Author: Jim Julius

Dear colleagues, happy 2026! Please see below for reminders of resources to help you and your students to succeed in online environments this spring. If you didn’t see my email last week with updates about new and useful tools for getting your Canvas courses ready for the semester, I’d invite you to first check that out. And definitely look for the online ed Flex workshops coming this week.

Support for You

• Our Canvas start-of-term checklist can help you prepare your classes. New to Canvas? We have lots of resources to help you get started.
• The TIC website is a great starting point for all kinds of information and support for teaching with online technologies – see the last section of this email for specific TIC links to MiraCosta technologies supporting online teaching and learning. 
• Ongoing faculty support – You can set a meeting with Instructional Designer Nadia Khan, for help with Canvas and teaching with tech. We have another instructional designer also available for 1-1 support, Stephanie Kelley, especially for faculty working on use of OER/ZTC course materials.
• Tech Support – Canvas options include 24×7 phone and chat support. Just click the Tech Support button at lower left in Canvas! Zoom and other MiraCostatech support for faculty is available through the MiraCosta employee help desk.

Expectations and Recommendations for Faculty Teaching Online

• The MiraCosta Online Class Quality Guidelines documentprovides MiraCosta requirements and recommended practices for online instructors. 
• Class Availability in Canvas – Faculty teaching distance education (online, HyFlex, and hybrid) classes are expected to make their classes available by mid-day on the first instructional day of the week in which they begin. To learn more, please see MiraCosta Distance Education Class Authentication Compliance, Start-of-Term Availability Procedures, and Recommendations.
• Accessibility – A new federal regulation taking effect in spring reinforces the requirement for all of our instructional tools and materials to be accessible. Please be sure to use the PopeTech accessibility checker on your Canvas classes, and use the auto-captioning and caption cleanup tools for videos created via Canvas Studio, Zoom, or YouTube. Check out our recent accessibility workshop recordings!
• Zero- and Low-Textbook Cost Course Sections – If you are teaching one of these, please be sure to mark your class in SURF as LTC or ZTC if you haven’t already, so students know that your class has lowered that access barrier!
• Artificial Intelligence class policy – Students want to know the “rules” around using AI in your class. There is not a one-size-fits-all answer to this question so there is not a blanket college policy. Please check out a 1-page guide to help you craft language to share with your students if you’re still working on that! Learn more about AI tools and guidance for MiraCosta faculty and students.

Support for Your Students – Please help your students to be aware of and make use of these important services and resources!

• Student Online Academic Readiness workshops – In collaboration with the library, I’ll be offering a number of these across the first nine weeks of the term – see all dates and times on the MiraCosta Online site and in Canvas announcements. These workshops engage students with resources MiraCosta provides to support them, as well as habits and attitudes of successful online students. Encourage your students to attend and, if you like, find out which of your students participated in order to incentivize their attendance. Faculty are welcome to attend as well!
• Technology Needs – Be sure to share the form for students to fill out if they need a laptop and/or wifi hotspot to succeed this semester.
• Tech Support – At lower left in Canvas is a button for students to quickly access Tech Support options, including 24×7 phone and chat support from Canvas, and our local MiraCosta student help desk.
• Online Student Support Access Points – the Student Support Hub in Canvas, accessed via the Student Support button on the left in Canvas, gives quick access to online support from the library, Learning Centers, counseling, career center, open computer lab staff, student help desk, health services, CARE team, and more! The Ask the Spartan chat integrated into MiraCosta’s website provides both automated responses and the opportunity to connect to Live Chat with staff from many student support areas. The Help Hut and Online Education webpages are also great starting points for students to connect with all kinds of support services when they’re not in Canvas.

MiraCosta’s Online Education Tools

Select the links for a detailed MiraCosta-specific overview (and often, recorded Flex workshops) for each tool below. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have questions about these or other resources.

