Orlando, FL | November 16, 2026
Join us Monday, November 16, 2026 for these special onsite pre-conference classes addressing the hottest topics in digital learning.
Looking to deep-dive into the hottest topics in online learning? Join us on November 16, 2026 for our pre-conference Accelerate 2026 Immersion Classes.
Immersion class registrations are at an additional fee, and are available only to attendees with an Accelerate 2026 Conference Pass registration. Immersion classes can be selected with an individual class registration, or through our cost-saving Combo Package (one AM & one PM class). Discounted rates are available for OLC members for both individual and combo package registration options. Class selections are made at the time of registration.
All Immersion classes are listed in U.S. Eastern Time Zone and are presented onsite at the Walt Disney World Dolphin Resort in Orlando, FL.
Presenter: Renee Ford, Senior Instructional Designer, Penn State Smeal College of Business
Abstract: Higher education institutions got an extra year, and now just five months remain. Is your institution ready? This immersive workshop moves from regulatory requirements to lasting culture change, equipping educators and instructional designers with tools, checklists, and strategies to close compliance gaps and build accessibility culture that outlasts any deadline.
Higher education institutions got an extra year to prepare for accessibility compliance regulations. Now there are five months left. The ADA Title II web accessibility compliance enforcement deadline of April 26, 2027 is not just approaching; the window to act is here. The grace period is over. It’s time to get to work.
And yet, across higher education and other public- and private industries,, too many institutions are still in a holding pattern. It’s understandable. The landscape has never been more demanding. Generative AI is reshaping teaching and learning overnight. Enrollment cliffs are forcing hard budget decisions. The pace of change leaves little room to breathe, let alone audit a Canvas course for WCAG compliance. Awareness of the mandate is high, yet progress has lagged behind. But this was never just about compliance. A deadline can get you started, but it can’t tell you why this work matters. The real point is that somewhere on your campus right now, a student with a disability is downloading a PDF they cannot read, watching a video with no captions, or navigating a course that was never designed with them in mind. Students with disabilities, neurodiverse learners, and anyone navigating complex digital environments have been waiting long enough, regardless of any extended compliance deadline. With this in mind, this session is for the educators and designers who are ready to get to work in upskilling towards greater digital accessibility, whether you’re just getting started or looking to scale.
This 3-hour immersion session is a direct response to that reality, and isis practical by design. Rather than covering everything, it focuses on key areas of accessibility to address first ahead of the next accessibility deadline, while highlighting what you can take back to your institution and implement the moment you get home. We will move from the overall accessibility landscape to the recommended hands-on work, from awareness to action, and from compliance to the beginnings of a culture shift. You will leave with tools, strategies, and a concrete plan in-hand.
This session is built for faculty, instructional designers, accessibility specialists, educational technologists, and administrators. If you have any role in how digital learning is designed and delivered at your institution, this session is for you.
Why This, Why Now
The April 2027 deadline is not a suggestion. The 2024 updates to ADA Title II establish clear, enforceable expectations for digital accessibility in public higher education — and the clock is running. Five months is enough time to make meaningful progress, but only if institutions stop treating accessibility as a future priority and start treating it as a present one.
The stakes extend well beyond compliance. Disability disclosure in higher education remains consistently low, meaning accessibility gaps affect far more students than institutional data typically reflects, therefore many of your learners are under-performing due to inaccessible content. Neurodiverse learners, students managing chronic illness, and those navigating language and cognitive differences all benefit from accessible design — whether or not they ever file a formal accommodation request. And as AI-generated content, video-heavy courses, and complex LMS environments become the norm, the risk of inadvertently creating new barriers keeps pace with every technological advance.
Compliance is the floor, not the ceiling. The institutions best positioned to meet the April 2027 deadline — and sustain progress after it — are those that have begun to shift accessibility from a legal obligation into an institutional value. This session offers a roadmap for that shift, in the time that remains.
Session Structure and Plan for Interactivity
The session opens with a single slide: “5 months.” Participants are asked to complete an anonymous poll about whether their institution is fully prepared. Whatever the response, that moment sets the tone: honest, urgent, and forward-focused. This is not a session about what should have happened. It is about what can still happen.
