Author: Jim Julius

Online Ed Summer 2019 News You Can Use

Happy summer, everyone! I’m back from sabbatical – huge thanks to Sean Davis who filled in wonderfully for me this spring. Here I have two quick, important updates that can’t wait for fall semester:

eTutoring Links Have Changed

Hopefully you are aware of eTutoring, which is available at no cost to all MiraCosta students year-round, including summer. If you’re teaching now, please check miracosta.edu/etutoring to learn more, and please share this link with your students if your discipline is supported.

On July 1, the organization supporting eTutoring changed. With that, the links to eTutoring changed as well. If you would like to provide your students with direct access to eTutoring in your courses, the key links are now:

ARC is now Studio

Studio is a really great video tool that’s integrated inside of Canvas, which MiraCosta began piloting this spring when it was known as ARC. You’ll see Studio in the global Canvas menu (on the left). Studio is also integrated into Canvas’s Rich Content Editor toolbar:

With Studio:

  • Faculty and students can easily record webcam and screencast video within Canvas
  • Faculty and students can create and manage a library of videos for use in Canvas (and even to share outside of Canvas)
  • Faculty can create discussion activities that are based on video (discussion comments are tied to specific points in the video)
  • Faculty get data on student viewing of video
  • Faculty can add quiz questions into videos; students respond while watching the video; results go directly into the gradebook
  • Students can submit video assignments; faculty can provide feedback directly on specific moments in the video
  • Videos can be automatically captioned and the captions can be easily edited

See MiraCosta’s Studio intro to learn more, and/or dive into the full set of Studio Guides.

– Jim

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

Collegial Faculty Canvas Support this Week

I’m excited to announce that some stellar MiraCosta colleagues have volunteered to provide 33 hours of drop-in faculty Canvas support during finals week. This support will be offered in the Oceanside Teaching & Learning Center, on the San Elijo Campus, and even online via Zoom. Please see the schedule for details.

You may have questions about grading, wrapping up your classes, or even questions about designing your spring classes. Or perhaps you have some nagging questions about Canvas that you just haven’t had time to address this semester. Or, maybe you’ll just feel better about getting some Canvas work done knowing that you have an expert on hand should anything come up! Either way, take advantage of this great support offered by your fellow faculty.

Additional Canvas Support & Tips

At the end of each term, you have a couple weeks to wrap up your work within your Canvas courses, and courses then go into a read-only Concluded mode. For the fall semester, this occurs on Dec. 31, after which you and your students will have continued but limited access to course materials by default. See our detailed support guide to learn more about how this works, how you can change what happens, and how to work with your Concluded courses as you’re creating your new classes.

Remember, you always have 24×7 access to Canvas support (even during winter break) by calling the faculty Canvas support hotline: 1-833-345-2890

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

Online Ed News to Know Before You Go

Canvas Drop-In Support for Faculty This Week

On the first day of finals (and the second, third, and fourth), my colleagues gave to me … help with all things Canvas, from grading, to designing next semester’s classes, to any other burning Canvas questions you might have! An announcement will be updated each day this week in Canvas with the day’s times and locations – see the full week schedule here.

Canvas End-of-Term Reminders

After Dec. 31, your fall Canvas classes go into read-only mode for you and your students. There are some important things you should consider before that date! Please review our Canvas end-of-term guide.

Zero- and Low-Textbook Cost Class Spring Classes

If you are teaching any spring classes that have course material costs of $0 (zero) or under $40 (low), please be sure to designate those classes as such in SURF. This enables your class to receive a special denotation in SURF and also to be listed on the ZTC/LTC page. See directions here (and this procedure may be a bit different following the SURF upgrade, so please take care of this ASAP).

Online and Hybrid Class Information Reminder

If you are teaching an online or hybrid class this spring, please make sure your class description is up to date on the Online Class Schedule page. Students use the information on this page to get details about your class such as your expectations for success, and how they should get started. See detailed instructions on how to provide detailed class information there.

Faculty Professional Learning Opportunities

Online Teaching Conference – Submit a Proposal?

The CCC Online Teaching Conference returns to Anaheim June 17-19. MiraCosta is always well represented at this conference. Online Ed will fully fund attendance including hotel for MiraCostans who present at OTC. The Call for Proposals is open now through Jan. 31. If you’d like to go but don’t want to submit a proposal, look for more information later in the spring about potential support.

@ONE Online Teaching Classes

@ONE offers an incredible array of online teaching classes ranging from general introductory and intermediate courses about online education, to more focused learning experiences related to topics such as culturally responsive teaching, accessibility, assessment, and much more. New classes begin January 14 – check out the catalog.

