Instructional Technology (ITC)
2024-2025 Program Review

The Instructional Technology Center (ITC) strives to maintain a culture of excellence in online teaching and learning by empowering faculty and staff to create inclusive and engaging learning experiences. We provide training and support in instructional technology, emphasizing universal design principles and accessibility, numerous engagement opportunities including flex programs, customized trainings, workshops, academies, drop-in labs, responsive support, newsletters, and collaborative departmental assistance. Implementing tools and approaches for inclusive and accessible course design, the ITC promotes equitable education access, ultimately creating more enriching academic experiences and increased success rates for all students.

In support of our efforts, the ITC Coordinators work locally within the district, across the state, and even at the federal level to stay current on research-based effective practices; seek professional development offerings to participate in, adopt, and offer; advocate for, test, and deploy updates to our learning management system (LMS, Canvas); engage in discussions regarding policies and regulations, advocating for our stakeholders—employees and students alike; and share through professional organizations engagement/instructional approaches that are/are not serving those same stakeholders.

In prior program reviews (PRs), we have tracked the growth of online teaching and learning as well as the increased utilization of our LMS. In a post-pandemic era, we are all aware of that explosive growth and, ultimately, our trajectory back towards finding where the plateau will be. As a department that is both and neither Instructional or Support Services, the ITC only indirectly serves students through supporting and guiding faculty in creating inclusive and culturally responsive learning environments across all modalities.

To give readers some perspective, we were still using D2L when we last completed a PR.

The pandemic served to move our institution as a whole towards accepting online learning as a viable and valuable option to increase college access for students for whom online learning may not have been an option in the past. Previously, the ITC would review our online course/program offerings and our online student services every year, continuing conversations on how to improve the experience of our online students, from first inquiry to program completion. With the campus closures, the college/district was forced to move quickly to revise forms that previously required wet signatures, bolster online student services, provide Internet-connected devices and access, and adopt additional educational technology tools–many of which were provided by the state at no cost through the emergency closures. Many of those changes are now permanent fixtures or otherwise remain available to certain demographics of students as either free or reduced-cost resources. 

Further, with the district’s movement towards having a “remote-ready” workforce, most employees have been issued a laptop to be logistically prepared to work from home and teach online, and the training/support from the ITC helps to ease that transition and support an exemplary teaching, learning, and working environment while taking into account a range of possibilities for what that environment may be. Availability of employees and their workload can impact the extent to which they avail themselves of our services.

As for success rates in online courses, long-range data is a muddy picture due to changes in how the district has coded online courses prior to and during the pandemic. When the ARC data dashboard, Precision Campus, launched, there was no information available specific to DE; current data is only available from Spring 2021, so we are just beginning to build a new reference point for future reflection. We do have data from the 2019 Distance Education (DE) Plan, in the Equity and Social Justice in the Online Learning Environment section.

Statewide, a focus on online peda/andragogy and establishment of the CVC-OEI Online Course Design Rubric, combined with professional development efforts, the overall gap in success rates between fully online and in-person courses had shrunk to about -2%. Data for ARC, as we’ve moved out of the pandemic closures, does seem to reflect that with a -2% in Spring of 2023, -3% in Spring of 2024, and most recent data for Fall of 2024 showing just -1%.

However, disaggregating the data to look at historically disproportionately impacted (DI) populations at ARC, we see some more prominent success gaps between in-person and online success rates. Where our 2019 DE Plan indicated that overall success rates of DI populations were rising as we worked to close the gap between in-person and online, the gaps between DI populations were not impacted to the same extent. In the Fall of 2024, the greatest success rate gap between in-person and online courses was seen for African Americans, at -5%.

The training and support provided by the ITC at large are driven by developments in law/policy, LMS and other educational technologies, development of equity efforts, and needs stated by employees and students. All Distance Education (DE) and Instructional Technology Center (ITC) department staff are responsible for providing professional development (PD) opportunities for ARC faculty and staff while concurrently strengthening capacity in ADA compliance and fostering a culture of inclusiveness, social justice, and equity. The work of the ITC aligns with the college’s professional development competencies of equity-minded service, effective communication, technology proficiency, collaborative innovation, and specialized expertise.

