NWeLearn 2026

Join us for light breakfast fare including pastries, fruit, and coffee.

As generative AI becomes more common in higher education, faculty and instructional designers are often left asking how to preserve student learning, critical thinking, and academic integrity. This session uses a PSU School of Business course on Research and Analysis of Business Problems as a case example for designing AI-ready learning experiences that support, rather than replace, student thinking. Through a structured problem-solving framework, students move from situation analysis to problem definition, root-cause analysis, solution evaluation, and final recommendations. Participants of the session will explore how AI can support brainstorming, questioning, organization, revision, and presentation planning while still requiring students to make evidence-based decisions and demonstrate professional judgment. The session will include practical examples, a short interactive activity, and a reusable framework for identifying where AI can productively support learning and where human expertise must remain central.

This 50-minute breakout session will introduce faculty and instructional designers to approachable, off-the-shelf immersive technology tools that can support teaching and learning without requiring advanced technical skills or coding experience. Presenters will share examples of XR tools and real-world classroom applications to explore how immersive technology can support engagement and learning. We will also briefly address important considerations such as privacy, student labor, institutional support, and how to decide when immersive learning is worth the investment.

Last year you were captivated by our talk: Two Totally Legitimate but Possibly Antithetical Perspectives on AI. You laughed. You cried. You hungered for more. And even if you missed it, that’s what you would have felt. Good news, Laura and Jeff are back…. with part deux. (Laura speaks French. Can AI do that?! Well, yes… but Jeff digresses.) Anyway, join us for a preview of our study-in-progress on student resistance to generative AI in education. We’ll review recent literature about student attitudes toward AI, share some preliminary findings from our study, and discuss how our perspectives on AI intersect with our project.

Good design and accessible content should be within reach for every educator, and now it is.

Designing visually engaging course content has traditionally required specialized skills, but AI is changing that. In this session, we'll show how educators, instructional designers, and administrators can use AI tools to create compelling page layouts, develop reusable design patterns, and support accessible content creation for diverse learners regardless of their technical background.

Through live demos and discussion, we'll walk through a practical workflow using tools like NotebookLM, Gemini, and Gems alongside curated design resources to move from idea to finished content. You'll see real examples of transformed content and leave with a starting point you can adapt for your own context.

Whether you're brand new to AI or looking to expand how you use it, this session will inspire you with what's possible and give you concrete next steps to get started. Come curious, leave ready to build.

In this session, we will discuss our journey of vetting a new platform. We will share our process and lessons learned. We will share the intentional steps we take to center all types of users, all while championing cognitive accessibility.

Training students for a career in a healthcare field requires interactions with patients. However, placing new students in front of human patients presents several challenges. Concise and empathetic communication skills, cultural competency, and self-efficacy are just some barriers that students face when attempting to communicate with patients. Engaging students in meta-patient interactions early in their training improves the skills that will ensure they are prepared to successfully interact with human patients. For the past year, with the support the students in the Community Health Worker program at Lower Columbia College, Mark has been able to utilize meta-patients to engage students in "real-world" interactions.

This session presents a scalable, innovative model for a faculty training series that integrates an international, on-site pedagogical research workshop with quarter-long curriculum design activities, culminating in end-of-year reflections for both faculty and students. We will highlight a successful case study from this initiative: the “Shan Shui in Chinese Culture: International Teaching Workshop,” facilitated jointly by the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, China, and Bellevue College in Washington. This session reflects the ongoing partnership between the two institutions, building upon earlier collaborative research into instructor-initiated in situ learning within 360-degree immersive cultural spaces, which was presented at last year’s NW eLearning Conference. Attendees will receive a copy of the end-of-year project report of the workshop.

The presentation will also outline the long-term vision for this international faculty training series. We will explore its direct applications for Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL), the publication of Open Educational Resources (OER), and the broader goal of internationalizing home-campus curricula. Ultimately, attendees will learn how this collaborative framework delivers global learning experiences comparable to traditional in-person study abroad programs, but with a significantly lower budget impact to the college budget.

Hybrid and flexible learning environments require intentional instructional design to foster meaningful reflection and learner engagement. This session describes a 10-week graduate Educational Technology Leadership course that integrates project-based learning and multimodal reflection. As a culminating activity, students create AI-assisted digital postcards that combine text, visuals, and media to synthesize their learning and connect theory with authentic coaching practice. Participants will explore the course design, view examples of student work, and also hear from course participants who will reflect on the learning experience while offering perspectives from their diverse educational and professional contexts. The session concludes with practical ideas for adapting this approach across disciplines and teaching modalities.

