2025 Virtual Innovations in Pedagogy Summit Recap and Resources

The 2025 Innovations in Pedagogy Summit was the first time the CTE offered a virtual track as part of the event. The track was geared toward instructors interested in online teaching and learning and consisted of three sessions focusing on teaching online, connected to the Summit’s theme of emotions and learning.

Whether you joined us and want a refresher or are interested in learning about what was discussed, here's a recap of the three sessions.

Session 1: Online Learners Have Feelings, Too

Summit keynote speaker Sarah Rose Cavanagh was our special guest during the first virtual session. That session was titled "Online Learners Have Feelings, Too," and Sarah and I discussed how a better understanding of the connections between emotions and learning can help us teach more effectively online. See my PowerPoint slides for my portions of the session, and don't forget to check the notes fields for links to more resources. Here are my three takeaways from Sarah's portions of the session:

• Many of the support structures available to residential students to help them stay engaged and motivated—structures we often take for granted—aren’t available to online learners, so there’s more of a need to attend to things like student motivation when working with online learners. A good online program will have good support structures, but there's still room for instructors to make a difference. This often takes more intentionality in the online context than in the classroom context, where a lot of social interactions happen naturally as a result of physical proximity.
• Emotional synchrony refers to the alignment of emotions between individuals who are interacting in some kind of group setting. In a teaching context, it means that the enthusiasm an instructor has for a topic can spark enthusiasm for the topic in students. When teaching online, video is a useful tool for sharing our enthusiasm with our students. Sarah mentioned a colleague who makes short videos he calls "deck updates" (I think that was the term) for his students, so-called because he films them with his phone on his back deck. These videos humanize the instructors and invite the students, in a way, into the physical space he inhabits. Sarah also said that we should be maybe 30% more emotive in online videos (with our voice and our gestures) since the video format can flatten emotional impact.
• When I polled participants in the session, over half (53%) said that "shaping course materials around the questions your students bring to the course" made more sense in their teaching context than "helping students appreciate the questions you bring to the course" (29%). I'm guessing that's because many in the session taught in professional education settings where (a) students often know more what they want to get out of a course and (b) there's already some alignment between student interests and course topics. Sarah pointed out that there's a continuum here and that even when the course topics and objectives are set in advance, it's often possible to let students choose questions or context or applications of personal interest within particular assignments. That taps into two emotional dimensions of motivation: When we have control over our work and see value in the work, we bring more interest and motivation to the work.

For more insights from Sarah Rose Cavanagh, visit her website, where you can learn about her books and other writing, and subscribe to her newsletter.

Second Session: Online Student Motivation in an Age of AI

The second session of the virtual track was titled "Online Student Motivation in an Age of AI," and it featured a panel of five UVA instructors who shared their approaches to handling generative AI in their online courses. Here are some highlights from the panelists:

• Sara McClellan teaches public administration at the School of Continuing and Professional Studies (SCPS). She has led the development of a set of guidelines for using AI throughout the courses in the public administration certificate. These guidelines include recommendations for when to use AI freely (e.g. helping with conceptual understanding, getting feedback on paper drafts, converting text to audio or vice versa), when to use AI selectively (e.g. brainstorming ideas, identifying relevant sources for research), and when to avoid using AI (e.g. analyzing personal or confidential data, outsourcing your own critical thinking).
• Raj Venkatesan teaches marketing at the Darden School of Business, and since generative AI is playing increasing roles in the marketing profession, he has put AI on the syllabus in his courses. Raj uses a lot of "green light" assignments in which students are encouraged to explore ways generative AI might assist them in their marketing work and to reflect on the pros and cons of using AI in that work. He also includes some instruction in how generative AI works so that students are better equipped to use AI in ethical and effective ways, instead of using it as a "black box" replacement for their own creative and critical work.
• Susan Thacker-Gwaltney teaches graduate-level reading education courses in the School of Education and Human Development (EHD). She said her AI policies depend on the course, since her goal is to determine where generative AI tools are best suited to support her students' learning and their professional work as teachers. Those determinations are done in conversation with students, with Susan being transparent with the ways she uses AI (e.g. generating images for slides, quickly analyzing student feedback, writing case studies) and inviting her students to be equally as transparent. She mentioned using "red light, then green light" assignments, as well as ones where students are asked to critique the output of a chatbot.
• Michelle Beavers also teaches at EHD and, like Susan, teaches online. Michelle is one of the 2024-2025 Faculty AI Guides and has done a lot to explore AI in her teaching. She said that she started with a green light AI policy, but as she has learned more about AI and its strengths and limitations, she has become more nuanced. Key questions for Michelle include: For a given activity, how does AI support or hinder learning? How can I teach students to use AI ethically and effectively in their field? And how can I ensure equitable access to AI tools? Michelle also uses a variety of AI tools (Boodlebox, Synthesia, Riffbot) in designing activities for her courses.
• David Corlett teaches history at SCPS, making him the solo humanist on the panel. He labeled himself as "awareist not alarmist" when it comes to generative AI, although many of his humanities colleagues have firm red light policies on AI. David would rather let his students use AI than have them use it anyway and not tell him. Like Raj, David invites his students to explore AI use on assignments, like the one he mentioned in his course on witchcraft and the Western world. He asks students to design a pamphlet of the kind actually produced in conjunction with witch trials, something "fictionalized but within historical boundaries." David shared an example of an AI-generated image for such a pamphlet, noting that the image presented a useful opportunity for students to critique the historicity of the AI's output.

