Category: Online Education News You Can Use

SensusAccess – Alternative Media Made Easy

Sensus Access Notices & Flex Workshops Recordings

Sensus Acess Logo

SensusAccess offers two ways for MiraCosta faculty, classified professionals, and students to convert all kinds of documents and files into alternative and more accessible formats:

SensusAccess is available now.

  • A website that allows anyone to upload files including Word or PPT documents, scanned images, PDFs, or web pages and generate accessible alternative types of files and media, including audio, e-books, Braille, and large print. This helps meet accessibility standards and enhance inclusion by supporting diverse preferences and needs of users.
  • A Canvas integration that automatically enables conversion of files uploaded into Canvas into alternate file and media types and languages. (This replaces functionality that was previously provided in Canvas through Ally.)

Key Features

  • Automated conversion of files into a range of alternative media and file formats
  • Remediation of inaccessible documents such as image only PDFs into accessible formats
  • Language to language translation with a high degree of accuracy

For more information on SensusAccess and its use check out the SensusAccess website and one-page Canvas LTI description.

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.

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

Spring 2024 support for online equity and success

I hope you had a great break! Please see below for quick reminders of great MiraCosta resources to help you enable your students to succeed in online environments this spring! Note the highlights of NEW items and upcoming workshops!

Expectations and Recommendations for Faculty Teaching Online

Support for You

  • Our Canvas start-of-term checklist can help you prepare your classes.
  • 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 our Instructional Designer, Nadia Khan, any time. Also, look for Jim Sullivan’s announcements about the 2x/monthly Teaching With Tech sessions that he, Nadia, and I do on Zoom, Wednesdays at 1 pm.
  • 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.
  • Panda Pros are Canvas experts who provide free 45 minute 1-1 consultations.
  • Online Ed Workshops – The Flex week schedule includes many great online-related workshops, starting this morning (Friday 1/12). And you can always view recordings of online education Flex workshops (Flex-eligible, of course).

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 across the first nine weeks of the term – see all dates and times on the TASC 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. I welcome faculty to attend as well!
  • 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 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 – 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 to borrow a laptop and/or internet hotspot. 

MiraCosta’s Online Education Tools

Click 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 – we all use Canvas, right?
  • Zoom – if you’re using Zoom, make sure you’re using a pro Zoom account through MiraCosta. NEW: Zoom’s integration with Canvas has been updated. Faculty who use this integration must re-enable the Zoom LTI.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Pope Tech helps faculty detect and correct accessibility issues within Canvas. NEW: 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 NEW 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.
  • 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 super spring!

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

Zoom LTI 1.3 upgrade for Spring 2024

The way that Zoom is integrated with Canvas was updated over the 2023-24 winter break to Zoom LTI 1.3. For all who share Zoom meetings and recordings within Canvas using the Zoom integration, you will need to re-enable the Zoom LTI menu option within your spring 2024 Canvas courses. If you have Zoom recordings, those are safely within your Zoom account and can be accessed once you re-enable the Zoom menu option within each Canvas course.

NOTE: Faculty have the option to share Zoom links to meetings and recordings directly in Canvas courses rather than using the Zoom LTI integration described below.

Enable the Canvas Zoom LTI 1.3 Integration & View Past Meetings/Recordings

  1. Enter your Canvas course
  2. Click Settings on the course menu
  3. Click the Navigation tab
  1. Click the 3 dots to the right of Zoom and select Enable.
  2. Click the Save button
Step 4 and 5

6. Click the Zoom course menu item which will appear in your course menu.

7. Click All My Zoom Meetings / Recordings to view all past course zoom meetings and recordings.

Step 6 and 7

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.
1 2 3 … 38