Author: Jim Julius

Hello colleagues –

It’s a super busy time but there’s some important online education and ZTC reminders and info about upcoming events here that I hope you’ll scan!

• Report Canvas issues to Canvas support! In the wake of the AWS outage a couple weeks ago which took Canvas down for over 12 hours, we’re continuing to hear rumors of Canvas errors cropping up, but we aren’t seeing a bump in issues being reported to Canvas. Please do use the Canvas support system (hit Tech Help in Canvas at bottom left to see your options) to report concerns, both to help you and your students, and to ensure that if there is a larger issue going on, it’s more quickly elevated for Canvas to deal with and/or for us at MiraCosta to be aware of.
• Spring Schedule is Out! So …
  • Course sections assigned to you in SURF 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).
  • Make sure your Zero Textbook Cost and Low Textbook Cost spring course sections are marked as such in SURF. (See directions)
• Online Teaching Conference call for proposals is open through January 31 – MiraCostans who have a proposal accepted can get all travel expenses covered from the Online Ed budget!
• San Diego CCD invites you to their 2025 Distance Education Summit – Friday, Nov. 14 on Zoom and/or in person! See details (some of which are still being finalized) and if you’d like to attend in person, please let me know. No registration required to attend any of the Zoom sessions.

Finally, please see below for the latest from the ASCCC Open Educational Resources Initiative (OERI) – there are tons of great general and discipline-specific webinars this month.

Please let me know if you have any questions about anything online or OER/ZTC related!

– Jim

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

For those teaching this summer, please see below for important reminders of key resources to help you help your students succeed!

And don’t forget that this spring we added a new tool to Canvas called Adjust-All which 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.

Expectations and Recommendations for Faculty Teaching Online

• The MiraCosta Online Class Quality Guidelines document – updated this spring -provides MiraCosta requirements and recommended practices for online instructors. Join our accompanying Canvas course to be inspired by (or even copy from) real Canvas examples shared by colleagues.
• 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 Monday 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 – 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. 
• 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 blanket college policy but please review the attached resolution on Artificial Intelligence in Teaching and Learning just passed by our Academic Senate. Please check out a 1-page guide to help you craft language to share with your students if you’re still working on that.
  

Support for You

• OurCanvas 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 a new 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.
  

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.
• 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. Our ITS team is also offering in-person workshops for students about Zoom this summer – 6/10, 10 – 11 am OC 12136; and 6/12, 11 am – 12 pm SAN 101.
• 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 summer
  

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 – goes without saying (well, I said it)
• Adjust-All – as noted above, a new tool to make it easier to update course dates when copying/reusing Canvas courses
• 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.
• 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, PlayPosit is great. 
• 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.

Best wishes for summer success!

– Jim

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

Dear MiraCosta Colleagues, 

Some Online Ed reminders and opportunities as you wrap up spring and start thinking about what’s next.

Canvas End of Term

After June 6, your spring Canvas classes go into read-only mode for you and your students. 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 then. 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.

Support for Summer/Fall Class Prep 

• When’s the last time you explored the TIC website? Start on the tic.miracosta.edu home page and see where it leads you – there are many great resources including workshop recordings, tutorials, examples, and guidelines for online teaching.
• For one-to-one support in your course design and teaching connect with Instructional Designer Nadia Khan – she’s around all summer. Or, if you’re working on classes that are ZTC (Zero Textbook Cost), connect with Instructional Designer Stephanie Kelley.
• For those teaching summer or fall classes that are Zero- or Low-Textbook Cost, please update your course section ZTC/LTC designations in SURF if you haven’t done so yet.

Summer Professional Learning Opportunities

• The Online Teaching Conference is in Long Beach, June 16-18. Contact me if you’re interested in support for your registration.  
• There are some great @ONE online teaching courses – all free!
• An online conference called Cal OER returns for its fifth year, Aug. 6-8. The call for proposals closes June 9. Conference registration ($25) is open now.

May your summer recharge you!

– Jim

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