Resolving the tension between using AI and protecting learning: Takeaways from the 2026 Online Teaching Conference
Every spring, the Online Teaching Conference pulls faculty and instructional designers from across the California Community Colleges and beyond into one place to discuss and imagine the future of online education.
Nectir has a statewide partnership with the California Community Colleges, a system serving 2.2 million students across 116+ campuses. OTC is where we get face-to-face with our Nectir champions and the educators who are still exploring if and how to implement AI into their classroom.
This year's conference organized itself around the theme: "Designing the Future of Online Learning: Human Element, Ethics, Innovation, and AI." If you want a read on where AI adoption actually is in higher ed, the OTC crowd was a good sample. Some faculty are all in, some are skeptical, and some want nothing to do with it. Institutions are trying to figure out how to serve all three groups at once with one AI policy.
The ethical worry underneath most conversations came down to whether AI was helping students learn, or helping them take the easy way out. That question is the whole reason Nectir AI exists in the shape it does. Faculty and administrators keep control of the AI in every course. It's grounded in the instructor's own materials. It's built into the LMS the campus already uses, and it's FERPA- and SOC 2 Type II-compliant. Those are the guardrails, but they only answer half the question. The other half is what you actually ask students to do with AI.
The AI Tension
Most educators’ first reflex is to ban AI tools until a policy is ready, but that doesn't work the way schools hope. Students still use other AI tools on their own devices, off the institution's radar, with no faculty visibility and no record of how the tool was used. The ban protects the policy timeline, but leaves the student and the institution exposed.
Most faculty see another issue: what happens to students’ learning outcomes?
If a student hands an essay prompt to other AI tools and turns in whatever comes back, the learning that essay was supposed to produce never happened. Detection software and outright bans are the reflexive answers to that fear, but they only postpone it, because students keep using those tools on their own devices where no instructor can see how.
The more useful response is to make using AI and doing the learning within the same act instead of competing ones.
Designing AI Into the Assignment Itself
Our Head of Customer Success, Jaime Moquin, and Coast Community College District’s Trainer and Support Specialist for Instructional Innovative Learning Center, Eric Wilson, Ph.D., presented on how to redesign an assignment for the age of AI. Most of the AI conversation in higher ed has been stuck on catching students using AI. Jaime wanted to approach a new angle: how to design the assignment so the question of cheating mostly answers itself.
She walked faculty through a five-step redesign of one real assignment they brought with them. It starts by naming the actual learning goal, what a student should know, do, or think differently by the end. Then it maps where students currently struggle or check out. Instead of asking "should AI be allowed here,” the question becomes “where can AI genuinely support the work, in ideation, feedback, or reflection, and where does the struggle itself matter too much to hand off?” The last two steps cover writing clear guidance for students on how to use AI in that assignment, and turning the whole thing into an outline faculty could teach the following term.
Faculty walked out with a redesigned assignment in hand and a framework they could run again on the next one. No tool training required, because the work was really about instructional design with AI as one input among several.
That reframe gave faculty their agency back. Instead of a top-down rule to police AI or adopt it wholesale, they decided assignment by assignment where a student’s effort is the point and where it genuinely isn't. That's a more honest version of the academic integrity conversation than any detection tool offers, because it starts from what the assignment is for rather than what students might get away with.
Redesigning courses with AI integrated into the process changes what learning looks like for students. That is what "AI as part of the learning" actually looks like when you get specific about it, and it's a long way from the fear that AI just does the assignment for them.
Meeting Face-To-Face With The Ones Making It Happen
From skeptics to champions, nothing beats getting face-to-face with the faculty who work with students and course design every day.
Addressing skepticism firsthand is one of the most beneficial aspects of conferences like OTC, because behind good AI is a real-person team.
Our customer success team, Jaime Moquin and Lindsey Nicholls, shared real classroom examples without the jargon. Many vendors lead with buzzwords and big abstractions, but educators want a story. Something concrete instead of "our platform drives engagement.”
Lindsey saw the same thing from the booth. Faculty would leave another vendor's booth and come to ours to ask what the terminology even meant. Her approach was to drop the jargon and meet each person where they were, whether they'd been using AI for two years or had never touched it. Once she explained what Nectir does in plain terms, the conversation almost always turned to their specific class, and then to a training session or a follow-up meeting.
On the flip side, we had the opportunity to catch up with our Nectir champions who have fully integrated Nectir AI into their courses. Adoria Williams, Head Librarian at Merritt College, has been onboard with Nectir since what feels like day one. Adoria required students to use Nectir AI across every module for tasks like narrowing a research topic, developing keywords, navigating library databases, and learning MLA/APA citations. She set a minimum number of required interactions and had them submit their chat transcripts, letting her watch their prompting grow more sophisticated while the AI, by design, guided them back to the research process and never handed over the answer outright. As she described it, Nectir AI served as the “bridge from confusion to action.” At College of Marin, Instructional Designer Stacey Winkler has led an intentional, faculty-first rollout of Nectir AI, building genuine buy-in before scaling. She's now taking it a step further, piloting an assistant to support the college's internal teams through their AI Community of Practice.
What we took away, and where this goes next
What moves faculty is practical, creative examples of real faculty using AI. The best example Lindsey heard: have students use AI to produce something, then have them build on it, critique it, or write a reflection on it. The AI becomes a step in the work rather than a substitute for it, and the thinking stays with the student the entire time. Design it well, and using AI becomes the same act as doing the learning. The guardrails keep that safe.
The future of online learning is still in human hands, with faculty staying in control, students doing the learning, and the technology in the background, handling the parts that never needed a person in the first place.
Frequently asked questions about Nectir AI
What is Nectir? Nectir helps high schools, colleges, and universities use AI across their campus safely. Nectir AI Assistants are controlled by faculty and administrators, built into existing learning management systems, and compliant with FERPA and SOC 2 Type II standards. Nectir AI is trusted by 150,000+ students across 130+ campuses, including a partnership with California Community Colleges, which serves 2.2 million students across 116+ campuses.
Can Nectir AI work with my existing LMS? Yes. Nectir AI integrates with existing learning management systems, enabling schools to implement AI schoolwide without overhauling their current technology stack.
How do you use AI in an assignment without hurting real learning? Design it into the work on purpose. Keep the core learning goal fixed, then use AI only where it supports ideation, practice, feedback, or reflection, while protecting the parts of the assignment where a student's own struggle is the point. A common pattern is having students generate something with AI and then build on it, critique it, or reflect on what it got wrong.
How can I learn more about Nectir? Want to see what school-controlled AI looks like when it's built into the tools your campus already uses? Schedule a demo, and our team will walk you through how it works at schools like yours.