Author: Jim Julius

Teaching with Zoom at MiraCosta College

Zoom Logo

This page provides guidance on teaching with Zoom, and assumes some basic familiarity with Zoom. Visit the Getting Started, Getting Help, and Using Zoom with Canvas page for details and technical information about getting started with Zoom at MiraCosta College, including how to set up integration of Zoom within Canvas.

Zoom Teaching Tips: Inclusion, Equity, Privacy, Security, and more

MiraCosta Zoom how-to videos from faculty

Please note that some of the following resources may refer to the version of Zoom that MiraCostans used in fall 2020 or earlier; MiraCosta Zoom is now hosted at https://miracosta-edu.zoom.us rather than https://conferzoom.org.

  • Teaching with Zoom (Fall 2020 workshop) – CSIT faculty member Rick Cassoni provides a 1-hour overview of Zoom, from the beginnings of signing up for a Zoom account, to recommended settings within your account and creation of meetings, to the basics of using Zoom for both live and recorded online instruction.
  • Connecting with Students in Zoom (Spring 2020 workshop) – Letters faculty member curry mitchell shares a few simple activities and methods for scaffolding an interactive, collaborative Zoom workshop with students.  curry also discusses flexible and compassionate practices–such as attendance policies and creating asynchronous means for participation–to ensure we’re using Zoom to help each other. (Note, this session included 10 minutes in breakout rooms but the recording was not paused, so you can skip from when that happens at around minute 39 ahead to minute 49 of the recording.)
  • Sharing your iPad screen on Zoom – Math faculty member Angela Beltran-Aguilar demonstrates in this short (under 3 minutes) video how to use an iPad as your sharing source for teaching with Zoom.
  • Capturing a separate screencast of a Zoom session – Psychology faculty member Robert Kelley demonstrates in this very short (under 2 minutes) video how to capture a portion of a Zoom session, excluding student participants, in order to be able to share the recording more widely without FERPA concerns.

Captioning for Zoom

  • Enabling Automated Real-Time Captions in Zoom – We now have access to automated captions inside our Zoom meetings – both live and recorded. While automated captions are a great resource for our students, they are not a replacement for professional captions when those are needed.
  • Zoom cloud recordings auto-transcribe and caption recorded Zoom sessions within a few hours (typically) of completion of the recording. Zoom’s interface makes it easy to fix up the captions so they are fully accurate.
  • If you have a student who requires live captions and you are using Zoom, please contact MiraCosta SAS.
    • You will need to make a one-time change in your Zoom account settings to enable live captioning, and at the start of each Zoom session with captioning, you will need to assign the captioning role to the proper person in your meeting. See directions for both.

Accurate info about Zoom recordings

To: All faculty, IS Deans

You may have received messages recently indicating that your Zoom recordings may be deleted. This message is intended to clarify what is happening, what might happen, and what we recommend.

  • No Zoom recordings will be deleted imminently. You may hear from colleagues in the CCC system about a message from the Chancellor’s Office saying this would happen next week. That decision has been reversed, and it turns out it wouldn’t have applied to us at MiraCosta anyway, since MiraCosta now has more control over its Zoom account (many colleges in the system still do not).
  • There is, however, a longer-term concern about the storage of Zoom recordings. Cloud storage is not infinite and not free, and Zoom recordings can be large. If we do not manage our individual recordings well, we could face involuntary deletion of recordings in the future.

What should you do now?

  • Log into your Zoom account and click Recordings on the left-hand menu. Select all recordings that you do not need and delete them.
  • If you have any meetings set up for automatic cloud recording but you rarely use the recordings, consider changing that setting so that you only record what you need.

In the future, If our Zoom cloud storage space reaches its limit, users may need to download recordings out of Zoom as MP4s and upload them into other video storage/streaming systems such as Canvas Studio, 3C Media Solutions, or YouTube. This can be a time-consuming process for long recordings, and you may also lose the transcription and chat records, and you would also need to change your links in Canvas courses and elsewhere to reflect the new location of the recording. 

So, it’s in everyone’s interest to make sure we are only keeping Zoom recordings that we really need, and regularly deleting the rest.

If a decision is ever made to automatically delete certain Zoom recordings, the message will come from a MiraCosta College employee. It’s our hope that we this won’t be necessary, or that if it does happen, it would only impact videos that are no longer in use.

If you need assistance with managing your Zoom recordings and/or meeting settings, please contact the employee help desk.

– Jim, in partnership with AIS

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

MiraCosta Faculty and Student Online Support

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

Online News for our Online Spring 2021!

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

MiraCosta Online Tech Changes coming your way

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

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