Author: Jim Julius

Online Ed Info for ALL MiraCosta faculty

Happy fall, everyone. Please see below for important online education-related updates and information for all MiraCosta faculty.

Canvas Updates

Lots of new features are available in Canvas, which is now the sole course management system at MiraCosta. These include a more streamlined way to use Turnitin, an updated Gradebook, a brand-new Quiz feature, a new integrated accessibility checking/correction tool, and more. Read more.

If you are still getting familiar with Canvas, remember to check out all the great Canvas resources we provide, and at this time especially our Start of Semester Canvas Checklist.

Online Academic Support Resources for ALL Students

As you finalize your syllabi and course resources, please make your students aware of online tutoring, online writing center, and the 24×7 online ask-a-librarian service. These services are open to all MiraCosta students in any class!

Preferred Name Change Form for Students

Students who prefer to be known by a different name from their legal/formal name on record may change their name via SURF – instructions are here. Preferred name is used in Canvas, on class rosters and student ID cards, and to borrow items from the college library. Students may also stop by Admissions and Records to submit a paper Preferred Name Change form.

Designating Zero- and Low-Textbook-Cost Classes

If you are teaching a ZTC or LTC class this fall, please ensure it is designated as such in SURF – see directions to do so.

You can view more details about ZTC and LTC designations, as approved by the Academic Senate.

For faculty teaching at least one online/hybrid class this fall:

Fall Student Orientations to Online Learning

I will offer many online learning orientation sessions this fall. Please share the schedule with your online/hybrid students and encourage their attendance. Read more, including how to get a report from SURF on which of your students attend.

Online Class Schedule – UPDATE and beware HTML

For all those teaching an online or hybrid course this fall, please make sure your class description is up to date on the separate Online Class Schedule page. Students use this page to learn how to get started with your class, and you can provide other important information to help students prepare for success. See detailed instructions if needed. 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 by copying from NotePad on a PC or TextEdit on a Mac.

CCC DE Faculty Survey

The California Community College Chancellor’s Office conducts annual surveys of faculty and students involved in Distance Education. Be on the lookout this month for a survey if you taught a DE class in the spring, and please take the time to complete it – your input is invaluable!

Come on and Zoom-a-Zoom-a-Zoom-a-Zoom!

You might have to be of a certain age to get that headline. Anyway, Zoom is a great tool for live online interaction that has now replaced the old CCC Confer (Blackboard Collaborate) in the CCC system. Learn more about Zoom.

NetTutor Online Tutoring Service

In addition to eTutoring, an online tutoring option for MiraCosta distance education classes is NetTutor. Unlike eTutoring, NetTutor provides extensive coverage up to 24×7 of just about any academic subject, and is available via a link embedded within Canvas. The link would take students directly to the subject-specific tutoring area with no additional login required. Also with NetTutor, each instructor may specify “Rules of Engagement” that inform tutors about the approach and resources you would like them to use when working with your students. Contact me if you’re interested in NetTutor for your fall class(es).

Distance Education Requirements and Guidelines

Please review the MiraCosta online class quality guidelines. The document has two parts – (I) Essential elements for all distance education classes as already required in department and college policies (especially AP 4105 and the Syllabus Checklist), and (II) Good practices featuring principles and examples commonly recommended for consideration in online education.

Captioning Support

Videos included in your online course materials should be captioned. 3CMediaSolutions is a video storage and streaming system for California Community College faculty that provides free professional captioning as an option when you upload your media to the site. It’s a great way to manage your media and to get everything captioned. You can also work with Robert Erichsen of DSPS to submit media for captioning through a special grant-funded program. Please contact him to learn more: rerichsen@miracosta.edu

Jim Julius, Ed.D.
Faculty Director, Online Education
miracosta.edu/online | tic.miracosta.edu
OC 1254, MS 11A
1 Barnard Drive | Oceanside, CA 92056
(760) 795-6745

@jjulius | Linkedin

 

Countdown to Canvas: 6 weeks to go

Please be sure you have extracted everything you need from Blackboard and Moodle, since access to those systems ends on June 30. See Considerations in Leaving Blackboard and Moodle for more details; for quick guidance on downloading class gradebooks and archives, see directions to do so for Blackboard or for Moodle.

Further, please consider carefully:

  • Are there old courses that you haven’t taught for some time, but you don’t want to leave behind? Don’t forget those!
  • Are there old courses that someone else in your department taught, but that person has since left MiraCosta, and your department has permission to reuse course content? If so, contact Karen Turpin (kturpin@miracosta.edu) for assistance in bringing such content over to Canvas.

