EdgeCon Spring 2026

This session explores how Stockton University is integrating labor market intelligence, enrollment trends, and academic program analytics to guide the development of new digital and hybrid programs. By bringing together expertise from institutional research, academic leadership, finance, and enrollment teams through the Gray Decision Intelligence (Gray DI) platform, Stockton is moving toward a more strategic and data-informed approach to program portfolio maintenance and development.

The presentation will highlight how market data, student demand indicators, and competitive landscape analysis can help institutions identify opportunities for new digital offerings, evaluate program viability, and align program development with institutional priorities such as access, workforce relevance, and long-term sustainability. The session will also discuss practical considerations for incorporating data into academic planning processes, including faculty engagement, governance pathways, and balancing quantitative insights with academic mission and disciplinary expertise.

Participants will gain insights into how data can support more intentional decision-making around digital program development while fostering collaboration between academic and administrative units responsible for planning, analytics, and resource allocation.

Presenters:

• Nicole Suprun, Associate Director of Planning, Stockton University
• Kelly Oquist, Director of Academic Finance, Stockton University
• Jessica Kay, Director of Institutional Research, Stockton University

This presentation examines the increasingly difficult challenge of detecting AI-generated student work and its implications for academic integrity and instructional design. As AI tools become more sophisticated and accessible and students improve their proficiency in using them, educators face increasing uncertainty about the reliability of AI and plagiarism detection software and how to interpret the results.  We’ll begin with a game to challenge participants’ AI identification skills.  We’ll then examine the limitations of detection software and compare two approaches to assessment design: creating “AI-proof” assignments that minimize the potential for student AI assistance and creating assignments that require students to leverage AI as part of the process. Finally, we’ll explore the pedagogical and ethical challenges and benefits of each approach. 

Presenter:

• Jarrod Cecere, Instructional Designer, Seton Hall University

What does intentional, institution-wide AI faculty development actually look like in practice? At The College of New Jersey (TCNJ), The Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) partnered with faculty colleagues across campus to design and launch a five-week, online, stipend-supported certificate program to support more than 55 full-time faculty in moving from isolated experimentation with AI toward intentional, discipline-informed engagement in their teaching and research.

In this session, we share the institutional choices that shaped the program’s design, the adjustments we made in response to faculty realities, and what participant data revealed about what actually supports sustained engagement. We will discuss how we used the Canvas LMS to deploy the CETL AI Faculty Institute, leveraged our new One Button Recording Studios to create content introducing each week’s module, and created a forum space within the Canvas course for faculty to interact with one another as they experimented with AI tools and explored fundamental AI literacy. Attendees will leave with a replicable program framework, implementation lessons grounded in practice, and a reframing of AI faculty development — not as a one-time workshop, but as a durable, sustainable institutional infrastructure.

Presenters:

• Joseph Baker, Professor, Department of Chemistry, The College of New Jersey
• Judi Cook, Executive Director, CETL, The College of New Jersey
• Ellen Farr, Director of Online Learning, CETL, The College of New Jersey
• Rebecca Hunter, Associate Professor, Department of Chemistry, The College of New Jersey
• John Oliver, Information Literacy Librarian, The College of New Jersey
• Andrea Salgian, Professor, Department of Computer Science, The College of New Jersey

What year did you graduate college? Did you take blue book or scantron exams? How would your students (or children!) react to that experience? Let’s chat about how the pandemic, then AI, radically altered the educational landscape changing the rules of engagement in the college classroom. This interactive session invites instructional designers, faculty, and administrators to collaboratively explore the urgent need to update pedagogical strategies to align with the lived experiences and expectations of today’s students. This session will use structured dialogue, small-group activities, and reflective exercises to surface challenges, share solutions, and co-create actionable strategies.

Presenter:

• Ellen Farr, Director of Online Learning, The College of New Jersey

As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly embedded in learning management systems, instructional tools, and institutional decision-making, higher education is entering a new phase of digital learning, one defined not only by access to technology but by the values and assumptions encoded into it. Systems designed to support teaching and learning are now shaping what counts as engagement, rigor, integrity, and success. Yet many of these systems still operate on inherited models of standardization, compliance, and surveillance, models that often privilege the most advantaged users while intensifying barriers for those who are least resourced, least confident, or most vulnerable to exclusion.

This session introduces a philosophically grounded but highly practical framework for evaluating digital learning design through the lens of John Rawls’s veil of ignorance. Rawls’s thought experiment asks designers to build institutions without knowing what role they will occupy within them, whether student or instructor, advantaged or marginalized, digitally fluent or struggling. Applied to digital learning systems, this lens reveals how common institutional defaults, including rigid deadlines, narrow definitions of participation, and high-stakes assessment structures, are now being amplified by AI-enabled systems such as integrity tools and proctoring platforms, predictive analytics dashboards, and automated feedback systems. These tools often promise objectivity and efficiency, but they can also intensify inequities when deployed under policy pressure for standardization and scalability.

