2025 NDLW Thursday Friday
Join us for NDLW 2025. This year's theme is The Great AI Disequilibrium, so if you have felt a little shaken by all of the rapid changes and need some help finding your balance, we have a full week of free programming to help.
Free Registration (register as guest if you are not already a member):
https://members.usdla.org/members/evr/eventreg_login.php?mid=2786379639&evid=53186007&md=&
Each day starts at 11am ET with some of the USDLA Crew, including Farah Bennani and Kae Novak hosting the Online Daily Show, a chance to network and discuss topics of the day. Bring your ideas, questions, and a beverage. The end of the week's schedule is as follows:
Thursday November 6
10:00-10:45AM EST
Title: Side Quests in Your Online Course
Presenter: Jennifer Shloming, Fashion Institute of Technology
Description: Side quests are optional activities that let students spark their curiosity in a topic that may not be covered during class, which can earn them a bonus and develop skills.
12:00-12:45PM EST
Title: Accessible Course Content Checklist
Presenter: Allene Slating, Senior Instructional Designer, SUNY Online Teaching
Description: Are you an instructional designer, faculty member, or anyone involved in creating accessible course content? Join us for a webinar on how to use an optional accessibility checklist to help ensure your digital materials are accessible to all learners.
In this session, we will:
- Introduce and review the optional Accessible Course Content Checklist
- Demonstrate how it can be applied to a course or adapted to meet specific campus needs
- Highlight important points and tips for creating accessible digital content
*Note: This session will be the same as November 5th. Duplication is intentional to accommodate the varying teaching schedules of our audience.
1:00-1:45PM EST
Title: Case Studies: Working with Faculty on Title II Compliance
Presenter: Claudia Cafarelli – Nassau Community College
Description: View examples of case studies working with faculty to update teaching materials and make them compliant with Title II, from easy fixes to complex tables and PowerPoints. We’ll share how to help faculty design a plan for editing.
Friday November 7
10:00-10:45AM EST
Title: Creating Friction: Using Multi-Media Assignments in Online Courses
Presenter: Rachel Rigolino, SUNY New Paltz
Description: This presentation examines how the instructor transformed a standard assignment — an annotated bibliography — into a multimedia assignment. The original purpose was to circumvent student overreliance on abstracts and surface reading and encourage students to actually read sources and evaluate them. In the age of AI, these multimedia assignments have proven to be even more valuable.
11:00-11:45AM EST
Title: Strategies to Design for Student Engagement and Belonging in Online Courses
Presenter: Stephanie Foote, Stony Brook University
Description: Student engagement and sense of belonging are shaped by initial class experiences or class beginnings (Lange, 2016). While there are strategies faculty can use to maximize the beginning and end of synchronous class meetings, this session will focus on four approaches faculty can take to be intentional about the design of the beginning of their synchronous or asynchronous online course(s) in a broader sense. Specifically, we will explore pedagogical approaches that can be implemented to communicate belonging and engagement before and during the early part of a course. Participants will leave with specific ideas that can be implemented, immediately, in their own online courses.
Outcomes:
- Describe the importance of class beginnings on student engagement and belonging in online courses.
- Analyze four approaches that can be implemented to foster student engagement and belonging.
- Identify at least one approach to implement in your own course(s).