Artificial intelligence tools are increasingly generating content filled with emojis, icons, and visual embellishments. While these elements can add personality and engagement, they can also introduce barriers related to accessibility, usability, readability, and interpretation. We will examine how assistive technologies interpret emojis, discuss when emojis enhance or hinder communication, and review practical strategies for using visual elements intentionally in educational and professional contexts.

The 2027 Online Course Design Rubric is being revised, and this webinar offers an overview look at the work behind that effort. Designed for all California community college faculty, this session focuses on how the rubric is being shaped, not a walkthrough of the draft itself.

Presenters will share what has been learned through statewide listening sessions, faculty conversations, and the POCR pilot, where reviewers applied draft criteria to real online courses. These activities have surfaced valuable insights about clarity, usability, and how the rubric functions in practice for both course authors and reviewers.

In this webinar, we’ll share how that experience prompted City College of San Francisco to develop an Instructional Continuity Planning Guide and explore practical strategies for maintaining instruction during an LMS disruption. Topics will include communicating with students, accessing and sharing course materials, continuing synchronous or asynchronous instruction, adapting assignments and assessments, and using backup options such as email, Zoom, Pronto, Simple Syllabus, and institutionally supported cloud tools.

We’ll also look at how CCSF developed the guide, including the process used to identify practical alternatives, organize faculty guidance, and create a resource that could be used quickly during an outage. Administrators and instructional leaders will leave with ideas for facilitating a similar continuity-planning process at their own institutions.

Participants will leave with both practical strategies for teaching through an LMS disruption and a framework for strengthening instructional continuity and campus readiness before the next unexpected outage occurs.

If AI can produce what we've been asking for, what were we actually asking for? I spent years telling students to show their work — and it wasn't until AI that I let myself question an educational tradition of scoring human intellect that never felt completely right.

For over a century, education has asked students to produce things — essays, tests, rubric-scored papers — and called it evidence of learning. It wasn't a bad idea. It was a practical one. But somewhere along the way, the final submission became the point, and the thinking and learning behind it became invisible.

This presentation isn't about AI detection, policy, or whether students are cheating. It's about an older, quieter problem: assessment built around collecting output and predetermined outcomes, not witnessing genuine learning — the confusion, the questions a student doesn't know how to ask yet, the moment something finally clicks. As educators, we work within systems that need the cleaned-up product at the end — the scores, the outcomes, the things that can be counted. But now we have an opening to design assessment around what we actually care about: the learning itself.

Course outlines of record (CORs) are fundamental to community college curriculum. Explore the basics of CORs, including their legal foundations and varied purposes and audiences, as well as the ways faculty can use CORs to support faculty preparation and equitable student learning.

Does the rise of AI tools change how we teach? Does it change what we teach? How, in other words, should we think about the discipline-specific skills and knowledge that we share with students in the age of AI? AI raises many practical questions about our day-to-day teaching, but it also presents an opportunity to rethink more fundamental aspects of our disciplines. This presentation argues that departments across the California community colleges would benefit from focused discussion about such questions, and that the answers will almost certainly be different for different departments. What are the core skills and concepts that each discipline needs to defend against the temptations of AI shortcuts? What new skills might we adopt? What old skills might we deemphasize? What do we want to keep, and what do we want to change? And how might targeted use of AI tools help students learn our core skills and values more effectively?

This webinar will describe the experience of an instructor reflecting on these questions and will share some of the conclusions drawn so far. Most importantly, it will share templates that other disciplines and departments can use to organize their own versions of this conversation.

Educational chatbots are everywhere, from common classrooms to Khan Academy. The results: mixed. To understand why, we’ll examine the lessons learned and the bots that were built when dozens of college instructors collaboratively explored the frontiers of AI-mediated learning of language and content via Playlab app development. Instructor-created chatbots designed for learning through communication will be analyzed and shared, and tips for building original chatbots will be provided.