Finally, if you are still getting up to speed on Canvas, keep in mind:

  1. The plethora of great locally-developed and selected Canvas resources available to you.
  2. The 24-7 instructor hotline for Canvas support – it remains available throughout the summer: 1-833-345-2890 and is your best option for quick “how do I do this in Canvas” or “why isn’t Canvas doing what I think it should do” types of questions.
  3. The TIC will be closed for its transformation into the brand-new Teaching & Learning Center during the first part of the summer, but Karen and I are working and available to you throughout the summer – feel free to contact either of us with questions that go beyond what the Canvas hotline can provide.

 

Considerations in Leaving Blackboard and Moodle

With the closure of Blackboard and Moodle (“legacy systems”) on June 30, 2018, faculty should consider their obligations and needs regarding the class content and student records that those systems have contained. Here are three primary considerations for faculty:

  1. Export all content from legacy systems to rebuild classes in Canvas if that is still needed.
  2. Access to grade records from legacy system classes in the event of grade challenges.
  3. Need to be able to resolve incompletes for classes that were run in a legacy system this spring.

Please review the following for information and instructions on downloading gradebooks, student work, and entire course archives from your:

See below for more details on the three considerations listed above, as well as one additional possible concern.

Rebuilding Legacy System Classes in Canvas

MiraCosta’s Canvas page for faculty includes all kinds of resources, information, and recommended training materials to help faculty learn Canvas, including information on transitioning from legacy systems to Canvas.

For simple classes where the course management system is used fairly minimally, transitioning to Canvas should be straightforward. For more complex classes, especially hybrid and online classes, faculty typically report that it is a significant investment of time to rebuild in Canvas, but one that is well worthwhile.

Some elements of classes may export from legacy systems and import into Canvas in a useful way. Other elements are best to copy separately and paste into Canvas or re-create altogether. The following resources may be especially useful in helping faculty with this process.

Reference material

Videos of MiraCosta workshops

Maintaining Grade Records in Case of Challenges

For access to grade records, it is each faculty member’s responsibility to download/export what they need from the legacy systems. Please refer to AP 4231 (Grade Changes) for details on the circumstances you need to be aware of.

Resolving Incompletes

With under 10% of our spring 2018 classes running in Blackboard or Moodle, and given the infrequency of this occurrence, this should be a very minor issue. But if it comes up, there are several possibilities for handling this, depending on the work that needs to be completed and how dependent on the course management system it may be:

  • For courses which the instructor has already rebuilt in Canvas and which will work for the student to complete work there, the faculty member can work with Karen Turpin to create a special copy/section of the Canvas course and enroll the student who needs to finish the incomplete.
  • For a Blackboard course that has elements that the student really needs to complete in Blackboard for consistency/coherency, the faculty member can work with Karen Turpin to restore the Blackboard course archive into the free online CourseSites version of Blackboard.
  • In some cases, it may be possible to resolve the incomplete without using a course management system at all. If the instructor has made copies of the content/assignments and grade records, the student work could potentially be done on paper or through digital copies of the course materials.

For advice and assistance with this should it become necessary, please contact Karen Turpin.

One Other Possibility: Audits

There is a fourth consideration that is more for the institution than for faculty: the possibility of outside agencies in the future conducting audits of past classes run in legacy systems.

This is a low-likelihood issue, yet one we do need to account for. There have been a handful of audits of online classes at California community colleges within the last few years; these are typically related to accessibility investigations – either prompted by an Office of Civil Rights complaint or through a random selection of the state auditor. There have also been audits during federal Department of Education investigations of compliance with financial aid regulations and distance education. In such cases, auditors likely would want to be able to view each class in its original form, in the legacy system in which it was offered.

Should such a situation arise, it is likely that MiraCosta would negotiate short-term access to Blackboard and/or Moodle systems as needed in order to meet the needs of the auditors, restoring archives that we have retained institutionally into those systems.

Countdown to Canvas: 8 weeks to go

To: All faculty

Blackboard and Moodle will no longer be options for instruction after the spring semester. The official end of our licenses providing access to Blackboard and Moodle is June 30. Please make sure you have extracted all needed content from all classes by then.

Faculty should consider 3 potential issues:

  1. If you have not yet rebuilt all your classes in Canvas, do you have all class content, resources, materials, etc. that you will need from the old system?
  2. Are you prepared for potential grade challenges on classes that were run in an old system?
  3. If you taught this spring in an old system, what would you do if a student needs to resolve an incomplete?

For much more detail on these issues, please see Considerations in Leaving Blackboard and Moodle

For some quick guidance on downloading class gradebooks and archives, see directions to do so for Blackboard or for Moodle.

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

1 … 15 16 17 18 19 … 25