Category: Online Education News You Can Use

End-of-2021 Online News You Can Use

Dear MiraCosta Faculty,

As we near the much-needed winter break, here are some reminders and resources to help you reach the finish line, and perhaps, to begin spring preparation.

Canvas End of Term

After Dec. 31, your fall Canvas classes go into read-only mode for you and your students. 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 then. 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.

Speaking of Canvas, if you like, you can read more from Instructure about the Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage that affected Canvas last week.

MiraCosta Online Mentors and Instructional Designer Support

If you’d like help with any semester wrap-up tasks, or as you begin working on spring classes, some of our MiraCosta peer support faculty are available over break (yes, they will continue to be available in spring, hooray), and our Instructional Designer, Nadia Khan, is available as well over the break and into the spring. Click either link to make a connection!

Please also check out the helpful “five-minute fixes” and “more than five-minute fixes” videos some of our amazing Online Mentor faculty have created to inspire and support your online teaching!

SOOL is Now SOAR

We’re changing the name of what used to be the Student Orientation to Online Learning to SOAR: Student Online Academic Readiness. In partnership with librarians, we’ve already lined up 20 workshop times for the spring semester – please feel free to recommend this to your students as you build syllabi and welcome pages for your classes! As always, we’ll have Canvas announcements reminding students of sessions each week. And as always, you can check to see if your students have attended one of these workshops in order to incentivize their participation.

Upcoming Professional Learning Opportunities

  • The Online Teaching Conference. Is scheduled to take place in person this summer, June 29-July 1, in Long Beach. More details will come in 2022, but the call for proposals is open now through January 31 if you’re interested in presenting.
  • @ONE has opened registration for free spring webinars on equity, with two focused on grading practices. You can also register for a number of @ONE online teaching courses starting in early spring, and they are offering 25% discount on courses starting before April with coupon code PD4U_2022. Let me know if you’d like financial support to register for one of these. 

Spring Online Ed Flex Planning – Got Something to Share?

I’m pulling together Flex week online ed workshops around topics including student-instructor interaction, student-student interaction, accessibility, and proactive support of students through monitoring engagement and progress. I’d love to include diverse faculty voices/examples in these sessions – please let me know if you’d be interested in sharing your practices in one of these workshops!

Wishing you peace, joy, and rest for your winter break!

– Jim

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

LabArchives Electronic Lab Notebook

LabArchives

LabArchives is an electronic lab notebook that can help instructors and learners better manage, share, and publish research notes, data, protocols, and related documents.

MiraCosta College’s  institutional license gives all  MiraCosta College students, staff, and faculty free access to LabArchives. Log on with your MCC login and password to access LabArchives. Faculty can also integrate Lab Archives with Canvas.

Getting Started

Launch MiraCosta LabArchives

Features of LabArchives

  • Share and collaborate on notebooks by multiple parties.
  • Store multiple file types, including images, GraphPad Prism, FlowJo, PDFs, and Office documents
  • Create templates, forms, and custom applications for routine laboratory tasks.
  • Instructors can provide feedback on students’ notebooks.
  • Storage of every version of every file, recording the date, time, and username.

Faculty LabArchives Help and FAQs

Need Help?

LabArchives Information for your Students

The MiraCosta College Student Helpdesk can assist your students with Canvas and LabArchives.

Unlearn Grading to Ungrade Learning: Part 1 – A SAFE Topics Podcast

Good afternoon campus community,

In our latest episode release, the SAFE Topics team had a conversation with faculty members on the topic of ungrading! We explore ideas like deconstructing traditional grading, assessment being a conversation, meeting resistance, and self-reflections. Join hosts Sean and curry alongside Joe Salamon (Physical Science), Chad Tsuyuki (English), Virginia “Gin” Schwarz (English & Literature), and James Garcia (Sociology) as we talk about the world of ungrading. This episode is one for the books! Keep an eye out for Part 2 coming in the Spring ‘22 semester!

