Second year, bigger room. When the Online Teaching Conference accepted the Teach It Like You Stream It workshop for a return engagement, the assignment came with a venue usually reserved for keynotes — and a night-before moment of doubt that the next morning thoroughly disproved.
Why this session
This was Dr. E's second consecutive year at OTC — the follow-up to the standing-room-only 2025 plenary in Long Beach. The 2026 proposal was accepted as an interactive practitioner workshop, aimed at the reality most community colleges now live with: more and more courses are online, serving students whose schedules and lives depend on that flexibility. If online is where our students are, engaging synchronous and asynchronous teaching isn't a luxury — it's how we serve them better.
The night-before panic
The assigned room turned out to be one of the biggest venues at the conference — the kind of space where keynote presentations happen. Walking it the night before, empty seats stretching back, brought on a small panic: what if no one comes?
Lo and behold — the next day it was full. And the people who attended loved it.
The core message
Making online classes engaging comes with a cost: time, money, and software with a learning curve. A polished Zoom lesson layout usually means learning tools like Ecamm Live, OBS, or Camtasia — each with its own price tag and setup time. That barrier keeps a lot of faculty stuck in slides-only mode.
So this workshop showed the ropes two ways: the payoff of building your own video library as fast as possible, and the debut of Numberbender Studio — a free layout companion that puts you and your slides side by side, so you are the star of your online workshop, meeting, or class. No subscription, no install, no excuses.
Key takeaways from the session
- Online classes are here to stay. As educators in higher ed, our job is to keep finding ways to serve online students better — not to wait for a return to normal that isn't coming.
- Change is uncomfortable — do it anyway. If you believe in your work, the awkward early reps pay off.
- In the age of AI, good instruction still wins. AI helps us a lot, but sometimes we need to go back to our discipline and simply give students better teaching. That will always win.
What people said
"Your presentation was so inspiring — I am going to start working on my economics videos for my students. When you showed your Numberbender Studio, it gave me more motivation to start building my library."
What's next
Two years, two full rooms — the Teach It Like You Stream It movement now has a standing conversation with California Community Colleges faculty. Next stop: bringing the same workshop energy to national and international stages, and putting Numberbender Studio in the hands of every educator who teaches through a screen.