On Campus Podcast – Designing Better Online and Blended Learning in 2026

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1. Introduction and Disclaimer (00:00:06) Host introduces the podcast, its purpose, and provides a disclaimer about the views expressed.
2. Guest Introduction and Career Path (00:00:32) Dr. Rhiannon Pollard shares her background and journey into instructional design.
3. Early Online Learning and Faculty Resistance (00:04:52) Discussion of initial faculty resistance to online learning and how attitudes shifted over time, especially post-pandemic.
4. Normalization and Quality of Online Learning (00:07:47) Explores how online learning became normalized and what constitutes high-quality online and hybrid courses.
5. Building Connection and Community Online (00:11:14) Tips for faculty to foster connection and community in online and hybrid courses.
6. Respecting Student Experience and Engagement (00:13:37) Importance of valuing students’ lived experiences and encouraging their engagement in course content.
7. Faculty Workload and Institutional Support (00:14:14) How instructional designers and institutions can support faculty without overwhelming them.
8. The Value of Instructional Designers (00:17:07) The critical role instructional designers play in institutional online learning strategies.
9. Integrating AI in Instructional Design (00:18:10) How instructional designers and faculty are thoughtfully incorporating AI into course design and teaching.
10. AI, Academic Integrity, and Assessment (00:21:05) Addressing academic integrity concerns and reframing assessments in the age of AI.
11. Faculty and Student Use of AI (00:22:48) Encouraging faculty and students to use AI as a learning tool rather than prohibiting it.
12. Institutional Strategy for Online and AI Learning (00:24:22) Practical steps for institutions to improve online learning quality and integrate AI, emphasizing the need for clear strategy and leadership.
13. Authority, Responsibility, and Quality Standards (00:27:27) Challenges of units responsible for online learning quality lacking authority, and the importance of aligning responsibility with authority.
14. Conclusion and Final Thoughts (00:28:52) Host and guest wrap up the conversation, emphasizing the importance of strategy and expertise in online education.
15. Podcast Closing and Further Resources (00:29:19) Host invites listeners to explore more resources and previews future episodes.

Ed Butch: Welcome to On Campus with CITI Program, the podcast where we explore the complexities of the campus experience with higher education experts and researchers. I’m your host, Ed Butch, and I’m thrilled to have you with us today. Before we get started, I want to quickly note that this podcast is for educational purposes only, and is not designed to provide legal advice or guidance. In addition, the views expressed in this podcast are solely those of our guests. Welcome to On Campus. On today’s episode, my guest is Dr. Rhiannon Pollard, director of instructional design for the University of Central Florida. Welcome to the pod, Dr. Pollard.

Rhiannon Pollard: Thank you. I’m very happy to be here.

Ed Butch: Yes, I’m excited as well. I think this will be an exciting topic for people. So I guess to start, why don’t you just give us a little bit about your career path and kind of how you got to your current role at UCF?

Rhiannon Pollard: Oh, sure. So as a lot of other instructional designers that I know of, instructional design was really a found career for me. I didn’t know what instructional design was. I had never even heard of it before. And in the early 2000s, that’s kind of when I started recognizing that there was a career path here. I started off actually as an academic advisor. And some of the students that I was supporting were in very early stage online programs right when universities had just started getting into online learning.

So as I was supporting these students, I started to really understand their needs, which we didn’t know a whole lot at the time about how different those were. And I had some web design skills. So I ended up drifting in my academic advising role into a little bit of support for the online stuff that faculty were doing.

I learned a lot about the structural organization of online programs and online learning at the university that I worked at. And so it kind of just ended up being a natural progression where at some point I knew more than anybody else did about how our online programs worked. They needed someone to take that on full time. And so I fell into that role.

And immediately, as soon as I did, I started to realize that I wanted to pursue education and formal knowledge in instructional design. So I had a background in psychology. And that helped me a little bit before I had the degrees in instructional design because I understood the basics of how people learn, and cognitive science and these kinds of things. So I got a master’s first in educational technology, and then pretty quickly after that, in fact, immediately after that, not only have I just always been in love with learning, but I realized that being in higher education at an R1 university, I would best serve everyone, including myself, by going ahead and getting the PhD.