• Canvas – we all use Canvas, right?
• Adjust-All and TidyUP– make it easier to copy and reuse Canvas courses
• DesignPLUS – a brand new Canvas visual design tool
• Zoom – if you’re using Zoom, make sure you’re using a pro Zoom account through MiraCosta. 
• Canvas Studio – enables faculty and students to create videos while inside Canvas. Faculty can create interactive discussion or quiz activities based on video. Auto-captioning and caption clean up tools are high-quality and easy to use, but not automatic!
• Pronto is an incredible mobile-friendly and Canvas-integrated messaging platform that’s ready to use in every course.
• Pope Tech helps faculty detect and correct accessibility issues within Canvas. The PopeTech dashboard tool (via the Pope Tech Accessibility course menu item) provides a course-level guide for addressing all accessibility issues in a course in one place.
• SensusAccess provides multi-format course material accessibility and file type conversion options for students. If you notice an S symbol next to your page title and next to items in the Modules view, that’s SensusAccess.
• Perusall is a social annotation tool available within Canvas that makes it easy for students to comment/discuss right on a text, document, or image.
• Lab Archives Electronic Notebook is an online notebook especially useful for translating lab manuals and student notes/work into the online environment.
• WeVideo (formerly PlayPosit) – This video interaction tool offers more complexity and options than Studio. Studio is a great place to start, but if you’re looking for more types of interactivity to add to your videos, this is a great option. 
• Turnitin – help students learn to properly cite sources and avoid plagiarism. Also provides grading and peer review tools for written work. Turnitin has included an AI detection capability for instructors, but please beware of false positives should you use it. Most experts agree that AI detection tools are extremely unreliable.

Professional Learning for Online Teaching – Spring Possibilities

• In addition to many online ed workshops this Flex week, you can review lots of wonderful recorded MiraCosta online teaching workshops anytime (Flex-eligible, of course)! 
• Feb 25-27: San Diego area community colleges are offering a joint online AccessAbility Week with online workshops.
• March 14: NCHEA is hosting a large AI-focused conference, Instruction with Imagination and Intelligence. Registration is free and open now, and the call for proposals is open through Jan. 30.
• June 23-25: The CCC Online Teaching Conference returns to Anaheim. Consider submitting a proposal (due Jan. 31)! MiraCosta faculty who are presenting can get all travel expenses covered from the Online Ed budget!
• @ONE online teaching courses are open to all California Community College faculty. Some are self-paced and available anytime. Facilitated spring courses are open for enrollment now, and are completely free. They’ll fill, so sign up now if you’re interested!

Don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions! Best wishes for a great spring!

 – Jim

Jim Julius, Ed.D.
Faculty Coordinator, Online Education

Dear MiraCosta faculty,

As you create and update spring classes in Canvas, there are some important updates that happened in the last month which you should be aware of!

1. We’ve added DesignPLUS to Canvas. This is a powerful tool to make it way easier to design your classes with visual style and consistency. DesignPLUS gives you editing tools that used to require diving into HTML, as well as templating tools to make it easy to create a visual identity and structure that you can repeat across your course elements. Check out our TIC page on DesignPLUS to learn more. We also have FLEX workshops (via Zoom) on DesignPLUS on Monday and Tuesday (both days 11-12).
2. Turnitin users: the Turnitin 1.1 Canvas integration is no longer available. We already had Turnitin 1.3 integration available and most of our Turnitin users were already using either that (if you like using Turnitin’s grading/feedback tools) or the Turnitin Plagiarism Framework (which uses Turnitin for similarity checking but Canvas grading and feedback tools). If you were still using the Turnitin 1.1 tools, you will need to update your courses. For more info, see our Turnitin overview as well as our Turnitin 1.3 and Turnitin Canvas Plagiarism framework guides.
3. PlayPosit users (or anyone interested in a tool to create engaging assessments and interactions embedded in video): PlayPosit has been renamed WeVideo and now includes the ability for instructors to directly record instructional videos rather than having to import videos created elsewhere. Existing PlayPosit videos and activities should continue to work seamlessly in Canvas. We are still learning more about this upgrade and will soon have more updated information on our PlayPosit/WeVideo TIC page. If you’d like to learn more about this powerful tool for instructional video and interaction, you can register for a one hour TechConnect webinar: 1/20 at 11:30 am or 1/27 at 11:30 am.
4. Canvas tutorial links were updated. This is the second time Canvas has done this in the last several years. If you include Canvas tutorial links in your courses to help your students (a great practice!) and those links predated the last time Canvas did this, they may no longer work. Using the Canvas link checker tool (see below) can help you catch this.