Access the transcript for this episode.

And don’t forget to listen to the mini-series, “Hyflexing,” with hosts Sean and curry!

Ways to Listen!

  1. Podbean – S.A.F.E. Topics
  2. Google Podcasts
  3. Spotify
  4. Apple Podcasts
  5. Amazon Music
  6. Audible

What to Listen For

  • How are we all thinking about assessment in our classrooms?
  • Is ungrading a privilege reserved for full time faculty?
  • Points, points, points!
  • Deconstructing the years of high school grade trauma.
  • The myths of the transactional relationship vs an authentic relationship.
  • Ungrading isn’t a radical idea – it’s being used in other places too.
  • “If you don’t do this, you won’t get that.”
  • The self-worth tied to the grades.
  • How the grade becomes the message.
  • Having both flexibility and rigidity.
  • Have you been met with resistance to ungrading?
  • The importance of feedback.
  • Grades still matter → We’re still working within a paradox.
  • Thoughts on the affective, formative, and summative.
  • Being way less stressed when you don’t have to be a policing person.
  • Making sure we have these conversations and self-reflecting.

The S.A.F.E. Topics Team

curry mitchell – Faculty, Letters (Co-host)
Sean Davis – Faculty, Sociology (Co-host)
Mana Tadayon – Student (Co-host)
Kelly Barnett – Intern and Music Technology Student (Audio Editor)
James Garcia – Associate Faculty, Sociology (Show Notes, Online)

Connect with Us

PodBean
Safe Topics

How to Copy Individual Items to another Canvas Course or Share them with another Instructor

Canvas’s Direct Share feature allows instructors to share individual course items to their other Canvas courses, and easily share individual course items with other instructors in Canvas. To use this tool you will need to have a course role of Teacher, TA, or Designer in your Canvas course.

Please keep in mind that Direct Share is only for sharing individual items. If you wish to copy an entire course’s content over to a new Canvas course site, it is best to use Canvas’s course import tool to complete the course copy process.

Copying items to other Canvas courses

Follow these step-by-step directions:

Sending items to other Canvas instructors

Follow these step-by-step directions:

You can manage items that have been shared with you from within your Canvas account.

Down with Spring Break – A SAFE Topics Podcast

Hello campus community and happy Tuesday!!

The SAFE Topics team just released the latest episode, “Down with Spring Break!” In this episode, the team host a debate among with MiraCosta students and faculty over spring break. We ask why about the value of breaks and the costs of interruptions. We share the realities of workloads carried into breaks. And question what exactly it is we need a break from in the first place. Join hosts Sean, curry, and Mana along with Daniel Ante-Contreras (English), Carson Arias (mechanical engineering major), and Kayla Kamani (psychology & film major) in an argument over keeping or abandoning spring break!

Ways to Listen!

  1. Podbean – S.A.F.E. Topics
  2. Google Podcasts
  3. Spotify
  4. Apple Podcasts
  5. Amazon Music
  6. Audible

What to Listen For

  • Is spring break necessary?
  • The importance of a mental break where you can breathe.
  • Eliminating spring break altogether and extending our summer instead.
  • Catching up on work, working on mental health.
  • An institutional lens around spring break.
  • The lack of student input in talks around spring break.
  • “Doing the good for the most amount of people.”
  • The concept of spring break as a guilty pleasure.
  • Do we need a break from classroom culture?
  • Learning vs. time demand.
  • Admin and faculty should be more mindful of time especially during distant learning.
  • Working smarter and not harder.
  • Were any minds changed about their views on spring break?

The S.A.F.E. Topics Team

curry mitchell – Faculty, Letters (Co-host)
Sean Davis – Faculty, Sociology (Co-host)
Mana Tadayon – Student, ASG President (Co-host)
Kelly Barnett – Intern and Music Technology Student (Audio Editor)
James Garcia – Associate Faculty, Sociology (Show Notes, Online)

Connect with Us

PodBean
Safe Topics
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