So I just kind of kept taking the path. And I went from being a bit of a one-woman show supporting online programs that were just coming to being and getting off the ground into building a team of instructional designers, which was really exciting. And we were able to focus on supporting our faculty in a very close and connected kind of way. We were the only ones touching all of their courses. We were helping them with everything from, they couldn’t think of an idea for how to do a thing online to we were putting the content in, we were recording their lectures with them. And then after a few years of that, I ended up in a leadership position at the university that I was in, and it just kind of took off from there.

Ed Butch: Great. Fantastic. It’s interesting that you started off as an advisor. At my last role, I was at a university, an R1 university for 12 years, and my first multiple years was as an advisor as well in a college of arts and sciences. I feel like that progression does work really well because you get to know the programs so well, the curriculum and things like that so well. So I could imagine that would work very well into working with the faculty in designing those online courses then also.

Rhiannon Pollard: Yeah. And I mean, I think for me, understanding the student needs first, even though it was incidental that it happened that way, but really understanding the student needs first has informed everything that I’ve done since.

Ed Butch: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. That’s great. So obviously you work closely with faculty in designing these online and blended type courses. So you’ve mentioned you saw this as it started back in maybe the early 2000s and things like that. So I guess, what are some of the big shifts that you’ve seen since that first iteration to what you’re seeing now in these post-pandemic years?

Rhiannon Pollard: Yeah. I tell the story with so much love because these were my faculty for 10 years or more, but when we first started building our online programs where I was, so I came from a early, early 2000s, but then around 2011 or so is when I got into a formal position related to online learning. So we were just getting these programs off the ground, and there was so much resistance. I mean, we had pockets of faculty who just I will never do my courses online. And that was okay. We wanted the ones who wanted to do it, we supported them, and we let everyone else kind of hang back, and as classic diffusion of innovations.

So what I’ve seen change is that, over time, even those faculty who had said never, once they started to be willing to get their feet wet, they heard experiences of their colleagues, they heard from students. They were like, “All right, I’ll try this. We’ll see.” And it became something that they got excited about doing.

But even still, there was such a divide between faculty who said they were willing or they wanted to versus those who were just like, “It’s just not for me.” Then the pandemic hit and everyone had to, I think some people had really negative experiences being, quote, unquote, “forced” to go online. And I think also what I’ve seen is that it opened a lot of faculty members’ eyes to what’s possible. It shattered some assumptions of what online learning is. And in some cases, it crystallized them because not everyone was able to do the fidelity of online learning that we like to expect at this point.

But what I’ve seen now since is even more interesting to me because now because everyone’s done it, everyone had to teach online at some point. Everyone thinks they know how now. And that’s a dangerous place to be. So we have faculty who have, yes, they’ve been doing it now for five, six years. They have. They’ve been doing it. But have they been doing it the best way they could? So now there’s a little bit of undoing of bad habits that have been learned. But what at least we have now is a little less resistance to even the idea of online learning. It’s become so normalized. It’s not the threat to existence that it kind of seemed like some folks felt like it was back in the day.

Ed Butch: Right. Right, exactly. Well, and with that normalization, and also just like you mentioned, everyone has done it at this point and it’s not going anywhere. It’s part of strategy now for universities. In thinking about some of the faculty that you’re working with, with who’s doing it well, who’s not, I guess, what does really that high quality experience of online and hybrid learning look like?

Rhiannon Pollard: Yeah. So it’s been interesting. Again, I think early on the push was just get the content online. And there wasn’t as much understanding of the pedagogical strategy. I think it’s not dissimilar to how teaching has been done in the classroom for millennia. I think online learning opened up the door to questioning the best method for teaching. Most institutions, most faculty, I would say, understand that the sage on the stage doesn’t work in online learning. And that’s a big shift.

So high quality, or online or hybrid at this point, for me, what I can say is that the focus is so strongly on accessibility, on ensuring that learners have access to learning in ways that work for them. And that means a lot of different things. It doesn’t necessarily just mean we have captions on our videos, we have correct heading structures, all of these kinds of things. That’s absolutely critical.

But it also means that we’re meeting them where they are in a way that works for their lives. There’s a reason that these students are online. It’s mostly because they, for whatever reason in their lives, a full-time on-campus education doesn’t work for them. And so flexibility is a huge piece of how I think about high quality. Making sure that students have choice in terms of how they engage with each other and with the instructors, how they even engage with the content. As much as we can bring in UDL, that’s a huge focus for me and my team.

