Thursday Sessions, November 6

A strong sense of community is one of the most powerful predictors of online student persistence and success. Yet many distance learners report feeling disconnected from peers, faculty, and the institution. This session explores equity-focused strategies for intentionally designing courses that build belonging, with an emphasis on practices rather than specific tools.

Participants will learn community-building approaches grounded in Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and inclusive pedagogy, such as:

• Setting a welcoming course tone through personalized instructor presence,
• Fostering peer-to-peer connection with structured introductions and group norms,
• Embedding reflection and “low-stakes” sharing opportunities across the term,
• Designing discussion prompts that value diverse perspectives, and

Using BB Ultra features (announcements, discussion boards, journals, video feedback) to maintain ongoing instructor and student presence. Attendees will leave with a menu of strategies they can adapt to their own courses, regardless of discipline. By prioritizing belonging, faculty can reduce attrition, enhance equity, and create more human-centered online learning experiences.

This presentation offers a focused dive into Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Principle II: Providing Multiple Means of Representation. Participants will have the opportunity to engage in an activity to transform traditional course content into more accessible, comprehensible, and equitable formats. By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

• Explain the rationale for offering information in varied formats and connect UDL Representation to ADA standards;
• Apply a digital tool to convert a text-based resource into alternative formats;
• Reduce barriers to student comprehension of the language of their discipline; and
• Identify ways to activate or supply crucial background knowledge for students.

Belonging is an essential component of student success, however, it is often difficult to create a sense of belonging, especially for non-traditional students in an online environment. Non-traditional distance learning ACC students face unique challenges and often feel isolated due to inconsistent community building practices.

The Online Learning Empowerment and the Non-Traditional Student Support subteams of the Belonging & Engagement in the Classroom design teams will share findings from a series of focus groups we conducted to highlight how non-traditional distance learning students experience belonging. Paired with the lessons learned from benchmarking and prototype testing sessions, participants will learn some best practices for engaging these students in an online environment and create a culture of belonging.

Online courses continue to be the most popular choice for ACC students, but success in synchronous and asynchronous classes requires students to have strong executive functioning (EF) and solid digital literacy. Yet many students seem to struggle with skills necessary for confident navigation of the virtual classroom.

How do we support development of these essential skills for student success while continuing to meet course objectives? Join us to discuss strategies for building student comfort and confidence in online environments, embedding opportunities to practice EF skills, and connecting students with additional ACC resources.

The ACC Highland Welcome Center is a successful, high-impact strategy outside the classroom, designed to connect the community to opportunities for upward mobility. It aims to be the premiere location for community members to find their pathway to success through a welcoming and informational environment geared to enroll, engage, and educate.

The center’s core functions actively support student success by:

• CONNECTing guests with the best opportunities to achieve their goals.
• DISCOVERing opportunities for upward mobility and showcasing student support.
• START STRONG by providing next-step navigation and one-on-one support.
• BELONGing by creating welcoming experiences that connect guests to the Riverbat community.

Services include assistance with program options (credit & none-credit) applications for ALL programs, registration, securing payment, FREE Tuition information, and connecting students to support resources like Student Accessibility Services/Student Advocacy, Tutoring.

Basic Needs resources and so much more The positive impact is reflected in the high customer satisfaction(4.7 stars out of 5), and 86.12% of respondents either agreeing or strongly agreeing that staff listened and understood their goals. Plus, our Fall-to-Fall retention rate is higher than that of the College.

This session will introduce a unique prompt designing technique called Generative AI Self-Conversations (GAISC), where a user (faculty member and/or student) can instruct a generative AI tool such as ChatGPT to have engaging and dynamic conversations with itself on any topic of the user’s choosing. Essentially, drawing upon the vast repository of humanity’s collective knowledge within its training data, multiple personas may speak with each other about a tapestry of human ideas, experiences, and knowledge spanning cultures, languages, and fields of expertise.