Part 1: Where We Are — The Landscape and the Stakes (approx. 45 minutes)
We begin with shared context. Who are our students, and what barriers do they actually encounter in digital learning environments? A brief opening activity invites participants to share their own accessibility challenges and questions, grounding the session in real institutional realities from the start.
From there, we survey the current accessibility landscape: key disability and neurodiversity data (including the persistent gap between disclosed and undisclosed need), the most common categories of accessibility failure in online courses, and a plain-language overview of ADA Title II requirements and WCAG 2.1/2.2 standards. Brief case studies from peer institutions illustrate both what’s at stake and what’s achievable in the months ahead.
Part 2: Compliance in Practice — Getting to Work (approx. 75 minutes)
This is the heart of the session, and it is built for doing, not watching. Participants receive a curated accessibility checklist and a set of ready-to-use templates covering the areas where most institutions have the most ground to cover:
Working individually or in small groups, participants apply the checklist to a real or sample course element, identify their highest-priority gaps, and begin mapping a remediation approach based on impact and effort. We address the real constraints directly: limited time, limited staff, and the paralysis that sets in when everything feels too big to tackle at once. Short, focused demonstrations of widely available and low-cost tools are woven throughout. The emphasis throughout is on what is realistic, actionable, and achievable before April.
Part 3: From Compliance to Culture (approx. 30 minutes)
Meeting the April 2027 deadline matters. But what happens on April 27th, 2027? This section steps back to ask a bigger question: How do you build something that lasts? Participants explore practical strategies for embedding accessibility into the workflows and conversations that already exist at their institutions, including faculty development, course design processes, technology adoption and renewal decisions, and peer advocacy. The goal is not a perfect accessibility program by next spring. The goal is a foundation that keeps growing after the deadline passes, and that moves you into a culture shift, not a checklist.
Part 4: Your Action Plan (approx. 30 minutes)
The session closes with structured individual planning. Each participant leaves with a completed action plan organized around the next 30, 60, and 90 days: specific, realistic steps they can begin the week they return. Participants share their plans with a partner for peer feedback before the session wraps. Time is reserved for open questions, tool recommendations, and one-on-one guidance.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of this session, participants will be able to:
Takeaways
Participants leave with:
Presenter: Vanessa Dennen, Professor, Florida State University
Abstract: Coming soon
Presenter: Sean Nufer, Senior Director of Teaching and Learning, TCS Education System
Abstract: Tired of discussion boards that feel repetitive, forced, or transactional? This reprise of last year’s interactive workshop returns with new examples, stronger design tools. Participants will examine why online discussions often fail, explore practical alternatives, and redesign a discussion activity they can use in their own course. Let’s move beyond “post once, reply twice” and reimagine discussion boards as spaces for meaningful learning.
Discussion boards are a familiar part of online learning, but they often fail to create the kind of dialogue instructors hope to see. Students may complete the assignment without always feeling that the conversation matters (or they put it off until moments before the posts are due). The issue is usually not the discussion board itself, but rather the way our activity invite students to think, respond, and connect with one another.
This workshop focuses on how online discussions can be redesigned so they feel more purposeful to students. Instead of treating discussion boards as a required routine, participants will consider how discussion activities can support meaningful engagement when they are built around clear learning goals and meaningful reasons to participate.
The workshop will ask participants to think about what students are being invited to do in a discussion and why that activity matters for their learning.
Participants will examine why many traditional discussion boards miss the mark. Some discussions ask students to respond to a prompt without giving them a meaningful reason to engage with their peers other than earning points. Others create participation requirements that reward completion and perhaps even length more than conversation. This session will help participants recognize these design problems and consider how small changes in structure, wording, and purpose can lead to more meaningful interaction.
The session will also introduce updated examples from educators and instructional designers who have reimagined online discussions in different teaching contexts. These examples will show how discussion boards can move beyond the familiar post-and-reply pattern. Participants will use these examples to consider how a discussion can become more connected to students’ experiences and more useful for learning.
A major focus of the session will be practical redesign. Participants will create or revise a discussion activity for their own context. They will think through the purpose of the activity, the kind of participation it should encourage, and the way students will interact with one another’s ideas. The goal is to design a discussion that feels intentional rather than automatic and to emphasize peer learning. Participants will share their redesigned activities and respond to one another’s ideas. This exchange will help participants see different ways to approach discussion design and leave with ideas they can adapt for their own courses.
