This event has passed.

EdgeCon Spring 2026

Name: EdgeCon Spring 2026
Start: 2026-04-16T09:00:00-04:00
End: 2026-04-16T17:00:00-04:00
Location: The College of New Jersey

April 16 @ 9:00 am - 5:00 pm

$49

Agenda

8:00-8:30 — Check In / Registration

8:30-9:30 — Exhibitor Networking & Breakfast

9:40-10:20 — Breakout Session 1

10:30-11:10 — Breakout Session 2

11:20-12:30 — Keynote Panel

12:30-1:30 — Exhibitor Networking & Lunch

1:40-2:20 — Breakout Session 3

2:30-3:10 — Breakout Session 4

3:10-4 — Coffee & Connections: Exhibitor Networking

When Digital Learning Becomes Infrastructure: What Changes for Teaching and Learning

Digital learning is no longer experimental in higher education. Learning platforms, analytics, AI tools, and online and hybrid delivery models are now embedded in how institutions teach, advise, assess, and communicate. For many campuses these systems function as core infrastructure shaping everyday academic practice, often without being explicitly named as such.

This keynote panel moves beyond questions of what institutions should adopt next and instead examines what changes once digital learning becomes embedded in the institution. Panelists will explore how decisions affecting pedagogy, accessibility, equity, and academic quality are increasingly made through systems, policies, and vendor configurations—and where responsibility for those decisions truly sits.

The conversation will surface how institutional structures, governance models, and technology ecosystems influence teaching and learning behind the scenes, and what happens when the desire for speed, scale, and automation collides with the need for quality, trust, and accountability. Panelists will also discuss where institutions are intentionally slowing down, adding guardrails, or revisiting assumptions as digital learning continues to scale.

Rather than focusing on emerging trends, this session centers on institutional maturity: how roles and responsibilities shift as digital learning becomes infrastructure, what higher education must still actively own, and where the risks of not deciding are already being felt.

Breakout Sessions

Breakout Session 1 • 9:40 - 10:20 AM

AI or Not? Designing Assignments in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

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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

From Insight to Innovation: Using Data and Market Analytics to Inform Digital Program Development

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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

From Audit to Action: Real Strategies for ADA Title II Compliance in Higher Ed

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With the ADA Title II deadline now here, the question for most institutions has shifted from "do we need to comply?" to "how do we actually do this?" In this session, Edge is joined by institutional partners who have each approached compliance differently — and together they tell a story that covers nearly every angle an institution might be navigating right now. Mercer County Community College shares what a comprehensive accessibility audit revealed and how those findings became the foundation for a systemic, institution-wide response. Passaic County Community College walks through a course remediation partnership model that brought inaccessible courses back to life at scale without adding burden to already stretched faculty. Stockton University reflects on what it took to address compliance across complex vendor platforms while simultaneously building the faculty awareness and buy-in needed to make accessibility a shared institutional value. And Felician University — a private institution that chose to get ahead of the curve — speaks to what proactive compliance looks like from the inside: building policy and procedures, establishing student-facing communication, and holding vendors accountable before problems became crises. Together, these perspectives offer something for everyone in the room: practical strategies, honest reflection, and proof that compliance is achievable regardless of institutional type, size, or starting point. Attendees will leave with concrete takeaways and a clearer sense of what a realistic compliance roadmap can look like for their own institution.

Presenters:

Laura M. Romeo, Ph.D., Director of Digital Learning Innovation, Scholarship, and Educational Services, Edge
Inder Singh, VP for Information Technology Services, Mercer County Community College
Dr. Deanna Valente, Dean of Academic IT, Information Systems & Learning & Development, Felician University
Scott Huston, Chief Information Officer, Stockton University

The Modern Digital Campus: Turning Online Access Into Real Engagement and Community

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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

As Seen on TV: Using Television Best Practices in Video Lectures

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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

Breakout Session 2 • 10:30 - 11:10 AM

Covid, AI and the Blue Book: Rethinking Pedagogy in 2026

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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

From Clicks to Strategy: Using Canvas Analytics, AI, and Communication Data to Drive Institutional Decision-Making

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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

Reimagining Adult Learning through Collaborative Open Pedagogy Planning, Design, and Execution

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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

Behind the Veil: Designing Just Digital Learning in the Age of AI

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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

Breakout Session 3 • 1:40 - 2:20 PM

One Course, Many Formats: AI + UDL for In-Person, Hybrid, and Online Learning

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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

Building the Plane While Flying It: Lessons from Launching an AI Faculty Institute in Fall 2025

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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

Stop Retrofitting: Why Embedding Instructional Design from Day One Changes Everything

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Most institutions discover the cost of skipping instructional design the hard way — through courses that don't hold together, assessments that don't match outcomes, and program experiences that feel inconsistent from one course to the next. In this session, Edge's instructional design team uses the development of a graduate-level occupational therapy program as a real-world case study to explore what intentional, embedded program design actually looks like — and why it matters. Attendees will see how aligning learning outcomes across an entire program from the start, designing assessments that reflect authentic professional practice, and building a coherent student journey from course one to course completion produces measurably better results than retrofitting courses after the fact. But more importantly, they'll leave with a practical framework they can bring back to their own institutions — whether they're building something new, reexamining something existing, or trying to make the case internally for why instructional design needs a seat at the table from the beginning.

