MiraCosta Online Support for Students

Did you know? It’s now a requirement for MiraCosta faculty to “Help students in a DE course section to be aware of MiraCosta College support services and resources, especially those available online.”(MiraCosta Online Class Quality Guidelines)

While there are lots of ways you may do this, here are some important ones to consider adding to your syllabus, your Canvas home page, and/or your introductory week discussions with students:

Student Support Hub

Point your students to the Student Support Hub in Canvas. Share the link and direct them to the Student Support button on the left in Canvas for quick access to online support, including live help, online appointments, and access to key resources from:

  • Library
  • STEM & Math Learning Center
  • Tutoring & Academic Support Center
  • Writing Center
  • Academic Counseling
  • Career Center
  • CARE (including technology device requests)
  • Health Services (including virtual physical and mental health appointments)
  • Open computer lab staff
  • Student Help Desk

Online Help Hut

The Help Hut on the MiraCosta website is a quick way for current and prospective students to connect online with student support areas including Financial Aid, Admissions & Records, Academic Counseling, and the Student Help Desk.

Tech Help in Canvas

The Tech Help button at bottom left in Canvas provides students (and faculty) with quick access to 24s7 phone and chat support from Canvas, as well as local technology support from the Student Help Desk.

Student Orientation to Online Learning Workshops

In collaboration with the library, I’ll be again offering about two dozen Student Orientation to Online Learning workshops this fall – see all dates and times on the TASC site and in Canvas announcements. These workshops help to familiarize students with these great online resources, to become more comfortable with Zoom, and Canvas, and to consider time management strategies. Encourage your students to attend and, if you like, find out which of your students participated in order to incentivize their attendance.

Please let me know if you have questions about any of these great resources!

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

MiraCosta’s C3 Teaching and Learning Center’s Joyful Teacher Introduction and Website Reveal!

Hello, Faculty Community! 

And away we go…

It is the first day of our Flex Week for Fall 2021, and the schedule is packed! 

I want to start by introducing myself. My name is Sean Davis, and I am your Joyful Teacher in Residence (the faculty coordinator of the C3 Teaching and Learning Center) and faculty member in the sociology department. You will be hearing from me a lot this semester, and I hope the information and offerings from the C3 will be useful to you. 

My first major announcement – The C3 Teaching and Learning website is active and ready for you! James Garcia (Associate Faculty, Sociology) and I worked over the Spring to develop this site with an emphasis on minimalism, ease of use/navigation, and providing essential information and resources for all things teaching and learning.

Please pass this along to new and seasoned instructors alike. Hopefully, we have achieved our goal of simplicity, and no further explanation is needed. 🙂 

I hope you have a great Flex Week and start to Fall 2021.

Stay joyful,
Sean

Sean Davis

Joyful Teacher in Residence 🙂
Coordinator, C3 Teaching and Learning Center
Sociology Department Chair

Oceanside Campus
1 Barnard Drive
Oceanside, CA 92056
P 760.757.2121 x7713C
760.521.1387
sdavis@miracosta.edu

MiraCosta Online Ed Flex Workshops & Faculty Support

Welcome back to fall semester! I’m excited to share Flex workshops and other resources for your professional learning as you prepare for another semester of mostly or entirely online teaching!

Flex Week starts tomorrow with a Friday the 13th full of online ed workshops!

But this is a day of good luck! You can see all of these workshops listed on a handy 1-page schedule; they are also included with full descriptions on the complete Flex workshop schedule. Please note that there are a number of other superb-sounding online ed-related offerings later in Flex week, too.

Online Ed Workshop Recordings

We’ve been offering online workshops and recording them for years! Explore what’s available in the Online Education workshop archives page, including the fantastic sessions from our Equity Online day last April. If you’re looking for inspiration with a tool or online teaching topic that’s not on this fall’s Flex schedule, you can probably find a recording that’s just what you need. And viewing those recordings is, of course, Flex-eligible.

Return of the MiraCosta Online Mentors!

Many of you met with a MiraCosta peer faculty helper last year for support with your online course preparation and teaching. Happily, this program will continue this fall! More information on this will be coming soon, but if you can’t wait to get connected with a peer, feel free to reply to me.

Completely Updated: MiraCosta Online Class Quality Guidelines

Last year, the MiraCosta Online Educators committee undertook a major revision of the MiraCosta Online Class Quality Guidelines to place a greater emphasis on equity and to reflect updated regulations. Check out the document, which is intended “to help faculty develop and redesign online classes and foster conversation in departments about effective and equity-minded teaching practices in online education.”

Professional Learning Opportunities through @ONE

Many MiraCosta faculty looking for deeper professional learning about online education have let me know how important the @ONE program has been to them. Some events and classes are free while extended, facilitated classes typically have a fee. If you’re interested in having my office cover a fee for an @ONE class just reach out to me!

Save the Date: InstructureCon (the Canvas annual conference) is online and free – October 7  

You can learn more and register now!

Happy online teaching!

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

Canvas Student Annotation Submission Assignment

The student annotation assignment allows the teacher to upload a file to Canvas that the student can then, without leaving Canvas, mark up using the built-in annotation tools (highlight, make comments, draw marks, etc.) as their submission.

