IDEAL Consortium:
Many States, Same Current

Sept 30, 2026

Inside the 2026 IDEAL Summer Institute

Every August, for nearly two decades, adult education leaders from across the U.S. have come together for three days to collaborate on how to deliver quality distance and digital education. At the Innovating Digital Education in Adult Learning (IDEAL) Consortium Summer Institute, they compare challenges, strategies, and resources, in real time, across state lines. Under Jen Vanek’s leadership, World Education has been facilitating this work since 2015, after IDEAL’s founder, Jere Johnston of University of Michigan, retired. This year, we held the Summer Institute at a Literacy Minnesota learning center in Minneapolis. 

According to 2024–2025 NRS data, IDEAL’s nineteen member states served nearly half of the country’s distance education participants: 122,297 learners. The other 34 states combined serve 129,435, according to the most recent NRS data. The typical IDEAL state served roughly 47% more distance education participants than the typical non-member state. Because of member states’ commitment to providing quality digital education, the Institute provides a unique opportunity to check the pulse of the field through the perspectives of some of the most robust programs and experienced practitioners in the field.

Key themes kept resurfacing at the Institute across state reports, breakout sessions, and hallway conversations alike. Here’s what stood out:

The Institute opened with a preview of that shift: Jeff Goumas from World Education presented a new IDEAL course, Generative AI Maker Space (GenAIMS), built in partnership with the Texas Center for Advancement of Literacy and Learning (TCALL) and grounded in established frameworks for teacher professional development (PD). In the course, teachers create and adapt learning resources with Generative AI tools as they build their knowledge and skills. The course uses a flipped, à la carte model, and the pilot resulted in hundreds of completers. The early takeaway echoed a theme that ran through the whole Institute: AI is a strong starting point for differentiating and contextualizing instruction, but it works only with real human oversight and institutional support behind it. (Read the report, Generative AI Maker Space (GenAIMS).)

Other states made good progress this year on helping their teachers to build AI skills. Pennsylvania’s AI Community of Practice has grown so large it now breaks out into subject-focused small groups rather than a single open conversation. Connecticut demoed a Foundational Digital Literacy Checklist, with a built-in AI-assisted step that generates a standards-alignment table. These examples show that teacher support is being delivered in a variety of ways, from facilitated discussions to guidance embedded in the lesson planning steps that state leaders know teachers are going to see in their typical workflow. 

Despite all of this activity, conversations throughout the Institute highlighted two key gaps in the field: actual policy, along with a clear picture of what students are doing with AI.

On policy, state leaders described a shared tension between the guidance they need to give programs and the guidance they haven’t received themselves. One participant called it “policy limbo.” In its absence, most states are leaning on local control or borrowing an existing framework, most often the U.S. Department of Labor’s AI Literacy Framework, as unofficial guidance.

On the student side, one breakout landed on a four-part, agency-centered approach to integrating AI tools: give learners choice and build critical thinking, reflection and ownership of their use. The idea of student advisory groups that let learners teach the field how they’re already using these tools. Closing both gaps, real policy and a clearer picture of student AI use, is shaping up to be one of IDEAL’s next undertakings.

Rethinking Professional Development: From Attendance to Demonstrated Practice

One widespread challenge that emerged was how practitioners struggle to prioritize the limited time they have to engage in PD: what they want to attend, what they actually need, and what they realistically have time for. One breakout captured it memorably as “ice cream topics” (fun, low-lift) versus “broccoli topics” (necessary, less appealing).

State examples ranged widely, from Massachusetts’ and Texas’ “macro-first” microlearning series to Arizona’s Monthly Tech Tip Padlet to Rhode Island’s Tech Tuesdays. Participants appreciated hearing about Rhode Island’s “By RI Teachers, For RI Teachers” (BRITFIT), a peer-led PD model.

A featured session, "From Snack to Strategy," put the theory into practice: a live audience-response exercise let participants experience microlearning firsthand before introducing the 4 Cs of quality microlearning design: Concise, Current, Complete, and Component (of something larger). The guiding principle? Build the full learning pathway first, then break it into pieces, rather than starting from disconnected fragments and hoping they add up.