We have all kinds of different organizations that put out standards of quality and rubrics and ways that we can ensure that we’re meeting the pedagogical expectations of research. What does the research say. Using evidence-based best practices in our evaluation of online learning is critically important. I think being responsive to student needs in terms of asking them, doing student surveys and things like that. Not only on the evaluation of teaching, but also the evaluation of course design and structure, and even program design and structure.

And then for us, it’s also really important that a high quality experience means that there is a human element. That the student has a way to make a meaningful connection with the instructor, with the content, and with their peers. That doesn’t mean that every class has to have group projects. It doesn’t have to be that kind of way. Research has shown for many, many years that when you can connect, when you can have emotional salience involved in your learning, you learn better. So that’s an important aspect when I think of high quality.

Ed Butch: Definitely. So you mentioned, I think, really two very important things in that answer in terms of flexibility. Because we have students that are working more, that they can’t necessarily afford rent to live on or off campus, as well as that connection piece that you ended with there. So I guess, do you have some maybe tips or tricks of ways that faculty can really create that strong sense of connection and community in these types of courses?

Rhiannon Pollard: Sure. So I think for one of the easiest ways, and one of the things that we push our faculty to do, is just to have some kind of introduction to yourself. Some kind of orientation piece of the course. And not just, here’s how I’m going to grade you, but hey, here’s who I am. Here’s why this topic matters to me. Here’s what I want you to know about me as we go through this journey together. Really bringing in the authentic self and not being afraid to does a lot to help students feel like they can do the same.

And I think that this may be just my personal soapbox, but I really feel that the authenticity piece is really what allows connection to happen. And I think sometimes just because you create a discussion in your course, just because you say, “Hey, read this thing and then discuss it,” that doesn’t necessarily create connection. You have to really think, and I would say work with your instructional designer, to think about how you can intentionally create activities and spaces that foster that kind of connection because it can’t be forced. It has to be nurtured.

So right. Easy tips and tricks, I would say starting off with a faculty member orientation, instructor orientation. Letting the students introduce themselves as well. Giving them a space to talk where it doesn’t have to be all about the content, where there’s a little bit of give there for them to have real conversations. Maybe about around the content, but bringing in their personal experience, that’s a huge piece.

Ed Butch: Yeah. I think a lot of times, especially for an upper level course, students have experience in whatever area that they’re in, so they can provide maybe some of that context for fellow students, but also for the instructor to kind of have an idea of where they are within that kind of academic realm also.

Rhiannon Pollard: That’s right. I mean, first of all, it’s respect. When you respect the students’ lived experiences and ask them to bring it in and apply the content back to their life and do it in a way that is visible, they get more out of it, and everyone else in the class does too.

Ed Butch: Yeah, agreed. So one of the things I really, again, in my previous admin life at a university, I worked a lot with faculty and student recruitment and retention. And so one of the things that I always got some pushback on was workload and sustainability for what they’re doing. And so I guess in your role, and what you’ve seen as you’ve kind of maybe built some of these offices, how can offices like yours and institutions as a whole really support faculty in that, in designing effective courses, but not overwhelming them with tools and platforms and expectations and things like that?

Rhiannon Pollard: Yeah. So that’s the beauty of the instructional designer role, I mean, in a nutshell. You pretty much summed it. How can institutions support faculty? Give them instructional designers. So I like to think about it this way, that faculty are, by and large, and this is not always true, but by and large, a faculty member is a subject matter expert. They know chemistry. They are chemistry researchers. They’re biologists, they are writers. They’re all of the things that they spent all of their years and degree time honing.

When you ask them to also be technologists, pedagogical experts, understanding of student needs, all kinds of things, that’s a whole other job that they weren’t trained for. And you cannot throw them in a situation where they have to be experts at both. It doesn’t work. And it’s such a burden for faculty when that is the situation that they’re put in. So anything you can do to take some of that burden off, and say, “Hey, I’m going to partner you with someone.” When you’re writing a research paper on, I don’t know, I’m just going to say biology because I don’t know that much about biology, but here we go. They’re studying something, they’re studying a species, they’re studying behavior, whatever it is. They’re not going to try to do all the stats themselves. They bring a statistician to come in on their research project because that’s their expertise.

So dear higher education institutions, you already know how this works. We just need to do it and apply the same logic to teaching. Even on my team, we do a lot of training on all kinds of different tools and strategies and all kinds of things. And we have to know that we can’t throw the kitchen sink at faculty. We have to give them little bits. We have to make it self-directed in the same way that we expect students’ learning to be self-directed to some extent. Give them options and let them choose what works for them, and then lean into that. Not every faculty member is going to want to do in-depth conversations. Not every faculty member is going to want to do strategies for multiple choice exams. There has to be a menu, and there has to be some choice. Sorry, that was a little bit of a rant.

