We have devoted a great deal of space to AI-related articles this past year. AI is seemingly everywhere these days. Every week, we learn of a new application or adaptation of AI –and AI has been doing a lot of growing and becoming in the past year. AI is having a greater impact than ever – and is now coming to our online class LMS! I wanted to share a few recommendations to help you “move the needle” in addressing faculty/staff concerns as well as helping those learn how to effectively use AI.
AI Coming To Your LMS
There is an opinion piece this week that discusses the critical need to re-examine the traditional LMS in light of the arrival of AI. AI is – or at least should be – redefining what we teach and how we teach. This is true in the traditional classroom and needs to occur in the online classroom as well. I’d encourage checking out this article and then schedule a conversation with your LMS account representative to learn how your LMS is using/will be using AI and when these adaptations will occur. You need to plan and prepare – yes, your job and what you do is evolving as well. Ultimately, AI will help our faculty and instructional designers create ADA-compliant content, develop more engaging student material, provide assistance for your creation of content and for student projects and assignments, help create more complex course discussions, and will help faculty provide informed/detailed assessments of student work.
Don’t Feel Like You Need To Do All Of This Alone
No one feels up to implementing AI – it is complex, complicated and evolving rapidly. We are all digital immigrants in dealing with AI and will benefit from embracing a few key strategies:
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Join an organization that can help you. Luckily, you are a member of the ITC – we are an online learning/EdTech organization focused on community colleges. We offer regular AI webinar summits (the next one planned for April 2026), have a wonderful annual national conference – this year in Austin, Texas March 13-15 – which will have many sessions dealing with the topics of online learning and AI, have an AI affinity group with more than 30 members working on ways to help our members maximize the AI experience, and we also provide this weekly eNews digest/to share current information about topics like Distance Learning and AI. Tap into these resources to help to better understand these technologies as well as how to explore and implement them
- Collaborate. Honesty, you can’t do this alone. Most campuses are lacking resources, and have colleagues with limited knowledge. By working with others (external to your campus), you can pool the talent you have and SHARE with each other. If you are not part of a system, you are a member of the ITC – let us know and we can connect you with a campus you can work with.
- Higher-level Collaboration. As an example, my institution is part of a system – the Nevada System of Higher Education (NSHE). We are a small system – just seven campuses – 3 universities and 4 community colleges. We reached out to the system office and now have a permanent committee representing all seven campuses. We are committed to working with each other and to SHARING. Example: my campus has now hosted two 3-day Professional Development AI summits; one last April and the most recent in October. We included sessions from a few of our sister campuses as well as enlisting talent from within the ITC. Each summit featured 12 sessions – mostly webinars – but also a few in-person. We were able to register participants from the other six institutions – at no charge – to participate in our summits. We also recorded all sessions to create a stable of PD sessions that could be archived and accessed (hosted on our TMCC YouTube channel).
Please let me know if you have any questions or I can be of any assistance. [email protected]
