Category: Online Education News You Can Use

For those teaching this summer, please see below for important reminders of key resources to help you help your students succeed! (And read thoroughly to find the new theme song for our TIC website!)

Support for You

• OurCanvas start-of-term checklist can help you prepare your classes.
• TheMiraCosta Online Class Quality Guidelines provides MiraCosta requirements and recommended practices for online instructors.
• Ongoing faculty support – You can request an appointment with our Instructional Designer anytime.
• 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 MiraCosta tech support for faculty is available through the MiraCosta employee help desk.
• MiraCosta technologies supporting online teaching and learning – please see the last section of this email for an overview, with links to learn more. It’s always worth exploring the tic.miracosta.edu site but if you find it hard to remember the URL, check out the new theme song I created for it (using Suno).

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 Student Success Workshops site and in Canvas announcements. These workshops engage students with resources MiraCosta provides to support them, as well as 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, STEM & MLC, online tutoring, writing center, counseling, career center, open computer lab staff, student help desk, health services, CARE team, and more! The Help Hut on the MiraCosta website is also a quick way for students to connect with all kinds of support services including A&R and Financial Aid.
• 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.
• 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
• Class Availability in Canvas – Faculty teaching distance education (online 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.

MiraCosta’s Online Education Tools

Select the link immediately after each bullet for a detailed MiraCosta-specific overview of the online teaching tools that MiraCosta supports. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have questions about these or other resources. All of these links take you to the tic.miracosta.edu website – and oh, have you checked out the new theme song I created for it? (Lyrics are at the bottom if you’re reluctant to click and listen.)

• Canvas – of course
• 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.
• 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 added to Canvas last summer via the Pope Tech Accessibility course menu item provides a course-level overview for addressing all accessibility issues in a course in one place, rather than having to go item-by-item through Canvas.
• SensusAccess is a tool added last summer to provide 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 question types to add to your videos, PlayPosit is a great option. 
• Turnitin – help students learn to properly cite sources and avoid plagiarism. Also provides grading and peer review tools for written work, and AI detection (use with caution).

A Theme Song for MiraCosta Online Education and the TIC Website

I have a goal to playfully (and seriously) explore AI more this summer. Using Suno, I created a theme song for the TIC. It’s fun and peppy and hopefully the chorus sticks in your head and reminds you to visit tic.miracosta.edu for support with your work in teaching with technologies at MiraCosta. What might a theme song for your class sound like?

Here are the lyrics:

[Verse] Faculty rock and roll tonight
Tech at Tic it’s outta sight
Learn to teach with all our might
Canvas Pronto Studio right!

[Verse 2] Courses stream through fiber lines
Online tools make magic times
Interactive grand designs
In this place where knowledge shines

[Chorus] Tic dot MiraCosta dot E D U
Teaching with tech and a future view
Canvas Pronto Studio
Faculty learn and grow

[Verse 3] Click and tap we set the pace
Digital classroom space
Interactive learning base
Join the ride embrace the race

[Bridge] Fast and loud we won’t retreat
At Tic we stand, we’re never beat
Innovation fuels our feat
Online classes feeling sweet

[Chorus] Tic dot MiraCosta dot E D U
Teaching with tech and a future view
Canvas Pronto Studio
Faculty learn and grow

Best wishes for summer success!

– Jim

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

Dear MiraCosta faculty colleagues,

Generative Artificial Intelligence is on just about everyone’s minds these days. As we head toward summer, I’m sharing some resources and thoughts that I hope you’ll.find helpful for AI-related planning, exploring, and – perhaps – play.

Crafting AI Class Policies

The Academic Senate’s AI Task Force this spring agreed that many students are uncertain about what AI use is acceptable, and that the answer is not a college-wide policy. Every discipline, every faculty member, every course section, every assignment may have different approaches in whether AI use is required, banned, or somewhere in between. It’s important that we as faculty are clear with our students on this matter. In fact, AAC just updated the MiraCosta Syllabus Checklist to add a recommendation about having a class AI policy.

In consultation with the AI Task Force and the MiraCosta Online Educators committee, I’ve created a one-page guide to creating an AI class policy. It offers a range of starting points and considerations for elements to include in your policy, as well as links to sites where you can find examples to draw upon. Please view your class policy as the beginning, not the end, of conversation with your students about AI.

Where to Start with AI Tools

The AI toolset is emergent: constantly evolving and updating. Some tools may be more important in your discipline than others. Having said that, I would urge everyone to spend time exploring. Be playful! Ask questions from serious to absurd. Explore the limits of AI’s capabilities. Try it for non-academic summer things: recipes, travel ideas, event planning, hobbies.

I’ll mention two specific tools that I think are worthwhile starting points in your AI exploration.

1. Microsoft Copilot (when used with a MiraCosta login)

Basic Pros (as of now)

• Provides free high quality generative AI (GPT 4) access to all MiraCosta faculty, staff, and students, including generation of code, text, and images. It will also analyze images.
• Provides security and privacy that is uncertain when using non-institutional AI tools.

Basic Cons (as of now)

• Copilot chats cannot be saved for later reference or shared for others to view, making it less valuable to process-based teaching and learning.
• Does not accept files as input. Does not run code it generates.

2. OpenAI ChatGPT

Basic Pros (as of now)

• GPT 4 is now available for free to all users via the new ChatGPT 4o (o = “omni”) release (see Con #1, though)
• ChatGPT 4o is multimodal, accepting input via voice, text, file, image, and even simply by interpreting what’s on your screen, and providing output via voice, file, image, and code.
• Chats are automatically saved for future reference and continued exploration, and may be shared with others.

Basic Cons (as of now)

• Free access to GPT 4 is limited, resulting in inequitable experiences for students who pay for a full account vs. those who cannot.
• OpenAI’s business practices are questionable.

AI “Detection” Cautions

We will likely revisit this institutionally over the next academic year, but many of you may be exploring how you can detect AI usage in student work over the summer. Short answer: when AI is used in not-very-sophisticated ways, it may be detectable by you or a technology. But relying on that detection will become ever more problematic as both AI and our students become more sophisticated. Some reading:

• AI Detection is a Business, but Should it be a Faculty Business? (Chronicle of Higher Ed)
• Do teachers spot AI? Evaluating the detectability of AI-generated texts among student essays (research study of instructor ability to detect AI-generated text)
• GENAI DETECTION TOOLS, ADVERSARIAL TECHNIQUES AND IMPLICATIONS FOR INCLUSIVITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION (research study of the efficacy of various AI detection tools, including Turnitin)

The Importance of Collegial Conversation

Talking with your colleagues, especially within your departments, about AI is so important. I’m happy to connect with you through the month of June, and our Joyful Teacher, Jim Sullivan (jimsullivan@miracosta.edu), will be available throughout the summer. We’re already planning on developing related faculty support resources to share with you this summer, and ongoing Flex conversations in the next academic year. We’re in this together!

– Jim

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