Also keep in mind these tools as you build, reuse, update, and polish courses:

• Adjust-All enables bulk updates of course due dates, announcement timing, etc.
• TidyUP helps strip out unneeded, outdated files and content from Canvas courses.
• the Canvas link checker is always an important tool to use when copying forward old courses for reuse – it will quickly help you identify links which are no longer working
• the PopeTech Dashboard is a great way to make sure your course content is fully accessible – and remember that this is an absolute requirement for all Canvas classes based on federal regulations that take effect this spring.

I’ll send out more general reminders with my comprehensive start-of-term email soon, but wanted to get this to folks who may benefit from this info now.

Jim Julius, Ed.D.
Faculty Coordinator, Online Education

Dear MiraCosta Faculty, 

Here are a few reminders, resources, and opportunities as 2025 comes to a close!

Canvas End of Term Support and Reminders

After Dec. 31, your fall Canvas classes go into read-only mode for you and your students, and move from the Canvas Dashboard to the Past Enrollments area of Canvas (select Courses at left in Canvas, then All Courses to see Past Enrollment courses). If you wish to remove access to any of your course materials for your current students beyond this semester, you need to do so by Dec. 31. Review our Canvas end-of-term guide for details. It also discusses what you need to do if you have any students who will receive Incomplete grades, as well as what to do if you wish to close course access sooner than Dec. 31. If you’d like help with any semester wrap-up tasks, and/or as you begin working on spring classes, you can consult with our Instructional Designer, Nadia Khan (click the link to schedule a time). 

ZTC/OER Support and Reminders

For those teaching spring classes that are Zero- or Low-Textbook Cost, if you haven’t yet done so, please update your course section ZTC/LTC designations in SURF. For folks looking for support building spring ZTC classes or just exploring the use of OER, you can book a consult with our ZTC/OER Instructional Designer, Stephanie Kelley (click the link to schedule a time).

If You’re Already Thinking About Spring

• Stop! Chill out. Rest.
• Ok, if you insist … remember that in 2025 we added two nifty tools to streamline your Canvas course copy and reuse processes:
  • Adjust-All – makes copying previous Canvas courses for reuse a lot easier. It enables you to change all course item due dates and announcement publication dates in one place, rather than having to access each item individually.
  • TidyUP – makes it quick and simple to identify and delete files, folders, pages, and assignments that are no longer in use, making your Canvas course less cumbersome and easier for you and your students to use. Do this before copying current courses forward!
• An exciting new tool is coming very soon to our Canvas – DesignPlus. If you love visually engaging, beautifully designed Canvas courses but despise the technical challenges, accessibility concerns, and time required to do that, this tool will be an option worth exploring. See the DesignPlus website for a preview! More info to come once we have it set up in our Canvas system.
• @ONE online teaching courses are open to all California Community College faculty. Some are self-paced and available anytime. Facilitated spring courses are open for enrollment now, and are completely free. They’ll fill, so sign up now if you’re interested!
• Submit a proposal (due Jan. 31) for the Online Teaching Conference (June 23-25, Anaheim). MiraCosta faculty who present can have all travel expenses covered from the Online Ed budget!

Happy break!

– Jim

Jim Julius, Ed.D.
Faculty Coordinator, Online Education