Member states shared their responses to this challenge. One was a shift toward shorter, more targeted PD paired with opportunities for teachers to apply it, with real proof that the PD “worked.” For example, Arizona’s Digital Literacy Leader badge, issued through Credly, requires classroom observation evidence of actual implementation rather than mere course completion. The other strategy was a three-tier model, moving from microlearning to short courses to in-depth, certification-bearing application, which gained real traction in discussion. These strategies resonated with the group and led to a suggestion to build a shared, cross-state list of competencies states could align badges with together.

Meeting Every Learner Where They Are

Two of the Institute’s most candid conversations centered on a harder question: who still gets left out of digital and distance learning, and what does it really take to include all learners who want to access it?

One session focused on four learner populations that anchor so much of this work: incarcerated learners, rural learners, internationally trained professionals, and adults with very low literacy. Each group’s constraints are genuinely different, and so are the solutions states are building for them. Incarcerated learners often have no internet access at all, so paper-based instructional packets remain the backbone of instruction there. Pre-literate learners benefit from video since reading isn’t yet the entry point; one state pairs printed materials with QR codes linking directly to instructional video. Rural learners face a connectivity problem more than a preference problem: phone-based platforms built for basic devices and offline content servers are filling the gap where broadband simply isn’t reliable.

That distinction matters because of a genuinely myth-busting data point confirmed by a 2025 research report, Breaking Barriers to Adult Literacy Access: Insights from Adults with Low Literacy Across the United States. This report found that, given real access and choice, adult learners most preferred a hybrid or fully online option. This directly contradicts the assumption that students prefer in-person instruction. The takeaway isn’t that one modality wins across the board; it’s that access, not preference, is usually the actual constraint, and solutions have to be built around whichever barrier a specific population is facing.

A second session tackled digital accessibility compliance head-on, driven largely by a recent U.S. Department of Justice directive. The key insight that came out of this discussion from a member state with a deep accessibility expertise: don’t designate a single accessibility expert per organization. As one participant put it, concentrating that expertise in one or two people “creates undue burden and also creates a key personnel risk.” Instead, everyone in an organization should know the field’s most critical accessibility basics.

On data, the recurring problem isn’t that states use different systems. It’s that in more than one state, leadership and PD teams don’t have direct access to the student-level distance education data they need to make procurement and PD decisions. Two states described the same gap: state-level teams depend on individual programs voluntarily sharing data upward, rather than having real-time visibility themselves. One state’s model stood out as worth studying broadly: California gives both teachers and students their own reporting space, with students able to see their own testing history directly. Meanwhile, California and Minnesota are independently working on the same open problem, tracking co-enrollment across WIOA workforce partners.

The Year Ahead

Several threads from this year’s Institute point directly to where IDEAL’s work goes next:

• On AI, closing two gaps — real policy guidance and a clearer picture of how students are actually using these tools — is shaping up to be one of IDEAL’s next undertakings.

• On digital literacy, IDEAL will gather strategies from member states on integrating digital skills into other subject areas, with the goal of producing field-wide guidance.

• On professional development, states’ interest in a three-tier PD model led to a proposal worth pursuing: a shared, cross-state list of competencies that badges and credentials could align to.

• On data, California’s model — giving both teachers and students direct access to their own reporting, including testing history — is worth studying as a template other states could adapt.

And the biggest push will be growing IDEAL Commons, the shared resource library launched live at this year’s Institute. Participants uploaded 23 resources during the launch workshop alone, and early feedback was strongly positive: the overwhelming majority of participants rated the platform “easy” or “very easy” to use.

What This Institute Represents

A first-time attendee remarked that this was the best organized national adult education training they’d been part of, and wondered aloud why other national initiatives hadn’t reached this same level of genuine collaboration. What we know is that the Institute is built, deliberately and over the years, by states choosing to share their challenges and show their work to each other rather than solve the same problems in isolation.

That’s the culture the IDEAL Consortium exists to build: not top-down delivery, but grassroots partnership and states feeding inquiry, collaboration, and expertise back out to the field. This year’s Institute was a strong reminder of what that looks like in practice, and a preview of the work ahead.

The conversation continues soon: a new season of IDEAL’s EdTech Strategy Session series kicked off on September 11, with presentations on library-based mobile literacy labs and using Google Workspace to support student learning, and an update on Digital Equity Act grant opportunities. On October 9, two lightning talks will feature strategies to help adult education administrators and program leaders leverage AI to support their work. These monthly webinars are a way to extend the good work happening in the IDEAL Consortium to the broader field. We hope you’ll register and tune in each month.

Learn more about the IDEAL Consortium at ideal.worlded.org.