At Oregon State University, the Ecampus multimedia team helped create a set of digital, 3D, rotatable human bones for use in the Online Anatomy and Physiology course. This learning tool is called the "Bone Box". After creating and implementing the Bone Box, we investigated the ability of our students to transfer the knowledge learned in the online environment using those digital 3D models to the identical physical models used in the in-person laboratory space. In this session, we will present the final results of the study.

This presentation introduces the Educational Developer Competency Toolkit developed by the Professional Development Committee (PDC) of the POD Network. In a participatory approach, a group of diverse professional developers created a toolkit (framework, lexicon, and self-assessment tool) to articulate the knowledge, skills, and values needed in the work of educational developers across diverse institutional contexts.

The session will explore how the toolkit, including the self-assessment tool, can benefit educational developers, teaching and learning centers, and academic leaders. As a participant in the PDC working group, the presenter will share examples drawn from her own professional experience and colleagues using the tool kit. Participants will engage with components of the toolkit during the session and consider ways the framework can be adapted and applied within their own contexts.

This presentation credits the work of the POD Network Professional Development Committee and the Educational Developer Competency Toolkit (2024).

As interprofessional and collaborative learning initiatives expand, educators face increasing challenges in balancing scale with meaningful learner engagement. This session shares lessons learned from coordinating a large-scale interprofessional education program involving hundreds of health professions students across multiple disciplines, campuses, and learning modalities. Participants will explore practical strategies for fostering connection, psychological safety, reflective learning, and collaboration while managing complex logistical realities. Through discussion and reflection, attendees will identify approaches that can be adapted to their own large-scale educational initiatives.

In May 2026, when ShinyHunters attacked Canvas, the EdTech community got a sneak peek at one of our vulnerabilities: when your LMS goes down, your teachers and students have nothing to work with. The standard recommendation of, "just export your course" downloads an.imscc file, but it requires Canvas to open. Which is offline. Which is a problem.

This session introduces a free, open-source tool built by a Canvas Admin using AI collaboration called CanvExporter, a course backup tool using the Canvas API to extract important content to your local desktop computer. Announcements, assignments, discussions, quizzes (with and without answer keys), quiz question banks, content pages, rubrics, and files are delivered as editable.docx and.csv files within organized subfolders. Teachers can open, print, and teach from these backups. No vendor. No subscription needed.

Attendees will see a live demonstration, leave with a GitHub link to CanvExporter, understand exactly what their institution needs to deploy it, and additional use cases that come up more often.

Chris Powell is the Canvas LMS Administrator at Western Washington University. He has spent a decade spotting trends and developing elegant solutions that create ease, efficiency, and access for his clients. He's enjoyed harnessing AI collaboration to create several open-source Canvas automation tools that have proven helpful to multiple institutions.

Boxed Sandwich Lunches:

• Sandwiches:
• Turkey & Cheddar: Turkey, cheddar, tomato, lettuce, and mayonnaise on multigrain bread
• Turkey Club: Turkey, bacon, Swiss, tomato, lettuce, and mayonnaise on French white bread
• Jambon de Paris: Ham, Gruyère, butter, and Dijon on a demi baguette
• Albacore Tuna: Tuna, mayonnaise, tomato, pickle, and lettuce on multigrain bread
• Caprese (Vegetarian): Roma tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, basil, and basil oil on ciabatta with balsamic vinaigrette
• Buffalo Cauliflower Wrap: Cauliflower and chickpeas with red cabbage, kale, red onion, and Mama Lil’s peppers in a flour tortilla
• Sides & Dessert: Sea Salt Chips, Fruit Salad, and Shortbread Cookies
• Beverages: Water, Aloha Lemonade, Unsweetened Steven Smith Iced Tea, Stumptown Coffee, and Steven Smith Hot Tea

This 10-minute presentation demonstrates how AI-generated images, enhanced with Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, can bring unfolding case studies to life in online education. As learners receive new information, visual assets evolve to guide discovery and deepen engagement, making complex scenarios easier to explore and discuss.

As graduate health professions programs increasingly incorporate online learning, questions remain regarding how distance education can support institutional values that emphasize human connection. This descriptive study describes the co-design, implementation, and evaluation of an online teaching and learning course developed within a predominantly face-to-face curriculum to align with the program's purpose, mission, and vision. A co-design approach was used to develop a required graduate-level core curricular course focused on teaching and learning in physical therapy. The course instructor and the learners collaboratively informed course development. Course elements emphasized learner autonomy, collaboration, reflection, authentic application, and meaningful interaction. The co-design process resulted in an online course intentionally structured to promote connection, engagement, and reflective practice while providing flexibility within a face-to-face professional program. The online environment served as a platform for course delivery while maintaining alignment with the program's humanistic values. The study illustrates how online learning can extend, rather than diminish, a program's commitment to humanism. The study suggests that online course design can support institutional mission, vision, and community priorities when guided by human-centered principles and collaborative development processes.