CVC-OEI Course Academy

If you teach a fully online C-ID approved course, you are eligible to receive support from the Online Education Initiative in preparation for possibly offering the class on the Course Exchange. Learn more about the Course Design Academy and/or sign up for a spring informational meeting.

And finally … Sean Davis is the new & improved Jim Julius this spring!

I’ll be on sabbatical this spring, working on developing a whole new set of resources and professional learning experiences designed specifically for MiraCosta faculty interested in growing their online teaching skills and knowledge. Sean Davis, a sociology faculty member and all-around amazing MiraCostan, will be filling in for me. I am excited for the fresh perspective he will bring to this role, and I hope you take advantage of his availability to support all things Online Ed this spring.

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

MiraCosta Online Ed Updates: Mid-Semester edition

Good stuff here for all faculty – not just those teaching online. Please read on!

Canvas Conference online tomorrow (10/26)

Ready for some new ideas on effective uses of Canvas? The Can-Innovate online conference is designed by and for the CCC system. You can register and attend independently, or you can pop in to the new C3 Teaching & Learning Center space in the OC Hub (OC 1252 & 1253) to catch as many sessions as you like throughout the day (tomorrow, Friday 10/26). There’s also an open Canvas course with slides and other resources for every session. This is, of course, Flex-eligible!

Spring Class Schedule is available!

That means three things:

  1. Classes assigned to you in SURF are available for you to begin developing in Canvas.
  2. If any of your spring classes are Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) or Low Textbook Cost (<$40), you should designate them as such in SURF.
  3. If you are teaching online or hybrid spring classes, you can provide more information about them for students in the Online Course Schedule. . Please note: if you have done this in the past by copying text from Word or other sources, you may have introduced HTML that causes your course description to be inaccessible. Please type directly or copy in plain text only.

Want to learn more about Open Ed Resources & Zero Textbook Cost materials?

Check out the MiraCosta OER/ZTC website, starting with a curated set of texts and Canvas shells useful for many GE classes.
Consider registering for and attending a regional OER/ZTC summit on Nov. 9, 8 am – 2 pm, at Grossmont College.

Video Management System coming – interested?

The MiraCosta Online Educators committee is preparing to select a video management system to pilot this spring at MiraCosta. This will enable faculty and students to easily record, manage, and share videos within Canvas. Faculty will be able to get detailed information about student viewing of videos, discussions can be tied to different points in videos, and quiz questions can be inserted within videos. Please let me know if you might want to be part of our evaluation process.

Fall Student Orientations to Online Learning complete

Nearly 240 students attended a Student Orientation to Online Learning session this fall, and nearly 2700 have attended since 2014. If you want to give extra credit to your students for attending, you can run a report in SURF to see which ones participated. 

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

Academic Integrity and Canvas Exams

Though cheating is certainly not unique to the online environment, many instructors have  reasonable concerns about opportunities for students to cheat online. These concerns may include:

  • inappropriate access to resources when completing an online assessment
  • copying answers or text found online
  • sharing answers with other students
  • contracting with a third party to complete online classwork

There are many approaches to decreasing the likelihood or ability for students to cheat in the online environment.

Course Redesign ideas:

  • Consider including more formative assessments and activities, and making high-stakes objective assessment a smaller portion of the overall course grade.
  • Get to know your students to help them be more personally invested and to help you recognize individual student voices.
  • Integrate and encourage student use of institutional support resources such as tutoring as part of the learning process.
  • Design assignments that enable/require students to include unique, personally meaningful perspectives and details.
  • Consider combining or replacing objective tests with other methods of assessment, such as projects, collaborative work, writing assignments, and personal reflections.
  • Consider designing tests as open note/open resource so that you do not get caught in an “arms race” with students.
  • Multiple choice and essay questions requiring application of skills and knowledge rather than simple factual recall are harder to cheat on.
  • Consider requiring students to turn in drafts of projects and written work (for feedback from instructor and/or peers) well in advance of a final due date.
  • Include a variety of student-to-student interactions and group activities. For group work, ensure that assessment practices don’t allow non-contributing students to receive the same grade as other group members.
  • Alter assignments and tests from semester to semester.

Proctoring: For objective assessments critical to the learning outcomes for an online course, consider using the MiraCosta Proctoring Center. For students at a distance, the Proctoring Center can help to establish proctoring in other locations. [Note: during spring 2021, the Proctoring Center will have limited availability. Consider using Zoom to proctor objective online assessments yourself.]