The Instructional Technology Center provides advocacy, support, and review for:

• Canvas training and support
• Zoom training and support
• Instructional support (for all learning modalities)
• Accessibility
• Representation and advocacy in Local/District/State committees
• DE guidelines/policies (e.i. Regular and Substantive Interaction)
• Emerging educational trends & technologies
• Weekly Newsletter updates and invitations
• Camtasia & Snagit support
• Classified Professionals workshops
•  Topic-specific presentations to departments and committees
• Accreditation support
• ARC Foundations 2.0 Academies and Institutes

The ITC regularly offers four online teaching Academies and Institutes that support faculty in creating meaningful and engaging learning environments that are inclusive and culturally responsive:

• Online Teaching Institute (OTI)
•  ARC’s long-running institute teaches and models best practices through a rigorous 3-unit equivalent course; the OTI utilizes the CVC-OEI Course Design Rubric and introduces participants to Peralta’s companion Online Equity Rubric.
• Equity and Culturally Responsive Online Teaching Institute
• Adopted from @ONE (the state’s Online Network of Educators, a professional development community) and customized for ARC through collaboration between the ITC and CTL, this institute highlights barriers that students can face in their journey to a certificate, AA degree, or transfer; participants explore their role in designing and implementing online courses that integrate equitable practices and culturally responsive teaching strategies.
• Accessible Course Creation
• This 4-week academy is focused on increasing faculty awareness of instructional barriers experienced by students with disabilities, models, guides, and advocates for best accessibility practices to ensure access for all students to learn, and guides faculty on how to utilize available online tools to remediate their content (e.g. Pope Tech, Ally, District Accessibility Supports, and more). 
• Assessment for Online Teaching and Learning Institute
• Also adopted from @ONE and customized for ARC, this institute is centered around student learning, including authentic assessments, providing rich and meaningful feedback, and analysis of results; it introduces strategies to support equitable grading.

Success in this work looks first like continued enrollment and completion in the Foundations courses, repeat customers through all of our offerings, word of mouth, positive feedback from participants, and then—ultimately—closing the gaps that the data above highlights.

The pivot to fully online teaching during the pandemic-driven closures was initially an emergency response. The ITC coordinators were the touchpoint for assisting hundreds of instructors in transitioning to a fully online course delivery model in a very brief period of time, then providing ongoing training and support to level-up instruction and student services as it became evident that the closures would last longer than two weeks. This most clearly exemplifies the college’s goals of Exemplary Teaching, Learning & Working Environment (that is any environment in which teaching, learning, & working needs to take place) as well as Vibrancy and Resiliency (from emergency response to union-negotiated faculty preparation and onward to rigorous readiness).

The ITC will continue to:

• advocate for diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility for all students through our service to the college community.
• engage in outreach to maintain engagement with all employee groups, as all of our work impacts our students’ experiences and success.
• promote effective teaching and learning through professional development opportunities that support the interests and needs of faculty, staff, and students.
• review the resources we provide for currency and relevance in best practices for online teaching and learning, including universal design, accessibility, equitable practices, and emerging technologies.
• provide professional development that highlights equity and accessibility.
• explore and share new methodologies.
• review local success data and DI reports.
• share data and encourage faculty to look at their own individual data.
• engage with local, district, statewide, and national discussions related to best practices online teaching and learning.
• advocate for our colleagues and our students.
• encourage third-party publishers to incorporate universal design practices into their product development.
• seek new opportunities for developing new strategies and sharing those with the college.
• incorporate universal design—including accessibility and equitable practices—into all of our work.

Performance Reviews: It is important to note that different courses may have valid reasons for being offered in-person or online, and that faculty have their own preferences and comfort levels as well. Further, beyond the training and support that the ITC provides, it became apparent through ARC’s last accreditation review that it is incumbent upon Performance Review Teams to follow through on how an instructor/the college ensures that our online courses are meeting ACCJC standards and legal requirements. That includes ACCJC Standard 2.6, which asks the college to ensure “equitable student learning and achievement, and [using] results to guide improvements.”

Research: Data in the 2019 DE Plan sought a balanced view of online success rates by comparing “courses for which at least four online and four face-to-face sections have been offered” over a three-year time period. That approach would eliminate some of the success rate data that is extraneous to any comparison, such as our impossible to convert courses. Now that there is a growing data set in Precision Campus, we can submit research requests to accomplish similar data sets. (The data in this report does not include Public Safety or Apprenticeship courses, which is the default setting in Precision Campus, although some of those classes are approved through the Curriculum process to be offered fully online.)

