smartphone to this interactive, play-based workshop. Be ready to download and use AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Claude and Perplexity. As we explore everyday uses for one-off and extended AI chats, we will consider how both educators and students can effectively use or misuse AI for teaching and learning in our classes. We will close with a few tips on how, as educators, we can use AI to improve the quality of our work experience.

Expect to leave this talk with practices you can use and key questions you can continue to explore around AI for Teaching, Learning and Play.

Join us as we celebrate excellence in implementing the OSCQR online course quality rubric and process at the presentation ceremony for the SUNY Online Teaching OSCQR Awards. These awards honor effective, creative, and innovative practices that elevate online course design and advance continuous improvement across online education. Recognizing outstanding SUNY and non-SUNY institutions, programs, individuals, and researchers, this session showcases impactful online quality initiatives and inspiring approaches to faculty engagement and learner success and celebrate leadership in high impact practices in online education.

There is so much talk about Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT helping to make education more ‘engaging’ and ‘personalized’. But what if this was a terrible mistake? What if, rather than improving learning, the research evidence showed that making greater use of AI will send students’ learning into reverse?  What if AI might also make academics worse at their jobs, particularly those with less experience? And how are universities supposed to respond to the rampant plagiarism and assessment malpractice unleashed by ChatGPT and other GenAI tools?

This session will put the hype around AI to one side and, using a wide range of research studies, show why students, academics and university leaders should be very worried about the impact of AI.

Tools are awesome objects. Whether it is a twig that a crow uses to get a worm or a magnifying glass to read tiny letters, tools allow us animals a different access to our environment by enhancing our capabilities. Many tools can be used for opposite moral actions: a sickle for harvesting crops can also be used to kill someone. This dual-use is often invoked when discussing certain tools, most recently ‘AI’ in the classroom. Yet, ‘AI’ should not be seen as a tool. Rather it is a socio-technical apparatus aimed to alter the infrastructure of human knowledge, the fabric of our societies, and our environments. In this talk I will unpick some of the selling arguments of ‘AI’ tools for education and research, highlighting their actual workings as well as their broader and long-term effects. I will follow by sharing the proposal of a group of scholars and scientists in the Netherlands to assess the use of AI in educational and research settings according to the Dutch scientific code of conduct. I argue that this and similar proposals allow us to reflect on what we have, the challenges we face, and the collective actions we can take grounded in ethical considerations. This talk is a call to reclaim our agency into shaping a better present for students, educators, researchers, and society at large.