Ed Butch: No, no, it’s fantastic. I was going to say, I feel like you just made a perfect commercial for faculty to give to their deans and provosts of like this is why we need instructional designers.

Rhiannon Pollard: Yeah. I mean, really, the value that they bring to the whole enterprise, when you’re talking about an institution focusing pieces of their strategy, of their larger strategy, on online learning, you cannot overestimate the value that instructional designers bring to making that successful.

Ed Butch: For sure. And again, I think it goes back to that larger concept of what we’re supposed to be here for as institutions is the student experience. And the student experience and student support. With instructional designers helping the faculty with that, they’re going to have a better experience,

Rhiannon Pollard: Right.

Ed Butch: Right. And that’s what we’re supposed to be about. So I think that’s fantastic. I feel like nowadays we can’t talk about any subject area without talking about AI. So that I’m assuming is becoming part of the instructional design field as well, and part of course design and learning. So how do you feel like those professionals in your field are really helping faculty integrate AI thoughtfully into these types of courses?

Rhiannon Pollard: Yeah. So I can speak from two different angles on this one. I have the daily practical experience of my team and our larger unit and what we’re doing. And I also have co-authored some papers recently on how instructional designers are integrating AI into their work. So this is a great topic.

As they have been on teaching and learning in general, instructional designers continue to be the cutting edge of what’s happening in this space, really, in the ed tech space and learning sciences space. And as I have seen, they have continued to be the earliest adopters. They have been integrating AI since the day it came out, trying to see how can they apply this to their roles? How can they make their own jobs a little bit easier? How can they streamline some of the really time-consuming work, such as making captions for images? And as AI gets better and better, the applications in the actual work of instructional design just increase on a daily basis.

But in terms of helping faculty integrate AI, they sit with faculty to kind of work on things together. They’ve always done that, but now they’re sitting with faculty to work on things together with AI as a partner, as a kind of, let me show you the kinds of, let me show you how you can get new ideas for teaching. Let me show you how you can take your syllabus or learning modules and things like that and have it pull questions out of it. How can you test the alignment of the materials that you’re putting together and make sure that it is actually the objectives are aligned with the assessments or aligned with the content? There’s so many ways that AI has come in and helped us do the same things we were always doing just faster, and demonstrating to faculty that they can be more empowered than maybe they really thought they could for some of this work.

So another way that we are trying to help faculty thoughtfully integrate AI into their online and blended courses is by addressing the concerns with academic integrity that inevitably come out of whatever new technology is arising. This is not the first time we’ve had something that changes the conversation around, I’ll just say the word cheating.

So one of the things that the instructional designers are doing is helping faculty understand how they can reframe assessments in ways that make them a little more AI aware. There’s no such thing as AI proof. That is a adversarial framing that I don’t think is useful. I think that what we have been able to do is to really think about, in the age of AI, how can we have students leverage it for deeper thinking, for more critical thinking tasks? How can they use AI to experiment?

What it can actually do is offload some of the work that faculty might have had to do in terms of engaging with students, larger enrollment classes, and things like that. You can have your students go and experiment and run ideas and have conversations and test their writing and test their ideas. And bring all that back to you and show you, hey, look what I did. Look how much I learned. And it just opens up a lot of doors that weren’t even possible before we had these tools. And I think that we’re really trying to help faculty be creative about that and reframe their fear into possibility.

Ed Butch: If today’s conversation about online hybrid and AI supported teaching has you thinking about your own courses, CITI Program can help. Our Navigating Online and Hybrid Teaching course gives faculty practical guidance on course design, learner engagement, and choosing the right teaching modalities built specifically for higher education. Learn more at citiprogram.org.

It’s interesting because I’m always on the fence about AI because I have a little bit of that fear, but I also utilize it for some things. Talking about that faculty actually implementing it as part of the class. So maybe in one of their assignments is you’re going to have this paper use AI to help you brainstorm ideas and specific research topics for this. And let’s go through that print out of what you might be able to do. So actually using it and not just being, don’t use AI, don’t use AI, don’t use AI. But helping students understand really how to utilize it. I think that’s a really, really great point.