Personnel: For the ITC team, we need ongoing support for a Universal Design Coordinator (the current position is District funded through spring 26) and classified personnel. Recently, there was a conversation around the potential value of adding an Instructional Designer. Our Annual Unit Plan has repeatedly outlined the need for classified support since we lost our Web and Media Design Specialist position the summer before the pandemic (2019).  A classified position would provide web support, provide additional trainings (as part of the ITC staff, they would be compelled to have or develop knowledge in accessibility and equitable practices), develop training materials, explore and help test new educational technologies to the benefit of educators and students, and be a point of contact for the ITC when faculty coordinators are off-contract.

Accessibility Support: The college also needs ongoing support from the district’s Accessibility Team as we continue to navigate how faculty can be empowered to create accessible content as well as get help in remediating inaccessible content. There is also interest in working with the CCC’s Accessibility Center to participate in their Accessibility Capability Maturity Model, which will require engagement from all levels of governance across the campus, including faculty and student representation. While the position of the current leadership at the federal level is unknown, the Office of Civil Rights continues to work on discrimination cases involving accessibility and we do have legal requirements to comply with.

Facilities: Finally, while the ITC Training Room has become an instructional space in the wake of the Davies Hall closure, some of the technology in the room is over 25 years old and has failed, needing replacement. As a classroom and as a training space that lives within the ITC building (where IT and Distance Education are housed), we hope to bring it into Q2 of the 21st century so that it can be a multi-functional space that reflects a flexible range of teaching and learning experiences.

First and foremost, we recognize and honor that workload and expectations throughout the college is an ongoing discussion. Where increased scrutiny of DE (accessibility, Title 5, ACCJC's regular and substantive interaction review) has added to the workload of our department, it inevitably carries over to instructional faculty to make time to participate in additional professional development, let alone apply new knowledge. While district efforts, such as the accessibility team and long-term temporary Universal Design & Accessibility Coordinator positions help, they don't remove faculty responsibility for accessible course creation (an ongoing debate among stakeholders, including the union). Specific to accessibility, the state conducted an audit of our college’s accessibility in 2016, LRCCD’s own Deputy General Counsel conducted an accessibility audit in 2023, and the Department of Justice has revised electronic accessibility standards to align with WCAG 2.1 AA by April of 2026. Accessibility throughout the college needs to be a high priority.

Second, to return to the workload of our department, the ITC peaked in 2017 with a dedicated Dean of Distance Education, an AA, three Faculty Coordinators, a Classified Web and Media Design Specialist, a recurring part-time Classified temp, and student worker positions. Yet, as the pandemic closures proceeded and our online efforts to move from an emergency response to actual best practices were increasing, our department decreased to just two Coordinators. We would like to see focused development on rebuilding the ITC department to meet the expectations and changing demands of instruction and regulations to support the college in moving towards its goals. 

Third, ARC designed the Keep on Teaching training at the start of the pandemic and this became the basis for the union-negotiated Foundations 1 training for all faculty teaching online. The training requires just 15 hours of time and is a broad overview of logistics, requirements, and best practices during a very busy time for new hires. However, previous practice regarding assignment of online classes was based on a Dean’s right of assignment where completion of ARC’s more rigorous OTI was a consideration. The college supported this by having the OTI as a second semester option for new hire cohorts to complete onboarding. This was a valuable opportunity to not only get faculty into the ITC’s trainings, but to broadly introduce the work of our department and, perhaps more importantly, forge relationships where people would then be more comfortable seeking assistance in the future. In 2016, the ACCJC gave the college commendations on “The high quality of the college's distance education program, including faculty-led efforts and the quality of online course offerings.” If the college aims to get back to that status following our more recent accreditation review where we were called to task on our online courses, we need buy-in and support from all levels.

Finally, a significant part of the work done by our previous Web and Media Design Specialist was designing and supporting the online Virtual Education Center (VEC). The VEC served as a student-facing hub of information and resources for ARC’s online student population with links to online counseling, tutoring, and readiness checks. It no longer exists, despite being a centerpiece of ARC’s 2019 Distance Education Plan. The VEC further served to inform students about which of our college’s programs and degrees could possibly be completed fully online. The CCCCO’s CVC previously listed fully online programs and degrees on their website, but no longer has personnel dedicated to updating that list and the webpage has been removed. This has left the college without a direct marketing avenue for programs like our Music Department’s AA-T, which is notably the only fully online option in the state. We do not have a specific suggestion for reviving or replacing the VEC, as we do not have the personnel to maintain such a thing, but its value to students is something that is now missing and we hope that the college will put some thought and effort into a solution.