Presenters:

Laura M. Romeo, Ph.D., Director of Digital Learning Innovation, Scholarship, and Educational Services, Edge
Shirley Abbelard, MOT, OTR/L, Assistant Professor, Felician University

Reimagining Intro to Comm: Voice, Choice, and Digital Design

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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
Lisa Karakas, English Professor, Berkeley College

Humanizing Courses to Promote a Community of Learners

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Our diverse classrooms include first-generation, differently abled, international, and non-traditional students, among many other categories. Students bring their own strengths and concerns when it comes to “what will this class experience mean to me?”

Higher education research into “humanizing” courses is centered in online teaching and learning. In this session, we will share how these same principles can create opportunities to encourage students to share their personal preferences and individual needs. This, in turn, can help build class cohesion whether in the traditional classroom or in digital spaces.

Students are more likely to engage with their peers and instructors when they feel seen, heard, and welcomed. As an instructor, you can use multimedia elements to provide a human touch to text-based assignment feedback and enhance student sense of belonging.

This interactive session will provide ideas to new and seasoned instructors in higher education classes. You will come away with sample surveys, videos, and a renewed sense of how to engage students throughout the entire semester.

Upon completion of this workshop, the participant will be able to:

Describe the concept of a “humanized” course
Consider the use of surveys to provide students with an opportunity to share self-identification preferences and course-centered personal backgrounds
Preview sample videos to support a student’s sense of belonging
Investigate opportunities to use a learning management system’s feedback options

Presenters:

Ann Oro, Senior Instructional Designer, Seton Hall University
Kate Sierra, Senior Instructional Designer, Seton Hall University

Breakout Session 4 • 2:30 - 3:10 PM

A Division‑Level, Bottom‑Up Model for Responsible AI Adoption: Improving Administrative Productivity While Preserving Faculty Capacity

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As generative AI tools become embedded in higher education operations, institutions face a central challenge: how to improve efficiency without undermining faculty roles, governance structures, or institutional trust. This session presents a division‑level implementation case study from the Community College of Philadelphia demonstrating how a bottom‑up, staff‑centered approach to AI adoption—supported by IT and academic leadership—can increase administrative productivity while reducing faculty administrative burden.

Following compliance‑aligned training facilitated by IT leadership, administrative staff integrated Microsoft Copilot into high‑friction workflows spanning decision support, compliance reporting, operational documentation, and institutional analytics. Rather than targeting isolated tasks, Copilot was applied to recurring work patterns that consume disproportionate staff time—enabling faster information synthesis, more consistent documentation, and expanded analytic insight across the division’s core administrative functions.

This collaborative, bottom‑up model fostered rapid buy‑in, strengthened cross‑functional relationships between IT and administrative staff, and improved morale by positioning AI as an enabling tool rather than a directive mandate. Faculty—who operate as a distinct employee group—benefit indirectly through reduced administrative complexity, faster reporting cycles, and clearer operational support, allowing faculty effort to remain focused on teaching and academic work.

To assess impact, the division is developing an evaluation framework that estimates time saved per task and per staff member, translating individual efficiency gains into an amplifying, division‑level productivity effect. This session offers a practical, transferable framework for responsible AI implementation that aligns with institutional roles, governance, and long‑term sustainability.

Presenters:

Moe Rahman, Associate Vice President / CIO, Community College of Philadelphia
Vishal Shah, Dean, MSHC, Community College of Philadelphia
Andrenna Gibson, Associate Dean, Community College of Philadelphia

Academic Feedback Intelligent Assistant

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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.

The Operating System Changed: What Happened to Students, Information, Reality, and Knowledge While We Were Arguing About ChatGPT

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While higher education has spent the last two years debating AI tools, policies, and plagiarism detection, something more fundamental shifted underneath. The foundational conditions of learning: what students are, how information works, what counts as real, and what’s possible to know, changed before AI arrived. AI didn’t cause the disruption. It accelerated one already underway.

This session identifies four shifts in the educational landscape that most institutional AI strategies ignore: the dissolution of the human-machine boundary in student identity and cognition; the transformation of information from something students access to an environment they inhabit; the collapse of reliable distinctions between authentic and synthetic; and the expansion of what’s computable, knowable, and askable across every discipline.

Each shift carries direct implications for technology architecture, data strategy,governance, and institutional decision-making — implications that no vendor has an incentive to surface and most campuses haven’t yet named.

Presenters: