Author: Jim Julius

Is spring semester off to a great start? Could it be even better for you and/or your students with a little bit of help? The campus may be physically closed but an amazing array of support for successful online education is a click away! Some quick reminders for all faculty, and especially those launching classes starting this week:

For faculty:

• Online Mentors and Instructional Design help – To request online teaching and course design support from a peer faculty mentor and/or our instructional designer, please fill out our request form. We’ll get you connected!
• Tech Support – Canvas tech support options include 24×7 phone and chat support. Just click the Tech Support button at lower left in Canvas! Zoom tech support for faculty now is available through the MiraCosta employee help desk.
• Proctoring – If you have questions about how best to run your online proctored exams, the Academic Proctoring Center is happy to help faculty, as well as potentially providing makeup exam support for your students. For more information, please visit miracosta.edu/apc or email proctoringcenter@miracosta.edu.
• OER support – Interested in exploring Open Educational Resources (OER) this spring? The college and the statewide Academic Senate OER Initiative have many resources and projects you can tap into. Just reply to me and I can help you get connected with resources, colleagues, support staff, and/or financial support.

For students

• Student Orientation to Online Learning – I’m offering five more workshops this week and a couple more for the 12-week classes that start in two weeks. More details are on the TASC site, and you can point your students to the signup form. You can also find out which of your students attended a session via SURF.
• Student Support Hub – Please remind students about the Student Support Hub in Canvas (the button is at lower left in Canvas). This is a quick way for students to connect with live MiraCosta support folks from the library, tutoring centers, Writing Center, academic counseling, Career Center, computer lab staff and the student help desk. New this spring, the Hub has added connections to health services and mental health counseling.
• Tech Support – Also 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.

Happy spring!

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

Happy new year! I hope everyone had a good break, despite the weirdness of our world!

Flex workshops launch tomorrow: Friday, Jan. 15

Flex week starts tomorrow with lots of great online ed-related workshops, including some Canvas open lab hours for anyone seeking expert Canvas support. There’s also a workshop on an awesome new communication tool called Pronto, available college-wide this semester, and a workshop to make sure you’re ready for the new Zoom that arrived over winter break. Friday ends with a workshop featuring seven MiraCosta online faculty mentors sharing some of their top tips for online teaching. And there are many more super workshops coming next week!

Online Teaching Tool Updates

• Check out Pronto, an incredible mobile-friendly and Canvas-integrated messaging platform that’s ready to use in every course now.
• As you’re hopefully aware, Zoom was updated over break. Many of the changes are seamless but review our updated faculty Zoom support site for details. With the new Zoom comes a new Canvas integration that’s a huge improvement on what we had previously.
• Accessibility and Universal Design are important elements of equity and inclusion. We have a new, more powerful tool built into Canvas called Pope Tech that helps faculty detect and correct accessibility issues. (This replaces UDOIT, if you had used that.) Another tool, Ally, is here for spring. Ally automatically provides files you share through Canvas in multiple options for students. For instance, PDFs can be listened to (great for those who would prefer to listen). PPTs can be accessed as PDFs (great for those without PPT). Word documents can be viewed as HTML (great for mobile devices).
• The big change you’ll notice in Canvas is an update to the Rich Content Editor. If that makes you nervous, be sure to attend Karen Turpin’s 10 am Flex workshop tomorrow!
• Finally, Proctorio is no longer available at MiraCosta, as had been communicated in late fall.

Student Orientation to Online Learning Workshops

In collaboration with the library, I’ll be again offering over two dozen Student Orientation to Online Learning workshops this spring – see all dates and times on the TASC site and in Canvas announcements. These workshops help to familiarize students with the resources MiraCosta provides online to support them, as well as to adopt 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.

Student Support Resources to Share with your Students

Campus may be closed, but our amazing array of student support services and resources are just one or two clicks away. Point your students to the Student Support Hub in Canvas. Share the link and point them to the Student Support button on the left in Canvas for quick access to online support from the library, STEM & MLC, online tutoring, writing center, counseling, career center, open computer lab staff, student help desk, health services, and more! The new Help Hut on the MiraCosta website is also a quick way for students to connect with all kinds of support services, and the tutoring hub gives access from the website to all the academic support resources found in the Student Support Hub within Canvas.

Reminder: Merging Canvas Course Sections

This was once again available to faculty starting this fall. See our guide to learn more about merged course sections in Canvas, and if you’d like to request this, see the guide to the SURF dashboard for merging course sections – be sure to do so ASAP!

Don’t forget to refer to our useful Canvas start-of-term checklist to keep you on track as you finalize your spring classes!

See you online!

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

To: All Faculty, IS Deans

Some important updates and additions to the tools available for online instruction at MiraCosta are happening starting next week. Here’s a quick overview of what’s headed your way! Look for Flex workshops and follow-up emails early in the new year to learn more about all of these.

New Rich Content Editor in Canvas

The Rich Content Editor (RCE) in Canvas – the toolbar everyone uses when entering content, discussion replies, etc. in Canvas – is getting a major overhaul. The What is the New Rich Content Editor? Canvas guideis a great place to start learning about it. You may also be interested in a comparison of the old and new RCEs. This change happens next week on 12/23, but it’s possible for you to try out the new RCE now if you like. In a course where you want to try it, click Settings in the navigation menu, then click the Feature Optionstab, then toggle on the RCE Enhancementsoption. This will impact any students still active in your course, so it’s best to use a Sandbox course or one where students are done using Canvas for the term.

