Category: Featured

Fall 2025 Online Ed tips & resources for MiraCosta

Welcome to fall, colleagues! Please see below for important reminders of key online education resources to help all faculty to enable student success!

New and Noteworthy …

  • Late in 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.
  • This summer, we’ve added another tool to Canvas to make your life easier as you reuse Canvas courses: TidyUP. TidyUP makes it quick and simple to identify and delete files, folders, pages, and assignments that are no longer in use, making your Canvas course less cumbersome and easier for you and your students to use.
  • In case you haven’t heard from other sources, all Zoom recordings from prior to July 2024 will be deleted in early October. This is a decision made at the CCC system level and we can’t change it! So if you rely on older Zoom recordings, you’ll need to download those over to Canvas Studio (most recommended!) or another video storage/streaming solution. ITS and Online Education will be offering support for this in multiple ways over the next 6 weeks.

Expectations and Recommendations for Faculty

Support for You

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 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.
  • 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 to help them with tech basics – see Canvas announcements for where and when these will be offered!
  • 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 semester/year!

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 and TidyUP– as noted above, new tools to make it easier to copy and reuse 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 a fantastic fall!

– Jim

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

Adjust-All

Adjust-All is a simple Canvas tool that enables you to change all course item due dates and announcement publication dates in one place, rather than having to access each item individually.

View a short (3½ minutes) video that will show you how it works!

Adjust-All Tips

  • The first time you use Adjust-All, you’ll need to click the blue Authorize button – it’s fine 😊
  • This tool is only available to faculty – students won’t see it in your course menu.
  • There are a few other things you can do with Adjust-All. Click the gear icon at top right to see options for bulk adjustments to dates or publishing status.
  • See the Adjust-All user guide for more tutorials and guides to using Adjust-All.

Adjust-All Limitations

  • Doesn’t work to update publish or to-do dates for Pages
  • Doesn’t work with New Quizzes
  • An assignment that is included in multiple modules may need to be updated multiple times within Adjust-All

MCC Canvas

You’ll find “Adjust All” toward the bottom of each Canvas course’s navigation menu. Adjust the dates of your course items, and click Save.

Adjust All in Canvas

ADAPT: LibreTexts’ Free Homework System

ADAPT logo

ADAPT is a free and open online homework system from LibreTexts. Think of it as your all-in-one hub for creating engaging assessments. ADAPT solves a common open educational resource (OER) challenge by bringing different homework technologies (like H5P, WeBWorK, and iMathAS) under one roof. This gives you the freedom to mix and match from a vast library of existing questions to create engaging assignments for your students, without getting bogged down by technology.

Key Features

  • Large, customizable question library
  • Question types (can include interactives, simulations, 3D models, code):
    • Canvas-like questions: multiple-choice, true/false, fill-in-the-blank, essays, matching, drop downs, categorization, ordering, hot spots
    • Highlight table or text
    • Drag and drop
    • Sketcher (molecular structure building)
    • Discuss-it (discussion board with audio, video, and/or text inputs)
    • Learning trees (students start with a “root” problem and are offered branching pathways based on how they do)
  • Grading options (auto, manual, feedback, apply late policies, multiple attempts, randomized order)
  • View data on students engagement and performance to adjust teaching

Explore this sample ADAPT assignment to see some of the questions that can be built. You can view this video from LibreTexts (8:58 – 14:50) alongside the sample assignment to get detailed explanations of each question type.

How to Get Started with ADAPT

Step 1: Get Instructor Account

Register for a LibreOne Account (this gives you access to all of LibreTexts’ applications).

Step 2: Create Your First Course

Once you log in and click into ADAPT, your dashboard will be empty. Here is how you can create a course:

  1. Click “New Course”.
  2. Fill in Course Details.
  3. Check “Yes” for LMS.
  4. Click “Save”.
Screenshot pointing to "New Course" button
Screenshot of Course Details and pointing our LMS sections and "Save" button

Step 3: Build an Assignment

  1. Click into the course that was just created.
  2. Click “New Assignment”.
  3. Set assignment properties.
  4. Click “Save”.
Screenshot pointing to "New Assignment"
Screenshot showing Assignment Properties

Add Questions from Existing ADAPT Library

  1. Click on the assignment that you’d like to add questions to.
  2. Click “Add Questions”.
  3. Choose a question source
    • “Search Questions” lets you filter questions by several different properties.
    • “My Questions” takes you to a library of questions that you have adapted or created.
    • “My Favorites” shows you questions that you have favorited.
    • “My Courses” allows you to select questions from other courses that you have created.
    • “Commons” contains questions for courses that have been curated by the ADAPT/LibreTexts team. They could be courses matching a specific textbook or ones geared towards a course/topic.
    • “All Public Courses” shows you questions created and made publicly available by other ADAPT users.
  4. Browse questions available to you. Clicking on a question will allow you to preview it in a pop-up window. Click the “+” icon to add them to your assignment. Clicking the heart icon will allow you to add questions to a Favorites folder to be used at a later time.
Screenshot pointing to "Add Questions"
Screenshot pointing to "Question Source" dropdown menu
Screenshot pointing to plus and heart icons next to questions

