Author: Jim Julius

Online Education Workshop Archives

Flex Credit is available for viewing MiraCosta online workshop archives. Contact the Professional Development Program / Flex for more information.

If you require improved captions for any of the video recordings below, please contact Jim Julius.

Fall 2026

Spring 2026

Spring 26: DesignPLUS Train and Play Series

Fall 2025

Spring 2025

Fall 2024

Spring 2024

Fall 2023

Spring 2023

Fall 2022

Spring 2022

Fall 2021

Spring 2021

Equity Online: Celebrating Our Collaborative Work In Progress

Flex Week

Fall 2020

Summer 2020

Canvas Basics

Additional recorded zoom sessions and online teaching guides from Summer 2020 can be viewed within the PROJECT Online Teaching Foundations Canvas course.

Spring 2020

Fall 2019

Spring 2019

Fall 2018

Spring 2018

Fall 2017

Spring 2017

Fall 2016

Fall 2026 MiraCosta online teaching resources & tips

Can’t believe it’s time, but it is! Welcome to fall, colleagues! Please see below for important reminders of key online education resources to help all faculty to enable student success!

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 with 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.
  • Check out the Flex Week Calendar for lots of great workshops, including many relating to online education..

Expectations and Recommendations for Faculty Teaching Online

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 during the first half of the fall term – see all dates and times on the MiraCosta Online site and in Canvas announcements. These workshops provide tech tips, engage students with resources MiraCosta provides to support them, as well as reviewing 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.
  • Technology Loans – Be sure to share the form for students to fill out if they need a laptop and/or wifi hotspot to succeed this semester.
  • Online Student Support Access Points – the Student Support Hubin 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.
  • Tech Support – Also at lower left in Canvas is a button for students to quickly access Tech Help options, including 24×7 phone and chat support from Canvas, and our local MiraCosta ITS help desk. 

MiraCosta’s Online Education Tools

It all starts with Canvas, of course. MiraCosta has a robust set of instructional technologies which can support teaching and learning within and beyond Canvas as well. Follow links for a detailed MiraCosta-specific overview (and often, recorded Flex workshops) for any tool below. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have questions about these or other resources.

Course Design Tools (Faculty only)

  • Adjust-All and TidyUP– make it easier to copy and reuse Canvas courses
  • DesignPLUS – a Canvas visual design tool
  • 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.

Communication Tools

  • Zoom – if you’re using Zoom, make sure you’re using a pro Zoom account through MiraCosta. 
  • Pronto is an incredible mobile-friendly and Canvas-integrated messaging platform that’s ready to use in every course.

Video Tools

  • 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!
  • 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 worth exploring. 
  • Camtasia and Snagit – Software to create and edit videos for those looking for more advanced creation options.

Assignment/Assessment Tools

  • 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.
  • 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.

Student Access Tool

  • 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. Faculty and staff have access to a SensusAccess tool on the portal that can help ensure PDFs and other files are compliant with accessibility standards.

Best wishes for an awesome autumn!

– Jim

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

Summer 2026 MiraCosta Online Teaching Resources & Tips

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 with 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

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 during the first three weeks of summer – see all dates and times on the MiraCosta Online site and in Canvas announcements. These workshops provide tech tips, engage students with resources MiraCosta provides to support them, as well as reviewing 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.
  • Technology Loans – Be sure to share the form for students to fill out if they need a laptop and/or wifi hotspot to succeed this summer.
  • Online Student Support Access Points – the Student Support Hubin 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.
  • Tech Support – Also at lower left in Canvas is a button for students to quickly access Tech Help options, including 24×7 phone and chat support from Canvas, and our local MiraCosta ITS help desk. 

MiraCosta’s Online Education Tools

It all starts with Canvas, of course. MiraCosta has a robust set of instructional technologies which can support teaching and learning within and beyond Canvas as well. Select the links for a detailed MiraCosta-specific overview (and often, recorded Flex workshops) for any tool below. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have questions about these or other resources.

Course Design Tools (Faculty-only)

  • Adjust-All and TidyUP– make it easier to copy and reuse Canvas courses
  • DesignPLUS – a Canvas visual design tool
  • 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.

Communication Tools

  • Zoom – if you’re using Zoom, make sure you’re using a pro Zoom account through MiraCosta. 
  • Pronto is an incredible mobile-friendly and Canvas-integrated messaging platform that’s ready to use in every course.

Assignment/Assessment Tools

  • 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.
  • 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.

Student Access Tool

  • 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. Faculty and staff have access to a SensusAccess tool on the portal that can help ensure PDFs and other files are compliant with accessibility standards.

Best wishes for summer success!

– Jim

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

MiraCosta Online Ed Tips: End of spring 2026

Dear MiraCosta Colleagues, 

Some Online Ed reminders and opportunities as you wrap up spring and (perhaps) start thinking about what’s next. Hope to see you at commencement!

Canvas End of Term

After June 6, your spring 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 June 6. 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 June 6. If you’d like help with any semester wrap-up tasks, you can consult with our Instructional Designer, Nadia Khan (click the link to schedule a time). 

Support for Summer/Fall Class Prep 

Summer Professional Learning Opportunities

Happy final finals week!

– Jim

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

Online and OER News for MiraCosta – May 2026

Hello, MiraCosta colleagues!

As we near the spring finish line, a couple quick reminders/opportunities. And, further below, some May ASCCC OERI events to consider.

Summer and Fall Classes are in SURF and Canvas

  • Course sections assigned to you in SURF for summer and fall now have shells available for you to work with in Canvas (select Courses on the left, then All Courses to see upcoming classes that aren’t yet on your dashboard).
  • If any of your fall (or summer) course sections are Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) or Low Textbook Cost (<=$40), you should designate them as such in SURF following directions here, so that the classes will have the appropriate logo in SURF. And don’t forget to inform the bookstore of your course material details, even if you are using zero-cost resources.

Professional Learning Opportunities related to teaching online 

Please let me know how I can help with your online, ZTC, and OER work! 

– Jim Julius
Faculty Coordinator, Online Education

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