Category: Online Education News You Can Use

Online and OER/ZTC tips and opportunities – Oct 2026

Dear faculty colleagues,

I hope your October is more treat than trick so far! I have some timely online-related things to share with you, and below, see the latest from the ASCCC Open Educational Resources Initiative (OERI) – some good overview webinars this month on finding OER, using Creative Commons licensing, AI and OER, and UDL and OER. 

  • Any questions about MiraCosta’s new Distance Education Certification / Recertification? Don’t hesitate to contact me!
  • CCC Online Teaching Conference – this year will be in Anaheim June 28-30
  • Perusall just kicked off a “4-week virtual, author-facilitated reading experience with author Flower Darby” focused on her book, The Joyful Online Teacher. Learn more on the Perusall event site(there is a small cost to gain access to the eBook).
  • SDCCD invites area faculty to attend part of all of their free annual DE Summit – Amplifying Human Potential: Designing Learning Experiences That Reveal, Empower, and Challenge Students
    • Friday, November 13, 8 am – 2 pm at their North City Campus Rm #101 or Online via Zoom
    • The day features a keynote speaker (Jenae Cohn – she’s great), student panel on their experiences in Canvas, faculty showcases, and more. Breakfast and lunch are provided for in-person attendees. Register here.

 Please let me know if you have any questions about anything online or OER/ZTC related!

– Jim Julius
Faculty Coordinator, Online Education

• Back to Basics – Getting Started with Open Educational Resources (OER)•

Tuesday, October 13, 1:30 pm – 2:30 pm
Back to Basics: Finding Open Educational Resources (OER)
Curious about OER and you don’t know where to start? Join us to start your OER discovery journey. Where can you find existing OER for your discipline? Join us to learn how to find OER – and options to consider when you can’t find anything.
Register for Back to Basics: Finding OER

• Creative Commons (CC) Licensing •

What exactly is a Creative Commons license – and what does it do? Whether you are new to the OER space or struggling to select the right license, we have a webinar for you.

Wednesday, October 21, 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Introduction to Creative Commons Licensing
Understanding Creative Commons licensing is critical when working with open educational resources. In this interactive webinar, we’ll explore the nuances of the various Creative Commons licenses for when a resource is used, adapted, or created.
Register for Introduction to Creative Commons Licensing

Wednesday, October 21, 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Curation and Advanced Licensing
How do you remix and attribute content with different open licenses? How are collections and remixes different and why does it matter? This interactive session is intended for those who are familiar with the Creative Commons licenses and would like to expand their understanding. Bring your questions and licensing challenges.
Register for Curation and Advanced Licensing

• Interactive Office Hours: Artificial Intelligence (AI) •

Join the OERI’s AI Lead, Liz Encarnacion, for a series of interactive office hours centered around using AI to create and adapt OER.

Thursday, October 22, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm
Artificial Intelligence (AI) Office Hour: Accessibility for Open Educational Resources (OER)
Join this interactive office hour focused on accessibility questions and concerns when using generative AI to create, adapt, and share OER. Engage in discussion around reviewing AI-generated text, images, alt text, documents, and other course materials for accessibility prior to publishing or adopting. Bring your questions and draft materials as this office hour will provide practical guidance, peer support, and strategies for ways to use AI-enabled technology responsible to keep accessibility in the forefront of our OER work.
Register for AI Office Hour: Accessibility for OER

Thursday, November 5, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Artificial Intelligence (AI) Office Hour: AI Resilient Assessments for Courses Using Open Educational Resources (OER) 
Join this interactive office hour that will focus on designing AI-resilient assessments for OER and OER-based courses. Bring your assessments and OER material that need the most support to workshop practical solutions that emphasize authentic learning, student process, reflection, application, and meaningful demonstration of course outcomes. We will discuss how the flexibility of OER can be used to create accessible, equitable, and AI-aware assessments that support learning, rather than just simply detecting AI use.
Register for AI Office Hour: AI Resilient Assessments for OER Courses

• Universal Design for Learning and Open Educational Resources •

Thursday, October 29, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Beyond Compliance to Universal Design for Learning (UDL) for Open Educational Resources (OER)
How do we create OER that meet the needs of our diverse student body? UDL helps us build resources that maximize student access, engagement, and learning. Focusing on UDL also places accessibility guidelines in a context that aids us in achieving those goals.  From describing complex graphics to providing multiple modalities for content, UDL offers a framework that supports us in creating resources which best serve our students. Open Educational Pedagogy (OEP) can take us to the next level by empowering students to participate in content creation that solidifies their learning and critical thinking – and it also improves our OER for future students.
Register for Beyond Compliance to UDL of OER

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.

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.

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

Summer 2026 MiraCosta Online Teaching Resources & Tips

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.

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 three weeks of summer – 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 summer.
  • 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. Select the 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.

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 summer success!

– Jim

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

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