New Zoom, New Zoom Integration in Canvas

As you hopefully read in Anthony Ginger’s recent email, MiraCosta will soon start managing its own Zoom. If you haven’t read the email and you are a Zoom user, it’s essential that you do. Many aspects of this change will be seamless; however, a major one that faculty need to be aware of NOW is that access to current Zoom meeting reports will be lost following the change occurring Monday evening, Dec. 21. If you need to hold onto meeting reports for any reason, you’ll need to download them before the changeover. Going forward, another point is that all Zoom links for meetings and recordings will change. You MAY need to update links to meetings and recordings if you wish to use them in the future. Zoom is trying to implement a fix very soon that would seamlessly transition old Zoom links over to the new link– hopefully this will work and you will not need to do that manually. We’ll monitor how well that works and update you in the new year.

With the new implementation of Zoom will come a MUCH improved Canvas integration. For those of you that have preferred to use ConferZoom.org directly to manage your Zoom meetings, you’ll now be able to do basically everything using the new Zoom integration within Canvas. If you were using the existing Zoom-Canvas integration tool, it will be replaced next Tuesday following our Zoom account migration. If you’re interested, you may download an instructor guide for the new Zoom integration within Canvas.

Pronto: New Tool for Mobile-Friendly and Canvas-Integrated Communication

We will have an all-college pilot of Pronto this spring. Pronto is an app that integrates with Canvas and really enhances communication beyond what Canvas provides, enabling group messaging, file sharing, video chat, announcements, and more in a very mobile-friendly way. Pronto has already been adopted by dozens of CCCs, and we had a small group of faculty trying it out late this fall. More information will come when Pronto is ready for everyone to start using, but if you’d like a preview of what it looks like in Canvas, check out a 6 minute video.

New Accessibility Support Tools in Canvas: Ally and Pope Tech

Ensuring your Canvas courses are accessible and inclusive is getting easier. This spring, Ally will automatically make course files you’ve added to Canvas available to students in multiple alternative formats that are device- and user-friendly. Pope Tech is a tool available now in Canvas that will help you perform more complete accessibility checks and fixes than our current tool, UDOIT. UDOIT will be removed in the new year and we’ll encourage all faculty to make use of Pope Tech to ensure our courses are accessible to as many learners as possible.

Goodbye, Proctorio

Very few faculty were relying on Proctorio, and with the discontinuation of funding for this tool from the Chancellor’s Office, it will be removed from Canvas over winter break. If you hadn’t heard that this was a likely possibility previously and you are concerned about this tool going away, please reach out to me so we can discuss alternatives.

Now, don’t obsess about all this over break! Disconnect and enjoy some down time!

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

Hello, all!

Whew! You’ve just about made it to mid-semester. As you begin thinking about finishing fall well and looking ahead to another semester online in the spring, I want to remind you of various ways you can get support and enhance your professional knowledge and practice in online education.

Collegial Mentoring Available!

If you’d like to connect with a faculty colleague for any kinds of questions about online teaching – from getting a quick answer to a head-scratcher, to a more comprehensive conversation about effective practices and/or a walkthrough of a course – we have a dozen folks ready to help. Just fill out the form to request a mentor.

Career Education Faculty – Would you like professional instructional design support?

A strong workforce grant has given our CE faculty access to an outstanding instructional design expert, who has been working with many MiraCosta faculty for more than a year. She can help you with online course design guidance/advice and she can also work directly to make enhancements to your course(s), if you desire. Just reply to this email indicating interest and I will get you connected.

CE Faculty may also be interested in the Developing and Strengthening Online Career Education: The CVC-OEI Improving Online CTE Pathways Speaker Series featuring CE discipline-specific and general online teaching webinars later in October and November.

Interested in Open Educational Resources (OER)?

Adopting OER is a great way to support equity by lowering course material costs, and through greater flexibility to teach a course the way you think students will learn best, rather than being tied to the organization of a traditional textbook. Over 340 MiraCosta fall classes are listed in SURF as Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC)– that is awesome! Want to get more involved with OER?

• MiraCosta still has grant funds available to provide stipends, timesheet-based compensation, and/or instructional designer expertise to support efforts to reduce course material costs by at least 30% through the adoption of OER and other no-cost course material. Please reply to me if you would like to learn more.
• The statewide Academic Senate (ASCCC) has great resources available via the ASCCC OERI website, as well as a Canvas site (tinyurl.com/ASCCC-OpenEd) with more informal sharing of discipline-oriented information.
• The ASCCC is recruiting discipline faculty to support OER advocacy efforts by serving as Discipline Leads. “Our intent is to expand our discipline collections during the fall 2020 term and to increase our targeted advocacy efforts across all identified disciplines in the spring 2021 term. In order to meet these goals, we are now seeking Discipline Leads for disciplines that have never had a Lead and we will be seeking new Leads for the disciplines that have had a Lead previously. Read more about the disciplines we are recruiting, the Discipline Lead role, and the application process.”
• Register for Copyright, Fair Use, and Piracy. Where does OER Fit In?webinar from ASCCC this Friday, Oct. 16 at 3 pm.
• The Open Education Global conferenceis online Nov. 16-20. MiraCosta is an OEGlobal member, making your registration just $25.

Additional Upcoming Events, Courses, and Recorded Workshops

• Check out our comprehensive set of recordings of past MiraCosta Online Education workshops. Viewing workshop recordings is always Flex-eligible.
• FACCC is holding a statewide “Future of Distance Education” event on Friday afternoon, Oct. 23.See details and register.
• @ONE provides comprehensive online teaching courses for CCC faculty. New courses are starting soon – check out what’s available. Departmental travel funds can potentially be used to pay for your registration in these courses; if you don’t have access to such funds please reach out to me for support from the Online Education budget.

What Additional Training Opportunities Would You Like?

As you think about your needs over the next few months in finishing out fall and preparing for spring, what kinds of training and support are you looking for? Please reply to me with any requests/suggestions. I will be collaborating with Sean Davis, Joyful Teacher in Residence, to plan online teaching workshops over the next two months.

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