Rhiannon Pollard: And I have to say, it feels to me, and this is just my personal view, I think, it feels to me irresponsible not to. The students are living in this world where AI is going to be part of it. And so if we choose to say, nope, how are we serving them? Are we enabling them… Sorry, are we preventing them from getting experience that might be actually really valuable to them later in their lives? And I have to say, UCF is very AI forward. And we also enable each faculty member to make that decision for themselves and just very clearly relay it to students. But I have in my own poking around, I don’t think I’ve seen a course yet where the faculty member said absolutely no AI.

Ed Butch: Okay. I would assume that that is not the standard. That’s not the case at a lot of institutions. But I think that really kind is one of the last things I really want to talk about and ask you is, for those institutions that maybe are just rethinking their strategy, especially maybe around AI, I guess, what are maybe a practical step or two that they can take to really improve the quality of that online learning experience?

Rhiannon Pollard: Relative to AI?

Ed Butch: Relative to AI, or in general, or both. However you want to take that.

Rhiannon Pollard: Yeah. So I’ve been in middle management roles in both places where there was absolute decentralization and absolute centralization, whether at the entire institution scale or in pockets. And I have to say that there has to be someone steering the ship. When it comes to ensuring that they’re improving quality of online and blended learning, there has to be someone who is looking out for it. There has to be someone, and I don’t even mean in a compliance kind of way, I even mean just in a give me a framework, help me know what I’m supposed to do, some kind of leadership around this is our vision, this is our goal, and here’s some structure for how we do it.

And that can work even in decentralized environments. It’s just one of those things where when you see an institution’s online, well, I won’t call it strategy, but their online reality being the wild west, where every faculty member’s on their own. Maybe they have an LMS, they have an IT group, they have have some structure, because you must, you can’t just not have any infrastructure. But infrastructure without the supports around it, without the leadership guiding what direction it’s going, that is the best way to start improving and having a more successful experience is that someone needs to hold the line for what is this institution’s goal? What are the quality standards we’re going to use? Are we going to use quality standards? And if not, why not? And if we are, why, which ones? And at what level?

Do we have instructional designers in a centralized unit, or does every department need to hire their own? Do those instructional designers have a centralized place where they’re talking together so that everyone’s on the same page about what the courses look like? Do you hear from students? All of the kinds of things that I’ve really already talked about. It’s really about if they’re beginning to rethink their online strategy, I would say start with having a strategy.

Ed Butch: Yep. Yeah. No, put in something that makes sense, right? Because yeah, you just can’t throw it out there and be like, okay, we’re hiring 10 designers, but have-

Rhiannon Pollard: Yeah. And they’ll figure it out.

Ed Butch: … no policies or procedures or anything for them to do. Yeah, that makes total sense.

Rhiannon Pollard: And I think another thing that I’ve seen that’s been problematic at times is setting up those kinds of units, like units that are responsible for the quality of online learning, let’s just say. Setting up those units to where they have a lot of responsibility and no authority. That can be a recipe for a lot of tension and a lot of non-forward motion.

Ed Butch: That really goes back to something you mentioned earlier in terms of subject matter expertise. The faculty have their subject matter, chemistry, biology, whatever it might be, but you also have your expertise as instructional designers. You know what tools and technologies and policies and pedagogy and things like that, you are the experts. So you need to be able to have that conversation with the faculty then, and knowing that you have that expertise.

Rhiannon Pollard: Yeah. And I want to be really clear, what I’m not saying is that anyone other than the faculty member should have a say over how they teach their course. That is a sacred right of faculty that I would never breach. I meant more at the higher leadership levels. It’s great to say we have these quality standards and everyone needs to meet them, but when there’s no way to, when there’s no mechanism to expect that kind of compliance, then it becomes problematic.

Ed Butch: Well, that’s fantastic. Thank you so much for the conversation today. I mean, I think this is really interesting. I hope that some faculty and administrators get some good tips from this. I think there was plenty in there. And just start with a strategy. I think that’s what it boils down to.

Rhiannon Pollard: Thank you. Yeah, this was really fun. I love talking about the subject.

Ed Butch: Fantastic.

Rhiannon Pollard: I appreciate the opportunity.

Ed Butch: Thanks again, Dr. Pollard.

Rhiannon Pollard: Thank you.

Ed Butch: I invite all of our listeners to visit citiprogram.org to learn more about our courses and webinars on research, ethics, compliance, and higher education. I look forward to bringing you more expert guests to discuss what’s happening on campus.