Participants will explore instructional design as a form of moral architecture and will be introduced to a Rawlsian Design Audit, a set of guiding questions that can be applied to course design, institutional policy, and learning technology governance. Using examples drawn from common LMS practices and emerging AI-enabled tools, attendees will examine five design domains, including time, communication, assessment, navigation, and institutional governance. The session will highlight justice-oriented alternatives that support learner and faculty agency, such as multimodal participation pathways, transparent assessment design, flexible pacing structures, human-centered feedback practices, and governance approaches that treat AI as a tool for support rather than surveillance. Participants will leave with a concrete, reusable framework and checklist for evaluating whether digital learning environments are being built primarily for efficiency and scale, or for justice, inclusion, and human dignity. 

Presenters:

• Steven D'Agustino, Senior Director for Online Programs, Fordham University
• Joshua Gaul, Chief Information Officer, SUNY Schenectady County Community College

How do I adjust my course content and teaching for a variety of modalities? Designing a course that works across in-person, hybrid, and online formats can feel overwhelming, especially as faculty balance accessibility, engagement, and academic rigor. This session explores how Artificial Intelligence, grounded in Universal Design for Learning (UDL), can help instructors design once and adapt intentionally across multiple learning environments.

Rather than treating each format as a separate course, participants will examine how AI can function as a design partner to:

• Anticipate and reduce barriers before students encounter them.
• Create multiple means of engagement, representation, and expression based on the course modality.
• Develop flexible assessments aligned to shared learning outcomes.
• Scaffold student learning while maintaining rigor.
• Streamline feedback and course adjustments without increasing workload.
• Through practical examples and adaptable prompts, attendees will leave with concrete strategies for building resilient, inclusive courses that translate effectively across in-person, hybrid, and online settings.

Presenter:

• Jaimie Dubuque, Learning Technology Administrator, Ellucian

As educators in a rapidly evolving digital world, we’re on a mission to design learning experiences that reflect the real-world communication demands and creative possibilities students will encounter in their future careers. Projects that prioritize student voice and choice invite learners to explore new modes of expression through multimedia content creation. In this session, a professor and an instructional designer will share how they co-designed communication projects that empowered students to create compelling multimedia content, respond to realistic scenarios, and engage meaningfully with their peers.

Presenter:

• Victoria Ghilardi,Senior Learning Experience Strategist, Berkeley College

Academic learning is an iterative process that relies heavily on fair, effective, and timely feedback. However, overwhelmed faculty and administrative burnout often lead to feedback that is delayed or inconsistent, negatively impacting student motivation and engagement. How can institutions leverage Generative AI to solve the ""grading bottleneck"" without removing the human educator from the equation?

In this session, Slalom will present a case study from the UCLA Anderson School of Management, detailing the development and implementation of the Academic Feedback Intelligent Assistant (AFIA). Built on Amazon Bedrock and integrated directly into the LMS, AFIA utilizes a ""human-in-the-loop"" architecture. The system prompts the LLM to generate hyper-personalized, research-grounded feedback based on student submissions. Crucially, these insights are delivered as hidden comments within the LMS, allowing instructors to review, edit, and personalize the feedback before it reaches the student.

Attendees will explore the technical architecture and the proprietary prompt design strategies used to ground AI outputs in educational best practices. We will share pilot results demonstrating how AFIA improved feedback consistency and reduced the time course assistants spent writing comments by approximately 50%, ultimately freeing up educators to focus on high-value student interactions.

Presenter:

• Mariola Pogacnik, Director, Slalom, Inc.
• Jennie Wong, Director, Slalom, Inc.

This session examines how Providence College leverages Canvas analytics to move beyond course-level insights and build a data-informed annual report that directly shapes academic and operational decision-making. Drawing on real dashboards and reporting workflows, the presentation will show how LMS engagement data is aggregated, contextualized, and translated into narratives that inform faculty development, instructional design priorities, resource allocation, and long-term digital learning strategy.

In addition to Canvas usage and engagement metrics, the session highlights how categorization of email subject lines and communication patterns, supported by AI-assisted tagging and analysis, adds a critical layer to understanding student support, outreach effectiveness, and institutional responsiveness. By connecting LMS data, internal databases, and communication analytics, the institution creates a more holistic picture of how digital learning ecosystems function in practice.

Attendees will learn practical approaches to building scalable dashboards, aligning analytics with institutional goals, and using AI ethically and transparently to support decision-making. The session emphasizes lessons learned, challenges encountered, and strategies for ensuring analytics remain meaningful, actionable, and human-centered rather than purely technical.

Presenters:

• Aaron Colaiacomo, Sr. Instructional Technologist, Providence College

Prof. John Baldino draws on two decades of experience in television and digital media to help educators strengthen their courses with compelling video content. Grounded in best practices in television and online video shaped by consumer behavior, this session will provide practical strategies for producing engaging, high-quality video for both online and on-ground learning, blending proven media techniques with today’s digital teaching tools.

Presenter:

• John Baldino, Director, Center for Teaching and Learning / Assistant Professor, Lackawanna College

Students are already shaping the norms of AI use in higher education through daily academic and professional engagement, often without clear institutional guidance. This presentation argues that effective AI curriculum, policy, and research design must include students as active partners rather than passive recipients of rules. Traditional top-down approaches struggle to keep pace with AI’s rapid evolution, often leading to ambiguity, inconsistent enforcement, and mistrust. 

This session explores how faculty-student collaboration strengthens academic integrity, accelerates curriculum relevance, and expands innovation capacity within HBCU business schools. By involving students in curriculum redesign, AI policy development, and applied research initiatives, institutions can move from punitive frameworks toward shared responsibility and ethical clarity. The presentation also examines how restrictive research gatekeeping limits participation and reproduces inequities, while inclusive faculty-student research models broaden access and deepen learning. 

When students help shape the systems they are expected to follow, they are more likely to uphold them, emerging as graduates prepared not only to use AI tools but to lead responsibly in AI-enabled organizations. Attendees will gain a roadmap for integrating student voice into AI governance to enhance accountability, trust, and real-world readiness.

Presenter:

• Yaw Adoo, Department Chair of Business, Morris Brown College
• Sterline Caldwell, Assistant Professor of Mathematics, Morris Brown College

Digital learning pilots are often framed as low-risk experiments. In practice, they rarely are. Once a pilot is underway, educators invest time redesigning courses, students are exposed to new tools, and institutions build momentum that makes exiting difficult—even when the solution isn’t working.

The issue isn’t that pilots fail. It’s that many pilots are never designed to fail early, because success and failure are not clearly defined before the work begins. In higher education, where moving from idea to pilot takes significant effort, the cost of starting over is high. As a result, educators frequently adapt around tools that only partially meet instructional needs rather than revisit the decision altogether.

This session argues for a simple but often overlooked principle: if success can’t be defined up front, a pilot shouldn’t move forward. Educators play a critical role in this process—not as budget owners or contract managers, but as those responsible for delivering learning to students and understanding whether a solution is truly fit for purpose.

Participants will explore how to define clear success and failure metrics before a pilot begins, recognize early indicators that a solution is not delivering value, and push back constructively when experimentation turns into inertia. The session also addresses why early pilot failure should be expected, structured, and inexpensive—and why waiting to “see if it improves” often creates far greater institutional cost.

Attendees will leave with practical strategies to evaluate digital learning pilots early, influence decisions before they become locked in, and ensure experimentation leads to meaningful outcomes rather than long-term burden.

Presenter:

• Seth Koos, Director, Procurement Services & Contract Compliance, Western Connecticut State University

Online learners and faculty often exist at the edges of campus culture — engaged in academics but disconnected from community. In this session, we’ll explore how institutions are using a unified campus experience platform to replicate the richness of the physical campus in a digital environment — personalized, inclusive and built around the specific needs of online and hybrid learners. 

We'll draw on real outcomes from Franciscan University of Steubenville, where intentional segmentation and student-centered design drove online student awareness of resources from 69% to 94% — and discuss how institutions of any size or model can apply the same approach to close culture gaps and extend a sense of belonging to adjunct and online faculty. Whether you're rethinking student engagement or looking to better support your distributed teaching community, this session offers a practical, replicable framework for building a digital campus that works for everyone.

Presenters:

• Lindsey Haynes, Director of Franciscan Life Online, Franciscan University of Steubenville
• Allison Dean, Account Executive, Pathify

This presentation details the strategic design of a Wikimedia initiative at Lehman College that conceptually resituates students from passive consumers into active knowledge producers. The true innovation lies not just in the deliverables, but in the "positive collaboration" framework used to build it. Attendees will leave with two key takeaways: a pedagogical model for using Wikipedia to teach digital literacy and public scholarship, and a replicable "collaboration map" for identifying and engaging cross-campus stakeholders. By highlighting the specific roles and positive interplay of these departments, we demonstrate how reimagining adult learning starts with reimagining how we work together.

Presenter:

• Dermot Foley, Associate Director of Online Education, Center for Teaching and Learning, Lehman College, CUNY