Category: Featured

Course Evaluations in Canvas

Course evaluations are integrated within Canvas for both faculty and students. MiraCosta uses EvaluationKIT to provide this function. When you have a course section that is part of your evaluation process, this page has information to help you ensure it goes smoothly.

Information to share with your students

These directions are for the SURF enrolled students within your course.

Students can access the course evaluation within Canvas, or through an email sent to them from MiraCosta’s course evaluation survey administrator. Provide the link below to your students to help them with the evaluation process in Canvas.

Students must have cookies and pop ups enabled within their browser for the course evaluation tool to work correctly.

Advise students to contact the ITS Help Desk if they need assistance with course evaluations. The phone # is (760)-795-6850.

*Note for Instructors: The Student Course Evaluations menu item will NOT work with your Faculty Canvas Sample Student account, or the Instructor’s Student View in Canvas, as those accounts are not SURF enrolled users within your course.

Information for Faculty

As an instructor, you can view your course evaluation surveys from the course navigation menu or from the To Do list within your course. It is important to have the Course Evaluation course menu navigation tool available in Canvas in order to show the ‘Instructor Course Evaluations’ navigation menu item. Even if this tool is available in Settings > Navigation, this tool will only show up in your course if there is a course survey associated with your course.

If you modified your course navigation menu, you may have hidden the EvaluationKIT Course menu navigation tool. If you are being evaluated, you must enable the Course Evaluation menu navigation tool so that you will see the navigation menu item ‘Instructor Course Evaluations‘, and your students will see the ‘Student Course Evaluations‘ navigation menu item.

Instructor Navigation Menu

If you have not made any changes to your course navigation menu, this is the default location for the EvaluationKIT course surveys. Remember, this tool will only display if you have a course survey associated with your course. The navigation menu item is displayed as ‘Instructor Course Evaluations‘ in the instructor view.

Default location of Instructor Course Evaluations in the Canvas course navigation menu This tool will only display if you have a course survey associated with your course.

Instructor To Do List

On the To Do list within a Canvas course, you can also view your course evaluation survey. In this area you can view the percentage of students who have responded, as well as the start and end date of your course evaluation survey.

NOTE: Courses with a 1/1/3000 date on the Course Evaluation Survey are NOT being evaluated in the current semester.

Course evaluation surveys are located here on the Canvas course To Do list with % responded and start and end dates. NOTE: Courses with the 1/1/3000 date are NOT being surveyed this semester.

Enabling the EvaluationKIT Course Navigation Menu Tool

If you edited your Canvas course navigation menu, and your course is being evaluated, you may need to add the EvaluationKIT Course navigation tool back to your Canvas course. This is necessary so that you and your students will be able to access your course evaluations in the Canvas course navigation menu.

  1. Click on Settings. You will find this as the last option on your course navigation menu.
  2. Click the Navigation tab.
  3. Find the EvaluationKIT Course option in the bottom list of hidden navigation items.
  4. Drag EvaluationKIT Course from the bottom list to the top list of available items.
  5. Click the Save button
Steps 1-4
Step 5

Questions about Course Evaluations

For questions about student surveys and/or the Course Evaluations & Surveys system, associate faculty should contact their school’s Academic Division Administrative Assistant. Full-time faculty should contact human resources at [email protected]

If you are having a computer specific issue with a MCC computer contact the campus ITS Help Desk at (760) 795-6850.

Online Education Workshop Archives

Flex Credit is available for viewing MiraCosta online workshop archives. Contact the Professional Development Program / Flex for more information.

If you require improved captions for any of the video recordings below, please contact Jim Julius.

Fall 2026

Spring 2026

Spring 26: DesignPLUS Train and Play Series

Fall 2025

Spring 2025

Fall 2024

Spring 2024

Fall 2023

Spring 2023

Fall 2022

Spring 2022

Fall 2021

Spring 2021

Equity Online: Celebrating Our Collaborative Work In Progress

Flex Week

Fall 2020

Summer 2020

Canvas Basics

Additional recorded zoom sessions and online teaching guides from Summer 2020 can be viewed within the PROJECT Online Teaching Foundations Canvas course.

Spring 2020

Fall 2019

Spring 2019

Fall 2018

Spring 2018

Fall 2017

Spring 2017

Fall 2016

Fall 2026 MiraCosta online teaching resources & tips

Can’t believe it’s time, but it is! Welcome to fall, colleagues! Please see below for important reminders of key online education resources to help all faculty to enable student success!

Support for You

  • Our Canvas 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 another instructional designer also available for 1-1 support, Stephanie Kelley, especially for faculty working with 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.
  • Check out the Flex Week Calendar for lots of great workshops, including many relating to online education..

Expectations and Recommendations for Faculty Teaching Online

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 half of the fall term – 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.
  • Technology Loans – Be sure to share the form for students to fill out if they need a laptop and/or wifi hotspot to succeed this semester.
  • 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. 