The GAISC process begins when a user directs ChatGPT to take on various roles (personas & perspectives), contexts, tones, and topics of the user’s choosing in order to brainstorm, solve complex problems, spark new ideas, challenge assumptions, and generate fresh perspectives, which may also surface new ideas and insights that might otherwise have remained hidden.

Participants will gain a foundational understanding of the GAISC technique, including its educational value, benefits, and practical applications. They will also learn how to design an effective GAISC prompt. And using ChatGPT for a live demonstration, participants will discuss, analyze, and reflect on the generated GAISC conversation, summary elements, use-case scenario, and explore prompt iteration strategies, all to expand instructional possibilities.

What happens when English class takes place in a sausage factory, a private language school, or a virtual world? In each of these very different contexts, I discovered that radical accessibility begins with building authentic learning communities.

In East Austin, I taught ESOL on the floor of a sausage factory, where we co-created community values, used peer-teaching between higher- and lower-level students, and shaped lessons around the most immediate needs of workers. At a private adult school, I used simple but powerful routines—learning every student’s name, setting daily personal goals, reflecting on progress, and holding one-on-one “glows and goals” conferences—to make learning personalized and student-centered. In a fully virtual Second Life “English City,” students from around the world logged in as avatars to role-play, collaborate, and practice English in an immersive environment.

Across all three settings, the principles remain the same: flexibility, shared ownership of learning, peer support, and a commitment to accessibility through immediate, actionable tasks. This session will share lessons learned about how community-based learning can create inclusive, equitable classrooms—and how these practices translate to online and hybrid environments where belonging and access are essential.

How can we proactively design courses that welcome every student from the start? This session moves beyond reactive accommodations to introduce Universal Design for Learning (UDL), a framework for creating flexible, accessible, and engaging learning environments for all. As the strand lead for the Faculty Growth Series on UDL , I will guide participants through the core principles of UDL as defined by CAST: Multiple Means of Engagement, Representation, and Action & Expression. Rather than a theoretical overview, this will be a hands-on workshop.

You will leave with a toolkit of practical, low-effort strategies—from diversifying assignment formats to offering choice in how students engage with content—that you can implement immediately. Let’s work together to fire up your teaching and make a real impact on student success and belonging.

New research on parenting students in Texas demonstrates the importance of online and distance education options for students who are parents of dependent children. This presentation will share results of recent research, and provide participants with insights about the parenting students we serve.

The Workforce Learning Experience Design (WLX) team at Austin Community College (ACC) has partnered with Merit America and the AFF Foundation to transform the Advanced Manufacturing Production (AMP) training program into a scalable model that expands access for low-wage workers nationwide. Originally limited to about 14 students per cohort in an online synchronous hybrid format, the AMP program was redesigned into an asynchronous hybrid model that doubled enrollment capacity while maintaining rigor, hands-on learning, and robust learner support.

This redesign integrates in-person technical training with flexible online coursework, professional skills coaching, and wrap-around services funded through national partners. By leveraging Open Educational Resources (OER) to reduce costs and adopting inclusive, learner-centered design, the WLX team aligned technical training with equity-focused strategies that support economic mobility. Early outcomes show significant wage gains for learners, including alumni reporting an average annual increase of $24,000 after program completion.

This session will share how ACC and its partners are reimagining workforce training by combining innovative design with inclusive practices, offering a roadmap for institutions seeking to expand access, reduce barriers, and drive student success.

Development of subject matter interest is an important motivator for long term student learning. In this presentation I will share research based strategies for developing student interest via the pathway of social relatedness and connection within the classroom. Information shared will focus specifically on developing interest and relatedness in the online learning classroom and address challenges specific to that venue.

This showcase will be a representation of some the learning object and administrative tools created by ACC Faculty Participating the AI in Practice Advanced Applications Learning Community. This was a 6-week learning journney where faculty were introduced to and had hands on practice with various AI tools from prompting, to multimedia, to AI agents.

Faculty created tools to help student learn and to help them withe administrative practices invovled in teaching. The result is this sharing out and there will be time for Q&A.