2025 Innovations in Pedagogy Summit - Virtual Track

As part of this year’s Innovations in Pedagogy Summit, the CTE is pleased to offer a virtual track for those in the UVA teaching community who are interested in online teaching and learning. Three virtual sessions will be held on Zoom between 1:00 and 4:00 PM Eastern on Wednesday, April 30, the day of the on-Grounds Summit. All sessions will focus on teaching online, with connections to the Summit’s theme of emotions and learning.

If you teach online at UVA or might in the future, this virtual track is especially for you. But all UVA instructors who are interested in these virtual sessions are welcome to participate.

Learn more about the three virtual sessions below. Register for the track and then join whichever session(s) interest you. You'll receive the Zoom information for all meetings.

Agenda

SESSION 1: Online Learners Have Feelings, Too

1:00-1:50 PM ET

Facilitator: Derek Bruff, CTE Associate Director

Special Guest: Sarah Rose Cavanagh, Senior Associate Director for Teaching and Learning, Center for Faculty Excellence, Simmons University

Have you seen those commercials for online degrees where a working adult goes back to school, but all the scenes in the commercial show the student and their laptop? There’s no sign of an instructor or other students, just the technology? There’s a lot more to online learning. In this session, we’ll explore the role of emotions in online learning as well as strategies for enhancing instructor and social presence in our online courses.

SESSION 2: Online Student Motivation in an Age of AI

2:00-2:50 PM ET

Panelists: Michelle Beavers (Education), David Corlett (SCPS), Sara McClellan (SCPS), Susan Thacker-Gwaltney (Education), Raj Venkatesan (Darden)

It’s been more than two years since ChatGPT debuted and generative AI disrupted many standard assessment practices in higher ed. Online courses (especially asynchronous ones) have been particularly affected by AI. What should online assignments and assessments look like in a world where AI assistants are ubiquitous? And how can we better tap into the motivations students bring to the learning environment to avoid essays-by-chatbot? This interactive panel will feature several online instructors sharing their current answers to these questions.

SESSION 3: Collaborative Design for Engaged Online Learning

3:00-3:50 PM ET

Panelists: Ashley Caudill (Education), Marjorie Cook (SCPS), Anne Jewett (Education), Charlotte Matthews (SCPS), Mary Kate McArdle (SCPS), Sharon Phox (Education)

What goes into the design of an engaging and effective online course? In this interactive panel, we'll explore that question from multiple perspectives: instructors, instructional designers, and students. We’ll consider how an instructor and an instructional designer can collaborate to bring their respective strengths to the course design process, and we’ll discuss how students experience some of those design decisions. We’ll also see how an online course can change over time to better meet student and instructor needs.