In fully asynchronous biology courses, prerecorded videos serve as a primary mechanism for content delivery, yet the instructional impact of video structure and embedded active learning remains uncertain. Our study investigated how alternative video formats influence student learning in an introductory biology course at Oregon State University. Students engaged with one of three versions of the same instructional content: a single long video with questions consolidated at the end, a long video with questions interspersed, or a series of shorter videos each followed by a question. All formats were hosted in an Ecampus platform that supports embedded assessments and engagement analytics.

Drawing on Cognitive Load Theory, we hypothesized that distributing questions or breaking content into smaller segments might reduce extraneous load and enhance conditions for deeper learning. Conceptual learning was evaluated using established concept inventory questions and exam items aligned with course outcomes.

Our results suggest that learning outcomes in asynchronous environments are robust to variation in video segmentation and question placement, offering instructors wide latitude in selecting formats that match their teaching style or technological constraints. Ongoing work includes analysis incorporating qualitative student perspectives to deepen insight into how learners interact with asynchronous video materials.

In my presentation, I will interactively demonstrate two AI techniques to stimulate curiosity while promoting problem solving and long-term learning, presented in the context of learning about human prenatal brain development.

As generative AI tools become embedded in the everyday routines of students and educators alike, higher education faces a defining assessment question: Is what we are measuring actually learning? The reflexive answer from many institutions has been to pivot quickly to "authentic assessment" as the silver bullet — but the research increasingly shows that authenticity alone is not enough, and that poorly designed authentic tasks can still be completed by AI with surprising fluency.

This discussion session challenges practitioners to examine a more uncomfortable truth: that the real value of authentic assessment is not found in circumventing AI, but in forcing a reckoning with what genuine competency demonstration looks like — and in demanding that students actually own that demonstration. Drawing on findings from a qualitative, phenomenological research study of 12 competency-based education (CBE) program administrators across the United States, this session presents practitioner-validated evidence that the most effective programs have long embedded authentic, mastery-based assessment at their core — not as an AI countermeasure, but as a foundational pedagogical and organizational principle aligned to workforce expectations and student success.

Participants will explore the critical difference between tasks that merely look authentic and those assessments that require authentic performance, examine how CBE program leaders have designed and sustained mastery-based assessment systems, and grapple with the real design challenges: faculty workload, grading consistency, rubric development, equity/access, and continuous improvement. The session invites honest conversation about shortcuts — the ones students are taking with AI, and the ones faculty and institutions are tempted to take with assessment design. Participants will leave with a framework for rethinking their own assessment approaches, grounded in both applied research and the real-world experiences of CBE program leaders navigating these same tensions. "AI hasn't created the assessment problem — it has exposed it."

LLMs dramatically reduce the time it takes to convert paywalled course content into publicly accessible materials — what once took days or weeks now takes hours. This presentation covers practical, experience-driven methods for turning existing Canvas courses into free, distributable educational resources: OERs, EPUBs, fanzines, and websites. Drawing on firsthand experience converting Accessibility, EdTech and Rhetoric content and courses for OpenOregon.org, and producing EPUBs, fanzines, and websites on closed captions, accessibility, and transcripts hosted on Gumroad and Netlify, the presenter walks through a reproducible workflow for rapid content liberation. If you've built courses and want to share them freely with other educators and the public, this session shows you how. Note: This session does not cover marketing or outreach.

For educators and educational developers alike, Zoom has become the de facto venue for learning and professional development after COVID. We have synchronous online classes and workshops by Zoom. And the sad truth is that maybe no one wants to sit around a table anymore. Faculty tell us that is not true, and while they do sign up for in person events, they often do not actually show up. As a result, most of the PD offerings are delivered via Zoom.

Remember when faculty were afraid “online learning” was going to take their job? Nowadays, there might be some concern from people in teaching and learning centers that between AI and Zoom, they may become obsolete and the “center” will become a Zoom room or web page.

I want to fight back against that narrow vision of professional development. Join me in a discussion about ways we can offer faculty rich, meaningful life experiences that are better than meeting via Zoom. And how we can get them in a physical space to share and learn.