I truly enjoyed my time in Eugene, Oregon last week.  Lane Community College hosted the annual ITC National Leadership Academy.  And then the annual ITC Summer Board meeting/retreat.  This year’s academy again featured an outstanding faculty AND equally outstanding participants!   It was a fabulous group – eager, engaged, inquisitive, and willing to take on the challenges of leadership. 

This was the seventeenth year of the ITC Leadership Academy.  The event has always featured 3 days of intense training sessions; and since the fourth year, it has also always included an Escape Room team-building/making decisions with a time-limit/just fun! activity as well.   Training sessions have evolved, but there are several “evergreen” topics of leadership to cover. 

This week, I am attending the Annual ITC Leadership Academy in Eugene. Oregon.  Lane Community College is this year’s host – and Ian Coronado is our “host with the most”.  Somehow, Ian has persuaded the Northwest weather to be outstanding, and the sessions are off to a wonderful start.  And you can only imagine how picturesque the Lane Community College campus is. 

The ITC Board views the annual leadership academy as perhaps our best benefit of membership.  The academy was launched in 2009, partnering with Costa Mesa Community College in California.  In the years since, we have traversed the country to bring the academy closer to our members in all regions of the US.  We even hosted an academy in Charlottetown, PEI Canada in 2014. Over the past seventeen years, we have held academies in California, Maine, Colorado (2), Nevada, Oregon (2), Minnesota, Wisconsin, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina (2), and Florida (2) and Prince Edward Island Canada. 

I had a wonderful conversation with our campus Distance Learning administrator yesterday.  We share a number of EdTech interests that most recently has included AI.  The conversation turned to how crazy busy she has been – not just this summer – but for the last several years. 

It has been relentless in terms of the big issues to address.  This past year, we served together on an accessibility taskforce to address the new regulations.  It was great that they were postponed BUT we had to assume the deadline was real and it required some heavy lifting to get it done on time.  And the Canvas cyberattack during your last week of spring classes really piled on what she had to deal with.  Not to mention program-related efforts to update online teaching standards, explore microcredential solutions, and work to structure quality improvements to our online classes.  All of that is layered on top of the normal online program workload in support of half of our campus enrollment. 

By now, I assume many of you have reviewed this year’s Horizon Report; the annual report was released by Educause on May 18^th.   If you have not yet reviewed this year’s edition, I have provided a link:  The 2026 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report:  Teaching & Learning Edition.  Educause has been responsible for the annual report since 2017 – but the New Media Consortium (NMC) was the originator of the report, publishing the inaugural edition in 2005.  The Horizon Report has always focused on the bleeding edge of technology.  The report has always intended to provide a “heads up” as to what the emerging trends in new technologies were.  It was edgier in the beginning AND the ITC participated for several years in providing information about the trends at community colleges. 

This year, the Horizon Report is likely more of a “must read” than it has been in recent years.  As an article in this week’s eNews puts it, “Higher Ed’s warning light is flashing”!!!   As you might suspect, the winds of technological change are blowing at hurricane strength these days.  And many of our campuses seem to be living in a state of denial.  They indicate awareness, but can’t seem to see the forest for the trees. After all, there are many warning signs pointing towards tremendous change:

For many of us, the recent Canvas Ransomware attack was ill-timed (right at the end of our spring term) and unsettling.  Regardless of our LMS solution, we have had an odd complacency – because we had never had a disruption like this, we assumed immunity.   That complacency was seriously disrupted with this attack. 

It was reported that half of all colleges and universities are now on Canvas.  Since the disruption, a number of institutions have been looking to cancel contracts and pivot to another LMS solution.  To be honest, it really doesn’t matter what LMS you are using.  Actually, it doesn’t matter what third-party solution you are using for anything on your campus – be it your student information system or your accounting program.  Seemingly everything is vulnerable – cybersecurity has become a major concern.  And with the arrival of Generative AI, the variety and complexity of attacks are expected to increase exponentially.

The US Department of Education released the final regulation for the Workforce Pell Grant Program. This has been monitored closely since the launch of a major “redesign” of the program, and the related reduction in funding. The estimate is that $11 billion will be directed to this new approach, but that is substantially reduced from previous commitments AND there are numerous associated expenses that states are expected to cover (filling any funding gap from previous program, cost of collecting data from employers, students, etc. the actual certification process each governor must now put in place and the increased demands on program eligibility/requirements). 