This session is intended for educators and instructional designers who want online discussions to become more meaningful for students. Participants will leave with a clearer way to think about discussion design and a discussion activity they can continue developing for future use.
Presenter: Nathan Pritts, Ph.D., Principal AI Strategist and Professor, University of Arizona Global Campus and Karin Mente, MLIS, Outreach Librarian, University of Arizona Global Campus
Abstract: AI experimentation is everywhere, but scattered activity is not strategy. This hands-on immersion session helps participants move from reactive AI efforts to intentional institutional learning. Through examples, guided reflection, and practical planning, participants will design a campus-ready learning loop for one real AI-related challenge in their own context.
Artificial intelligence is already reshaping online education. Students are using AI tools to study, write, search, summarize, plan, and make sense of course expectations. Faculty are testing new approaches to assignment design, feedback, academic integrity, AI literacy, and student engagement. Staff and administrators are exploring AI-supported workflows across advising, curriculum, communication, analytics, student support, and institutional operations. In many cases, the question is no longer whether institutions are experimenting with AI. They are.
The more urgent question is whether those experiments are helping institutions learn.
Across higher education, many AI efforts begin from a familiar place: urgency. But without a structured way to observe what is happening, interpret what it means, act on what is learned, and share insight across the institution, AI experimentation can remain fragmented. This three-hour immersion session invites participants to slow down the rush to “keep up” and instead build the capacity to learn under uncertainty. Rather than asking, “How do we get AI right?” the session asks, “How do we design learning loops that help our institutions make better decisions while the landscape is still changing?”
The session is grounded in a single working cycle: Try → Observe → Interpret → Act → Share. In practice that means running a deliberate experiment, observing what actually happens rather than what you hoped, interpreting it with the people who can make sense of it, deciding what should follow, and sharing the result so that a local trial becomes knowledge others can use. This cycle gives participants a practical structure for turning local AI experimentation into institutional learning. It requires none of the things institutions often wait for: perfect information, large-scale research infrastructure, or fully settled policy.
The workshop will combine brief framing, facilitator dialogue, institutional examples, guided reflection, and hands-on planning. Participants will begin by locating their own context through a short diagnostic focused on three areas: where AI experimentation is already happening, how people are currently learning from it, and how those lessons are being turned into action. Then, they will select one real AI-related challenge or opportunity from their own teaching, design, support, leadership, or operational context to work on throughout the session.
From there, participants will build the loop in two moves. First, they design it for their own context: turning a real AI activity, concern, or opportunity into a clear learning question, naming the signals worth watching, and deciding who should help interpret them. Second, they make the loop travel beyond their own desk. Since not everyone in the room will be positioned to set institutional policy, this move is about coordination and connection instead of authority and command: identifying who has the standing to act on what the loop surfaces, and seeding the loop first in the smallest unit the participant already controls, such as a course, a team, or an advising caseload, where it can generate proof that travels.
Throughout the session, brief institutional examples will serve as implementation stories rather than extended case studies. These examples will illustrate how AI experimentation in online teaching, faculty development, student support, and institutional workflows can generate insight when paired with intentional observation and reflection. Short facilitator conversations will model the kinds of reflective dialogue institutions need after AI experiments: What did we think we were testing? What did we actually learn? What surprised us? What would we do differently? Who needs to hear the results?
By the end of the session, each participant or team will have a draft AI experimentation learning loop for one real challenge in their own context. The core of that loop will be worked in depth: a sharp learning question, the signals worth observing, and a plan for who interprets those signals and what to ask them. The remaining pieces – scoping the area of experimentation, sketching possible action steps, and naming a communication pathway – will be drafted in lighter form or carried forward as next steps. Participants leave having reasoned through the heart of the loop.
This immersion session is designed for participants across roles and levels of AI experience. Participants do not need technical expertise or a specific AI tool to participate. The focus is on designing the conditions for better institutional learning. Rather than trying to cover every AI issue facing online education, the workshop develops one core capacity in depth: how to learn well while working in uncertainty.
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