OTC’26 Archives

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Presentation slides are available to conference attendees through the conference app until December 15, 2026.

Keynotes

SONYA CHRISTIAN, California Community Colleges Chancellor California Community Colleges Chancellor Sonya Christian will provide opening remarks at the 2026 Online Teaching Conference. Chancellor Christian is scheduled to offer system wide insights on the future of online learning and student success, setting the tone for an inspiring conference experience!

FLOWER DARBY Joyful Online Teaching: Find Your Fizz to Boost Learning and Success Let’s face it. Teaching these days is tough. We’re exhausted, burned out, and frustrated by societal challenges like politics and AI. Yet our work is important, mea  ningful, and worthwhile. We’re changing lives and helping dreams come true. The best way to meet the threat posed by AI to meaningful learning is to center the people in our classes -- both ourselves and our students -- and focus on fostering collective well-being. Based on Flower’s new book, The Joyful Online Teacher: Finding Our Fizz in Asynchronous Classes, this talk will help us see how to promote flourishing and rediscover the joy inherent in transformational teaching and learning.

From Classroom to Career: Mobilizing a Human-First AI Ecosystem Facilitated by CRAIG HAYWARD, CCC Vice Chancellor of AI Strategy and Digital Transformation The intersection of online education and the modern workforce is being redefined by the paradox of artificial intelligence; it is both a challenge to traditional modes of ensuring academic integrity and a massive opportunity for equity and economic mobility. In this final session, system leaders pull back the curtain on the Vision 2030 workplans to explore the California Community Colleges’ ground game for 2.2 million students and 90,000 committed professionals. Facilitated by Vice Chancellor Craig Hayward, the panel, including Vice Chancellors Anthony Cordova, Vice Chancellor of Workforce and Economic Development, Siria Martinez, Vice Chancellor of Equity, Innovation & Institutional Effectiveness, and Executive in Residence, Strategic Technology Initiatives, Jory Hadsell, will move beyond theory into the lived realities of implementation. The panelists will share key accomplishments from the past year while addressing a vital question: How do we ensure AI projects deliver on the promise of student success without compromising educational depth? We will explore how the system is leveraging partnerships with Google, IBM, Coursera, Microsoft and others to build high-demand skills, while simultaneously evaluating whether our implementations are fostering human agency or creating new digital divides. Join us for a grounded yet hopeful look at how the California community colleges are navigating the technical and ethical details to ensure AI remains a human-centered force for good in California.

Engage Like a YouTuber: Transforming Online Teaching with Video
Peter Esperanza, PhD

This 50-minute, hands-on session invites faculty and instructional staff to explore the value of creating their own instructional videos to enhance student engagement across multiple teaching modalities—in-person, hybrid, synchronous, and asynchronous online learning. Designed especially for educators with little to no experience in video production, this session provides a supportive introduction to the fundamentals of content creation for teaching and learning.

Building upon the 2025 session “Engage Like a YouTuber: Transforming Online Teaching with Video,” this workshop focuses on practical strategies for designing short, authentic videos using accessible tools such as smartphones, laptops, and built-in cameras. Participants will gain experience in recording short clips and explore how AI-assisted features can improve accessibility and streamline production without compromising authenticity or ethical standards.

The session emphasizes the human element in digital instruction—how instructor-created videos can build presence, strengthen connection, and foster a more engaging and inclusive learning experience. Through guided activities, participants will experiment with scripting, recording, and sharing short video messages that can be integrated into their teaching practice immediately.

By the end of the session, attendees will have a clearer understanding of how to integrate video into their courses effectively and ethically. They will leave with practical approaches to producing meaningful, personalized content that supports student engagement and learning across all teaching modalities.
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Testing AI Prompts Before Students Do: A Practical Framework
Julie Gamberg
Anna Mills