I wanted to share some information – this is certainly not an EdTech issue – yes, online learning is used in some of the approved programs – but this is a big issue for our institutions. Given the changes, the number of Pell eligible career programs has been substantially narrowed.  There is also an accountability factor – ROI – for these career tracks.  There is a logic for doing this – but we have historically supported programs that are critical – like childcare  - even though the ultimate income does not correlate to the degree expected.

The recent Federal Government announcement that Title II Accessibility compliance was being delayed for a year was quite a surprise.  I know so many of you had been working so hard this past year to ensure you would be ready by the original deadline – I actually heard more frustration than relief.

Why?  For those who work directly in the world of accessibility compliance, it has often been hard to get others on campus to buy into what is needed to comply.  The Federal deadline had finally gotten everyone on the same page – and the unexpected delay, may now be counter-productive to the progress made.   There can be no expectation that the new deadline for next year will be extended, so it remains “all hands on deck” in identifying deficiencies and framing a set of solutions most appropriate for your institution.  

For those of you that joined us in Austin, Texas for the ITC Annual National Conference – thank you!!!  It was a wonderful conference – and represented the ITC’ return to staging our annual conference on a community college campus.  A major “tip of the ITC hat” to our host, Matt Evins, the director of Academic Technology at Austin Community College. He, and his wonderful staff, made everything work and flow so well. The tech support was wonderful, the food and refreshments were wonderful, the Highland Campus (one of twelve campus locations) was gi-normous but worked well for our conference.  As you can imagine, most of the board members were immersed in selecting session applications, arranging for keynote speakers, coordinating the Grand Debate or the Awards Ceremony, hosting/participating in our “power panel session, recruiting exhibitors, creating awards and give-aways, planning receptions and facilitating sessions.   And the ITC board leaders were “everything, everywhere, all at once” for the entire conference.  All deserve a hale and hearty “Hizzah!!” for a fabulous job!

There were many highlights at the conference, but some of our best news concerned the introduction of our new ITC management team as well.  No surprise here – you’ve been interacting with our team:  Craig and Holly, as they helped with membership renewals and conference registrations over the past eight months – as well as fielding any questions or needs from our membership. But to make this sound official, we formally introduce:

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.  

As we cycle through the fall national conferences and meetings related to EdTech (chief among them being Educause and WCET), the emerging consensus regarding AI in higher education includes:

• Generative AI is here to stay—as you will recall, I teach Political Science (Government) – I tell my students you may hate politics—you don’t have to like it, but you do need to understand it and get involved. The same is true for AI.
• Faculty are exercising strong influence over the specifics of implementing AI on our campuses. There are debates over appropriate parameters amongst faculty, on the administrative side of the house, not so much. Administrators tend to accept the inevitability of AI.
• Students want our colleges and universities to get our collective act together and help them to better prepare for the expectations and needs in the 21^st Century workplace
• AI will seemingly be everything, everywhere, all at once for the foreseeable future. Every software will eventually have an AI component.
• Users do not like the excessive power needs of AI and expect the industry to find ways to greatly reduce the power drain
• Effective, adaptive AI professional development training is needed for students, faculty and administrators

Given the rapidly changing nature of AI, attending a national edtech conference every year is highly recommended. If you are relatively new to attending a national conference. It is important to find the conference(s) that fit your specific needs. I remember attending a conference early in my career that was sponsored by a major brand—turned out to be a waste of time. It was excessively university-centric and solutions required a very large (40+) staff. I quickly learned that “right-sizing” was important to maximize the experience. For me, the ITC has always been my preferred annual conference.  It is community college focused, it is more affordable than the “big conference”, and I have been able to more effectively network. I also come back every year with great ideas, proven solutions and probably 15 new friends.  I hope you will consider joining us in Austin, T March 13-15. Take a minute to check out the specifics about the conference on our webpage.

Leading from the middle requires timing, and a sense of how to influence decisions.   It is a valuable skill-set and can help on a number of fronts, from maintaining staff  morale during difficult times to seizing on an opportunity – or addressing a problem - that many simply don’t recognize.

I wanted to speak to leaders this week.  Who qualifies?   All of you!!  Regardless of your role or position, anyone can step up to help advance the institution’s priorities.  Many may know this style of leadership as “leading from the middle”.   Authors like Scott Mautz focused on middle management positions, but honestly, anyone can ultimately influence the decision-making process.  Often, leading from the middle is most needed when the institution’s leadership team is distracted but it is also needed to enable new ideas that help the institution better serve its students.  It can and does take a village to keep an institution focused and functioning.