Code of Conduct and Instructor Leadership: Discuss with students the reasons why academic integrity is important. Emphasize the benefits (and pleasures!) of truly engaging with course material and learning, rather than focusing on grades. Have students sign or even jointly develop a statement summarizing the expectations and requirements for academic honesty. You might also refer to MiraCosta’s

  • Standards of Student Conduct, AP 5500
    Students must refrain from engaging in … Cheating, plagiarizing, or engaging in other academic dishonesty
  • Academic Integrity policy, BP 5505
    MiraCosta College highly values academic integrity. At the core, this means an honest representation of one’s own work. MiraCosta College also promotes the approach that education is best accomplished as a cooperative, collaborative enterprise in which students are encouraged to work with and learn from each other. The line between academic integrity and collaborative education is not always easy to define and may vary from one discipline to the next and from one instructor to the next. Many aspects of cheating and plagiarism are universally recognized, while others are subject to debate. This policy provides some broad, general guidelines and allows instructors to be more restrictive according to their preferences and practices. Examples of academic dishonesty include but are not limited to:
    A. Cheating: Copying from another student or using unauthorized aids or persons during an examination.
    B. Plagiarizing: Copying someone else’s work or ideas and misrepresenting them as one’s own.
    C. Falsification: Making up fictitious information and presenting it as factual or altering records for the purpose of misrepresentation.
    D. Facilitation: Helping another student to cheat, plagiarize, or falsify.

You might include a question on exams that has students agree to the code of conduct and/or that has students indicate that they have completed the exam on their own without using prohibited resources.

Making Canvas Exams More Secure

When conducting tests through Canvas, the following methods can further reduce the risk of cheating. Note that as of fall 2020, Canvas has two different tools for conducting tests – Quizzes (the original) and New Quizzes. New Quizzes is still being developed; at this time it has both advantages and limitations (view a comparison and/or a New Quizzes FAQ) compared to the original Quizzes tool, but it is expected to eventually fully replace the original Quizzes. Canvas guides for both Quizzes and New Quizzes are given for each item below as applicable.

  • Availability Window – Restrict the availability of the test to a specific date/time range. Quizzes | New Quizzes
  • Time Limits – Limit the time a student can spend on a test once they start it. Quizzes | New Quizzes
  • Disallow Multiple Attempts – Multiple attempts is a great option for a “mastery” quiz where you want students to retake it until they achieve a certain level of proficiency; this isn’t typical of a summative, high-stakes assessment. Quizzes | New Quizzes
  • Delay Per-Question Feedback (Quizzes only) – Providing students feedback on each question can help them learn; delaying the availability of this feedback until after the test availability window is over can help ensure the integrity of the exam. Quizzes [As of spring 2020, if feedback is built into a New Quizzes assessment, it is provided to students immediately and cannot be delayed.]
  • Answer Randomization – Answers to multiple choice questions can be randomized/shuffled so they are presented differently for different students. (Note: In Quizzes this is one setting for the entire quiz; in New Quizzes this is a per-question setting.) Quizzes | New Quizzes
  • Present Questions One at a Time – This can make it more difficult for students to “collaborate” if questions are also randomized. An additional option can prevent students from going back to previous questions, which can further strengthen the integrity of the exam, but can also frustrate students who legitimately realize they made a mistake on a previous question and wish to correct it. Quizzes | New Quizzes
  • Shuffle Questions (New Quizzes only) – This will present the quiz questions to students in random order. New Quizzes
  • Question Randomization with a Question Group/Item Bank – Drawing questions randomly from a pool (or pools) can make it even more difficult for students to productively share questions during an exam. Keep in mind that if your pool contains more questions than the number of questions you are drawing from the pool to go into the exam, you need to be careful about maintaining consistency of the questions within the pool (both in terms of outcomes measured and difficulty of the questions). Quizzes | New Quizzes
  • Calculated (Formula) Questions – Formula questions can include a range of values for one term/variable. Thus, the same question will have unique answers across different quizzes, but the question can still be auto-graded. Quizzes | New Quizzes
  • Require Presentation of ID – if you are not using a physical proctoring center, but you would like students to demonstrate that the person taking the test is the person enrolled in your class, one suggestion is to have students record a brief video holding a picture ID next to their face. If you use Proctorio, this step can automatically be included when enabling video proctoring; if you don’t, you could add an Essay question that directs students to access their webcam through the Rich Content Editor and record this. Of course, this requires students to have a webcam (and still wouldn’t prevent the student from doing this, then having someone else complete the rest of the exam). Quizzes | New Quizzes
  • Restrict Computer Activity During Exam – Technology such as Proctorio enables faculty to require that student’s computer and browser are “locked down” during an exam, preventing students from opening other browser windows or applications, taking screen captures, etc. This requires specific technology on the student computer. Note that Proctorio works only with Canvas Quizzes, not New Quizzes.
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