Category: Online Education News You Can Use

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

• The MiraCosta Online Class Quality Guidelines document provides requirements and recommended practices for our online instructors. Join our accompanying Canvas course to be inspired by (or even copy from) real Canvas examples shared by colleagues.
• Class Availability in Canvas – Faculty teaching distance education (online, HyFlex, 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.
• Accessibility – Please be sure to use the PopeTech accessibility checker on your Canvas classes, and use the auto-captioning and caption cleanup tools for videos created via Canvas Studio, Zoom, or YouTube. Check out our 2025-26 accessibility workshop recordings!
• Zero- and Low-Textbook Cost Course Sections – If you are teaching one of these, please be sure to mark your class in SURF as LTC or ZTC if you haven’t already, so students know that your class has lowered that access barrier!
• Artificial Intelligence – Students want to know the “rules” around using AI in your class. There is not a blanket college policy but please review the attached resolution on Artificial Intelligence in Teaching and Learning just passed by our Academic Senate. Please check out a 1-page guide to help you craft language to share with your students if you’re still working on that. Learn more about AI tools and guidance for MiraCosta faculty and students.

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

Dear MiraCosta Colleagues, 

Some Online Ed reminders and opportunities as you wrap up spring and (perhaps) start thinking about what’s next. Hope to see you at commencement!

Canvas End of Term

After June 6, your spring Canvas classes go into read-only mode for you and your students, and move from the Canvas Dashboard to the Past Enrollments area of Canvas (select Courses at left in Canvas, then All Courses to see Past Enrollment courses). If you wish to remove access to any of your course materials for your current students beyond this semester, you need to do so by June 6. Review our Canvas end-of-term guide for details. It also discusses what you need to do if you have any students who will receive Incomplete grades, as well as what to do if you wish to close course access sooner than June 6. If you’d like help with any semester wrap-up tasks, you can consult with our Instructional Designer, Nadia Khan (click the link to schedule a time). 

Support for Summer/Fall Class Prep 

• Our tic.miracosta.edu has many great resources including workshop recordings, tutorials, examples, and guidelines for online teaching.
• For one-to-one support in your course design and teaching connect with Instructional Designer Nadia Khan – she’s around all summer. Or, if you’re working on classes that are ZTC (Zero Textbook Cost), connect with Instructional Designer Stephanie Kelley.
• For those teaching summer or fall classes that are Zero- or Low-Textbook Cost, please update your course section ZTC/LTC designations in SURF if you haven’t done so yet.

Summer Professional Learning Opportunities

• The Online Teaching Conference is in Anaheim, June 23-25. Contact me if you’re interested in support for your registration.  
• There are some great @ONE online teaching courses – all free, many independent self-paced options and some facilitated.

Happy final finals week!

– Jim

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

Hello, MiraCosta colleagues!

As we near the spring finish line, a couple quick reminders/opportunities. And, further below, some May ASCCC OERI events to consider.

Summer and Fall Classes are in SURF and Canvas

• Course sections assigned to you in SURF for summer and fall now have shells available for you to work with in Canvas (select Courses on the left, then All Courses to see upcoming classes that aren’t yet on your dashboard).
• If any of your fall (or summer) course sections are Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) or Low Textbook Cost (<=$40), you should designate them as such in SURF following directions here, so that the classes will have the appropriate logo in SURF. And don’t forget to inform the bookstore of your course material details, even if you are using zero-cost resources.

Professional Learning Opportunities related to teaching online 

• May 4-6: the free online Peralta Online Equity Conference – register to receive email updates and access to recorded sessions! 
• May 5–14: The free online Perusall Exchange conference, “How to Assess Student Learning in the Age of AI,” includes some great speakers and an opportunity to learn more about the Perusall social annotation tool, which we have available to use in Canvas.
• May 21: The CCC Accessibility Center has a free Annual Workshop with sessions throughout the day. One registration allows you to attend any sessions.
• June 23-25: The CCC Online Teaching Conference is in Anaheim. If you would like support to attend, let me know! Early bird registration ends tomorrow, April 28. Online Ed can cover conference registration but likely not hotel or other travel expenses.
• Summer facilitated and self-paced @ONE online teaching courses are free! (Be sure to click through the catalog to see all your options.) Enroll now in a facilitated class before they fill up!
• July 29-31 The Cal OER conference is online. The call for proposals is open through May 18.

Please let me know how I can help with your online, ZTC, and OER work! 

– Jim Julius
Faculty Coordinator, Online Education