Interested in offering students AI feedback tailored to your assignments, but not sure where to start? Maybe you've heard about custom AI tools like PlayLab or seen colleagues sharing prompts, and you're wondering: would this actually help my students? How would I know if it's any good?  This session reveals what our multi-institutional research team learned from months of iterative prompt testing and shows you how you can create and test effective AI prompts for your online students, across disciplines.   Drawing from our experience refining AI feedback prompts across multiple ChatGPT models (GPT 4.1, 4o, and 5.2) and testing them against diverse student work, we'll share a practical framework for prompt validation that doesn't require a research team.  We'll explain what makes a prompt effective, including techniques like "chain-of-thought" scaffolding (telling the AI to brainstorm before responding) and reader-response framing (centering how human audiences experience writing). We'll show side-by-side examples of generic AI feedback versus equity-minded, pedagogically-designed feedback, so you can see how instructions shape outcomes.  You'll also learn how to evaluate whether a prompt is ready for your students: what to look for, what red flags to avoid, and how much testing is realistic. Whether you're just AI-curious or already experimenting with tools like PlayLab in your LMS, you'll leave with a prompt evaluation checklist, example prompts you can adapt, and realistic expectations for integrating AI prompts in your online course.
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Empowering Education with CCC TechConnect: Tools to Enhance Learning and Collaboration
Najib Manea
Candace Robertson
Heather Schmidt

Join us to explore how TechConnect's suite of services can revolutionize your institution's approach to digital education. Learn how TechConnect provides cutting-edge tools such as Zoom for e-conferencing, cloud-based video on demand, and integrations with Canvas, all designed to enhance learning engagement, collaboration, and accessibility. Discover how to leverage these tools at no cost to improve student success, streamline digital communication, and simplify media management, while also connecting with live support tailored for the California Community Colleges system​.
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Design Once, Benefit All: Building Flexible Access into Online Learning with UDL
Amanda Taintor

Providing access in online courses is often treated as reactive work—adding accommodations after students request them. This workshop reframes equitable access as a proactive design opportunity that benefits all learners while reducing last-minute faculty workload. Using Universal Design for Learning (UDL) as a framework, participants will explore practical strategies for building flexibility and multiple pathways into online courses from the start. Online environments present unique opportunities for UDL implementation: asynchronous learning naturally allows for varied pacing, multiple content formats, and diverse ways to demonstrate knowledge.

This session will focus on simple, technology-agnostic strategies to provide options for how students engage with course material (video, text, interactive elements), demonstrate their learning (varied assessment formats), and maintain motivation (choice, relevance, flexible deadlines). We'll discuss how proactive design through UDL principles reduces barriers to learning, creates more equitable experiences, and actually saves faculty time in the long run. Participants will see concrete examples applicable across disciplines and learning management systems, with attention to California's new UDL requirements for course outlines of record.

This session is designed for online faculty at any experience level who want practical, implementable strategies to support diverse learners—including students with disabilities, multilingual learners, working adults, and anyone navigating the challenges of asynchronous learning. Equitable access isn't about doing more work; it's about designing thoughtfully from the beginning.
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Extreme Makeover: Online Education Edition
Fabiola Torres
Scotty James
Jim Julius

Let’s be honest. Online education has been in need of a makeover for a while. Regulations, rubrics, and reviews might help with minor remodels. But now that generative and agentic AI are on the scene, the conventional wisdom for making online classes meaningful places for authentic learning is clearly insufficient. Does this mean AI is the enemy of online education?

Generative AI chatbots and agentic AI tools amplify longstanding concerns about academic integrity. They even call into question the efficacy of our most tried-and-true approaches to authentic, equity-minded, and humanized online course design and teaching. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have options in our efforts to make online education a meaningful venue for transformative teaching and learning.

In this session, you’ll hear from online education and AI leaders from three colleges who will describe not just design ideas for online course makeovers, but also leadership strategies to help our colleagues and colleges to undertake this work together. Participants will be able to access resources shared by the presenters, as well as to contribute their own ideas and resources to help develop a collective toolkit for us to advance this work on our campuses.
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Humanizing AI: Navigating 10 Ethical Pillars for Student Success
Alison Gurganus

The "Human Element" is our most vital asset as AI transforms the digital landscape. For faculty teaching online, navigating the ethics of Generative AI is no longer optional, it is a pedagogical necessity. This interactive workshop moves beyond the "how-to" of tools to explore the "should-we" of instruction. We will navigate ten critical ethical pillars, from Data Privacy (FERPA) and Accessibility to Labor Exploitation and Environmental Impact.  Participants will engage in a "Case Study Carousel," analyzing real-world ethical dilemmas tailored to the diverse California Community College student population. We will bridge the gap between innovation and integrity, focusing on how AI can support student empowerment rather than replace human connection. Attendees will walk away with a Practitioner’s Toolkit, including an "Ethical Vetting Checklist" and a modular syllabus statement. Join us to design an online future where technology serves the human experience without compromising our core values.  This  is presented in two back-to-back fast  paced, 50-minute, interactive, sessions.
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