Registration
MiraCosta faculty no longer need to sign up for Flex activities in advance. After attending a Flex workshop, record your participation on your Flex transcript under the “Record Activities” tab, selecting the “Scheduled Activities or Workshops” activity type. Visit the Flex website for more information.
Archives
After Flex week, go to the Workshop Archives to see recordings and resources from workshops below that were held online.
Fall 2021 Workshops
Friday August 13, 2021
Welcome & Reconnecting over Morning Coffee
9:00 AM – 9:30 AM
Sean Davis
Audience: Everyone
Sean will kick off our Online Education-focused day of workshops with an overview of what’s to come, and an opportunity to reconnect with colleagues through open sharing and discussion.
Overview of the new MiraCosta Online Class Quality Guidelines, with Examples
9:30 AM – 10:30 AM
Sean Davis & Angela Beltran-Aguilar
Audience: Everyone
Recording: Overview of the new MiraCosta Online Class Quality Guidelines, with Examples (Zoom Recording, 56 minutes)
In spring 2021, the Academic Senate approved significant updates the MiraCosta Online Educators committee made to the MiraCosta Online Class Quality Guidelines to reflect updated external regulations as well as an increased emphasis on equity. Learn how this document can be a useful tool for faculty as you create, update, and teach online classes. And, learn about a Canvas-based resource full of local faculty-created course elements that exemplify these guidelines in action.
Online Support through STEM and MLC
9:30 AM – 10:30 AM
Scott Fallstrom & Raymond Clark
Audience: Everyone
Recording: Online Support through STEM and MLC (Zoom Recording, 57 minutes)
The STEM and MLC are continuing with online tutoring and support services. Come learn about what is available, see the website/calendar, and consider how to integrate information about our services in your Canvas courses!
Annotation Tools and Pedagogies within Canvas
10:30 AM – 12:30 PM
Karen Turpin, curry mitchell, Lisa M. Lane, & Robert Bond
Audience: Everyone
Resource: Canvas Student Annotation Submission Assignment
Recording: Annotation tools and pedagogies within Canvas (Zoom Recording, 2 hours)
Emergent tools for creating activities and assignments around annotation (commenting directly upon and discussing a shared text, image, video, etc.) are making it easier for faculty to engage students in rich, interactive learning opportunities. In this session you’ll hear from faculty using Google Docs and Perusall for these kinds of activities, and you’ll learn about Canvas’s new built-in annotation assignment option.
Creating Accessible and Usable Documents
10:30 am – 11:30 am
Aaron Holmes
Audience: Everyone
Recording: Creating Accessible and Usable Documents (Zoom Recording, 43 minutes)
The workshop is related to instructional improvement as it will be geared toward creating accessible course content but it also has information on how to make accessible Word and PDF documents for non-instructional staff. The workshop will demonstrate how to enact a few simple changes to the way you develop your documents that can have a huge impact on your students’ ability to access and understand them. This will include using Microsoft Word to create accessible Word and PDF documents. It will also provide guidance on layout/formatting as well.
Online Tools for Math Teachers
10:30 AM – 11:30 PM
Scott Fallstrom
Audience: Everyone
Recording: Online Tools for Teaching Math (Zoom Recording, 24 minutes)
For statistics, we’ll take a look through the free art-of-stat webapps which contain a robust set of applications allowing students to participate, simulate, and conjecture based on pre-programmed data sets, or upload your own! For future teachers, we can use constructions with Desmos/Geogebra (geometry) as well as other OER resources that can help with possible online versions of these courses. And I’ll show how to embed these in canvas students to use… you’ll love it!
How are students accessing my courses? Strategies for Providing Increased Access for All Students.
11:30 AM – 12:30 PM
Henry Cohn-Geltner
Audience: Everyone
Recording: How are students accessing my courses? Strategies for Providing Increased Access for All Students (Zoom Recording, 48 minutes)
The goal of this workshop will be to discuss the multitude of ways in which students access your course. We will discuss the physical and mechanical modes, including the use of devices and platforms, and the contextual experience students have navigating course content. Experiences from learners with diverse learning profiles will illustrate key strategies that you can use to increase and expand on the access points you already provide for students.
Canvas Open Lab
11:30 AM – 12:30 PM & 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM
Karen Turpin
Audience: Everyone
This session is designed to give you open time to work with Canvas in a collaborative, supported environment. This is intended to be useful for anyone from beginners to advanced Canvas users, and is open entry/exit – show up anytime and stay as long as you like. Come with your Canvas questions and your fall classes-in-progress!
Equity & Humanizing Your Course: The Liquid Syllabus
1:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Robert Kelley & Lisa Lane
Audience: Everyone
“Humanized online teaching practices support the affective dimensions of student learning. Many students who enroll in online courses, particularly those from minoritized backgrounds, do not successfully log in and complete the first week successfully. Weeks 0-1 comprise a high opportunity zone for increasing the percentage of students who succeed online… An equity-minded strategy [for overcoming] these barriers is to transform your syllabus into a Liquid Syllabus… A Liquid Syllabus is a mobile-friendly, public website with a friendly welcome video that is written with inclusive, validating language” (Michelle Pacansky-Brock). Come for an overview of the Liquid Syllabus and then stick around to make one yourself.
Curious: Watch a 3 minute video overview: https://youtu.be/90BmvCuXMoI.
The subsequent “hands on” activity (for the first 20 participants; please register at https://forms.gle/fwwgGTJTmi245uoq5) requires having or creating a google account and access to an internet connected computer.
Increase Student Connection and Interaction with Pronto
2:30 pm – 3:30 pm
Tanessa Sanchez, Robert Bond, & Matt Baugh (Pronto)
Audience: Everyone
Recording: Increase student connection and interaction with Pronto (Zoom Recording, 49 minutes)
Learn how to get started with Pronto, an app that integrates with Canvas and enhances communication beyond what Canvas provides, enabling group messaging, file sharing, video chat, announcements, and more in a very mobile-friendly way. Hear from MiraCosta faculty who began using this last year and are excited to share their experiences!
Happy Hour, Open Discussion, and Sharing
3:30 pm – 4:00 pm
Jim Julius & Sean Davis
Audience: Everyone
Wrap up the day by connecting with colleagues to share your plans and discuss your lingering questions about all things online as you look ahead to the fall!