For more perspectives on generative AI in teaching and learning, visit our gallery on that topic on the UVA Teaching Hub.

Third Session: Collaborative Design for Engaged Online Learning

The third and final session of afternoon was titled "Collaborative Design for Engaged Online Learning." It featured a panel of two trios, each consisting of an instructor, an instructional designer, and a student. Through the panel discussion, we explored ways to design online courses that engage students in meaningful learning.

Anne Jewett teaches the capstone course of a fully online and fully asynchronous EHD master's program in curriculum and instruction. The students are working professionals, mostly K12 teachers. She worked with instructional designer Ashley Caudill and the Learning Design and Teaching Innovation team at EHD to revise the course several times over three years. They came together around the "gamification" of the course. Anne brought deep knowledge of the course (and program) learning objectives, while Ashley brought her design experience and ideas and options for gamifying the course. The result was a course that is framed around a story (escaping a deserted island) with opportunities for students to go on missions (exploring different learning resources) and "level up" (completing assignments).

Sharon Phox, who has twenty years experience teaching, was a student in the course, and she praised the course design for how it helped her bring together all the things she had learned throughout the program and how all the assignments were intensely practical for her and her profession. Sharon also noted that although the course was asynchronous, she developed a strong sense of community with her fellow students through intentionally designed small group activities. (As it happens, Sharon is a finalist for Virginia Teacher of the Year!) (Also, as it happens, Anne was just named one of the 2025 All-University Teaching Award winners at UVA!)

Charlotte Matthews teaches the "Transformations" course that is required for students in the bachelor of interdisciplinary studies degree program at SCPS. This program is for students who have completed 60 hours of college course work but don't have a bachelor's degree. The "Transformations" course is designed to help students transition back into college and into the scholarly ways of thinking and writing required in college. Charlotte worked recently with MJ Cook, an instructional designer at SCPS, on the design of her offering of "Transformations." MJ said that their working relationship was one of collaboration and care, with a focus on their own growth and the growth of Charlotte's students. Charlotte brought knowledge of her students and what they need, while MJ brought lots of design options and a knowledge of Canvas and its affordances.

Mary Kate McArdle was a student in the course, coming back to school after a few years off. She was apprehensive about taking an online course with a Zoom component, but thanks to Charlotte and MJ's collaboration around the design of the course modules, she found the course easy to navigate and the expectations for her participation very clear. One "small teaching" move Charlotte made was to ask students to post in the discussion forums when they had questions or needed to be absent. She would still respond, but this move signaled to students that they are in community with each other as much as with their instructor.

Final Thoughts

One thread that ran throughout the three sessions is the idea of making course assignments clearly relevant to students and their professional interests. Sarah Rose Cavanagh and I talked about how this "task value" helps motivate students toward deeper learning. Raj Venkatesan noted that his course doesn't have "busywork," that every assignment connects to the final project in the course in transparent ways. Anne Jewett's capstone course functions similarly, with all the activities in the course part of a narrative and tightly integrated with the teacher certification process. It can be challenging to design such a course (and a little painful to cut assignments that you find fun but aren't as clearly connected), but the potential for such a course to engage students is very high.