MiraCosta’s Online Education Tools

It all starts with Canvas, of course. MiraCosta has a robust set of instructional technologies which can support teaching and learning within and beyond Canvas as well. Follow links for a detailed MiraCosta-specific overview (and often, recorded Flex workshops) for any tool below. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have questions about these or other resources.

Course Design Tools (Faculty only)

  • Adjust-All and TidyUP– make it easier to copy and reuse Canvas courses
  • DesignPLUS – a Canvas visual design tool
  • 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.

Communication Tools

  • Zoom – if you’re using Zoom, make sure you’re using a pro Zoom account through MiraCosta. 
  • Pronto is an incredible mobile-friendly and Canvas-integrated messaging platform that’s ready to use in every course.

Video Tools

  • 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!
  • WeVideo (formerly 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, this is worth exploring. 
  • Camtasia and Snagit – Software to create and edit videos for those looking for more advanced creation options.

Assignment/Assessment Tools

  • 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.
  • 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.

Student Access Tool

  • 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. Faculty and staff have access to a SensusAccess tool on the portal that can help ensure PDFs and other files are compliant with accessibility standards.

Best wishes for an awesome autumn!

– Jim

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

Canvas Start of the Semester Instructor Checklist

Create or Import your Content

Multiple ways to begin to build your class

Copy from another class in Canvas. Your access to classes you have previously taught in Canvas continues indefinitely.

Copy in an entire course or portions of one from Canvas Commons.

Create your content from scratch in Canvas

Review Assignments, Quizzes, and Discussions

  • Verify activities and content in the course are published.
  • Verify dates. Due dates are added to the calendar and the syllabus and serve as reminders to students. “Available from” and “Until” dates will unlock and lock the activity.
  • Verify instructions are accurate and well formatted.
  • Verify assignment submission types.
  • Verify number of quiz attempts is correct.
  • Verify assignment groups are set up correctly. See: How to use Assignment Index Page.
  • Verify assignments are weighted correctly, if using a weighted grading system. See: How to Weight Assignment Groups.
  • Verify discussions are ordered logically on Discussions list page.
  • Verify Quiz “Options” are correct. See: Canvas Quiz Options.

Review Course Details

Final Preparations

  •  Publish your course when you are ready for students to have access to it. This typically is on the morning of or before the official course start date. See: How do I publish a course? NOTE: Some faculty like to publish their courses well in advance of the start date, but only publish a handful of elements of the course (such as the syllabus). This allows enrolled students to “preview” the class.
  • For online and hybrid classes, encourage students to attend a Student Online Academic Readiness (SOAR) workshop. You may also wish to share the Canvas Student Orientation to help any students who are new to Canvas to have a resource for learning the basics.
  •  Especially for online and hybrid classes, send an email to your students through your SURF Roster telling them how to access your course in Canvas.

Cautions

  • Canvas email (Inbox/Conversation) messages will not be sent out if the course is unpublished. Send class messages from your SURF Roster instead, prior to publishing the course.
  • Pay attention to the time stamp on anything you have placed a date on. 12:00 means the very first minute of the selected day. For end dates, it is often best to choose 11:59 PM to ensure you are setting it up on the correct date.

Adding Faculty Evaluators, TLC Staff, Community Ed Students, Substitute Instructors, and TAs to Canvas classes

Students and Instructors are automatically enrolled from SURF to your Canvas course several times a day.

For the roles called out below, follow the specified directions to have the user enrolled within your course with the appropriate role.

  • Faculty Evaluator:  Work with your dean when you need to provide access to a peer, your chair, etc. to conduct an evaluation. Approved evaluators are handled by your dean through the Office of Instruction’s procedures. The evaluator will be added on SURF and uploaded to Canvas for the allowable period of time. During that time, the evaluator will have the ‘Evaluator’ Canvas role. The Evaluator Canvas role has the same permissions as the student role.
  • The Learning Centers (TLC) ASIC, STEMLC, & Writing Center: Contact Amy Paopao at (760) 757-2121 ext. 6389 or [email protected]. On the People roster, within Canvas, the user will be assigned the ‘TLC Staff ‘ Canvas role.
  • Community Education Student: Contact Karen Turpin at [email protected]. Include the confirmation of student enrollment through community education. On the People roster, within Canvas, the user will be assigned the ‘Student Other’ Canvas role.
  • Substitute Instructors, & TAs: Work with your dean to provide access to Canvas for the substitute instructor or TA. Approved substitute instructors and TAs are handled by your dean through the Office of Instruction’s procedures. The substitute instructor or TA will be added on SURF and uploaded to Canvas for the allowable period of time. During that time, the substitute instructor will have the ‘Teacher’ Canvas role and the TA will have the ‘TA’ Canvas role.

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