Create Own Questions

  1. Click on the assignment that you’d like to add questions to.
  2. Click “New Question”.
  3. Fill in “Question Properties”
    • When selecting a License, an open one is preferable so others can benefit from your work!
  4. Fill in “Primary Content”
    • Use “HTML Block” if the question you are creating is purely text-based.
    • If you would like to import H5P, WeBWorK, or iMathAS content that you have, go to the “Auto-Grade Tech Block” and “Existing” to make a selection.
    • To build a question using ADAPT’s templates, go to “Auto-Grade Tech Block” and next to “New” select “Native”.
      • Next to “Native Question Type” select “All” to see all the types of questions you can build. When you select a question type, the blue box below will explain what kind of interaction students will experience and how to format your question.
  5. Click “Save”.
Screenshot pointing to "New Question"
Screenshot pointing to "Licenses" on Questions Properties
Screenshot pointing to mentioned items in the "Auto-Grade Tech Block"

Step 4: Share with Students in Your MCC Canvas Course

  1. In Canvas, create a new assignment that you would like to use ADAPT for.
  2. Next to “Submission Type,” select “External Tool” and then select “ADAPT”.
  3. Once to click “Save”, you will be directed to select the ADAPT course and assignment that you would like to link to the Canvas assignment. Click “Link Assignment” once you’ve made your selections.
  4. Alternatively, you can go to your ADAPT course and link it to a Canvas course. Doing this will automatically populate the Canvas course with all the assignments you’ve created in the linked ADAPT course.
Screenshot pointing to "Submission Type" and External Tool: ADAPT
Screenshot of linking assignment to LMS
Screenshot pointing to dropdown for linking ADAPT course to LMS

Step 5: Grade an Assignment

By default, ADAPT courses are set for students to access and use them from within the LibreTexts website rather than from within Canvas. So, the course properties must be set to enable the ADAPT course to interact with Canvas Grades.

  1. Make sure your ADAPT course is set to interact with your Canvas gradebook.
    • Click on the course properties icon next to the course.
    • Check the box for “Yes” next to “LMS”. Click “Save”.
  2. Click the checkmark icon next to the assignment you would like to grade and this will take you to ADAPT’s grader.
    • The grader will allow you to view and grade both open-ended and automatically graded submissions.
    • You can grade by student or by question.
  3. Click “Submit” after each grade that you enter
Screenshot pointing to course properties
Screenshot pointing to checkbox next to "LMS" and "Save" button

ADAPT Training & Support Resources

Reset Your Canvas Course Content

Overview

From time to time, you may want to delete all of the content in a Canvas course site. This is most typically needed early in the course building process. For example, after importing content from another course, you may realize that you imported from the wrong course. The directions described below will delete all content from your course site, but leave the course roster intact.

Warning about Deleting All Course Content

WARNING: This step deletes all existing content from your course. Take steps to preserve any content you want to keep (for example, copy and paste to a Word doc, copy select course elements to a sandbox course, import the course into another empty shell, etc.) before proceeding. DO NOT complete these steps in a current term course that is currently in process!

Reset Course Content in a Canvas Course

Canvas Guide: How do I reset course content?

1. Navigate to the course with the content you wish to delete.

2. From the course navigation menu, click the Settings link.

Settings

3. In the sidebar, click the Reset Course Content link.

Reset Course Content

4. Click the Reset Course Content button.

A completely new course shell with a new ID (the number following “https://miracosta.instructure.com/courses/…”) will be generated. All users previously enrolled in the course will remain enrolled.

Made a Mistake?

If for some reason you reset your course and it was a mistake report it as soon as possible. We have Test and Beta instances of Canvas we may be able to refer to for the content and/or to restore the original course.

Contact Karen Turpin, Instructional Technology Specialist at [email protected] or Canvas Faculty Support 24/7 at 1- 833-345-2890 for assistance.

Try These 10 Things To Fix Your Computer Problem Before You Call Support

Troubleshooting computer problems is part of modern life when you teach online. Before you make that support call, try your hand at fixing some of the most common problems yourself.

  1. Check your Course Management System (CMS) Status
    Is it a maintenance time? Or is  Canvas currently experiencing an outage?
    1. Canvas Status Updates
    2. Stay Up To Date with Changes Happening within Canvas
  2. Clear Browser Cache (history, cookies, etc.)
    Clearing your browser cache often will resolve the problem by allowing your computer to download the latest version of the webpage and/or software.
  3. Try a Different Browser
    If you have cleared your browser cache and things are still not working as you expect try a different browser. Example: if you are using Chrome, try Firefox and visa versa. Ensure that your browsers are up to date. You can always download the latest version free online.
    1. Chrome
    2. Firefox
    3. Which browsers does Canvas support?
  4. Restart your Computer
    Many faculty and staff solve their problems with this simple step. Always a good option to try.
  5. Check your Internet Connection Speed
    A slow connection could be why your CMS system is running slow.  Share your result with your internet service provider as necessary to resolve.
  6. Enable Browser Cookies
    Cookies are small files which are stored on a user’s computer. They are designed to hold a modest amount of data specific to a particular client and website, and can be accessed either by the web server or the client computer. This allows the online server to deliver a page tailored to a particular user, or the page itself can contain some script which is aware of the data in the cookie and so is able to carry information from one visit to the website (or related site) to the next.
  7. Enable Java
    It strongly recommended to have the latest version to ensure proper functionality of our online systems.
    1. Review ‘What is Java and Why do I need it?‘
    2. Download Java
  8. Manage Pop-Up Blockers
    Pop-up windows, or pop-ups, are windows that appear automatically without your permission. They vary in size but usually don’t cover the whole screen. They are often required for certain online website applications to work properly.
  9. Make sure that your Operating System is fully updated. 
    Neglecting updates could deprive you of important bug and performance fixes.
    1. Apple Computer
    2. PC Computer 
  10. Check your Device Settings

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