See the end of this page for some ideas for how you might use this feature.

Screencast Video

Canvas has published a one minute overview video of the new feature.

https://player.vimeo.com/video/541889461

Overview/How to Use

  1. Create an assignment as normal.
  2. For the assignment type, choose Online.
  3. Under online entry options, check student annotation.
  4. Choose an existing file (such as a PDF, Word document, or JPG), or upload a new one, that will be the template for the annotation assignment.
  5. Finish completing your assignment with the normal process.

Limitations

  • Annotation assignments use the same annotation tools available to teachers with SpeedGrader. While a variety of file types are supported, PDF or Word files will have the best compatibility. Here is a list of file types the DocViewer can preview.
  • These assignments are not currently available for use with with peer assessment, but this is planned for the future.
  • This type of assignment cannot be made a group assignment. (For these, consider using a full collaboration tool, like Office 365.)
  • This is not a multi-user live collaborative document (like Office 365, Google Documents, etc.).
  • Keep in mind that most students do not have a stylus for detail drawing, and drawing with a mouse is imprecise at best.
  • All annotations exist as a layer in Canvas displayed over top the original; it is not actually editing the original document. You can export the annotations to a PDF file, where the annotations will exist on the PDF comment layer.

Student Directions

Student Guide: How do I annotate a file as an assignment submission in Canvas?

Assignment Ideas

Here are some ideas to get you thinking about how you might use this new tool in your course. Do note that many of these are possible to do in other ways (like using Office 365 documents). The tool in Canvas can make some of these quicker or easier, but, in some cases, it may be appropriate to continue to use the other tools.

  • Have students analyze, critique, or respond to prompts (texts, images, or both).
  • Train academic paper reading skills. Reading academic papers can be challenging to read and learn from without training. Upload a paper (either relevant to this course, or perhaps in a similar field, but not exactly related to this course) and ask the students to read it. Have them use the annotation tools to highlight passages they consider important, make margin notes for questions that remain or their thoughts at that moment of reading, or to make commentary about the structure, flow, and formatting of the paper.
  • You can provide feedback on important information the student did not take notes on, extraneous highlighting, and other details.
  • Ask for self-reflection and/or start a class discussion of errors in papers. Use a sample assignment submission like students might hand in and ask them to mark it up. Optionally, you can include a rubric in the template document for the students to fill in. This will allow you to have a discussion with them about the feedback that they find most important. This can also help them to review their own submissions before submitting.
  • Post a “find errors and correct them” assignment. Especially useful for a language or coding course (but also can apply to others, like math or logic), create an assignment of statements or solutions that have errors in them, and ask students to mark up what the error is, and suggest corrections. Do keep in mind the limitations of annotations as small corrections; do not have problems that require a significant rework. “True or False, but, if false, make it true” assignments are a narrower sub-type of this activity.
  • Ask students to label a diagram or image as their submission. The student can use point comment tools to label individual parts, or box comments for larger structures that cover an area. This is comparable to a “hot spot” question in some ways. This is only recommended for identifying parts of a diagram, image or document; other assignment types are better for whole image identification. This can be used not only for low-level identification (“label the parts of this building’s façade and attribute it to a period”), but also higher-level analysis (“discuss your interpretation of this x-ray”).
  • Collect student feedback in a specific format, such as providing a form or template that you would like students to fill in for a “360 degree” peer evaluation after a group assignment, but you do not want students to need to download or upload files (and a survey is too much for what is needed).
  • Fill out “lab notebook” or “observation notebook” documents in a course that does not make heavy use of them to utilize another tool specialized to that purpose.

6 Tips for Creating Accessible Course Content

These seven tips are a starting point for creating accessible course content; for additional information or if questions arise, please contact Aaron Holmes, Access Specialist at aholmes@miracosta.edu

  1. Add a Disability Accommodations statement:

    Please review Page 3 of MiraCosta’s syllabus checklist for examples of recommended language:

    Disability Accommodations
    If you have a disability or medical condition impacting learning and have not yet been authorized to receive academic accommodations, you are encouraged to contact the Student Accessibility Services (SAS) office (formerly known as Disabled Students Programs and Services or DSPS). The SAS office can be reached at (760) 795-6658, or by email at sas@miracosta.edu. The SAS office will help you determine what accommodations are available for you. If you’re requesting my assistance utilizing any authorized accommodations, please contact me as soon as possible.

    OR

    If you have a disability, you are encouraged to contact Student Accessibility Services (SAS) (formerly known as Disabled Students Programs and Services or DSPS) at 760.795.6658. Their Oceanside campus office is located in Building 3000, adjacent to Parking lot 3C. They will help you determine what assistance is available for you.

    OR

    If you have a hidden or visible disability, which may require classroom or test accommodations, please contact me as soon as possible. If you have not already done so, please register with Student Accessibility Services (SAS) (formerly known as Disabled Students Programs and Services or DSPS) at 760.795.6658. Their Oceanside campus office is located in Building 3000, adjacent to parking lot 3C.

  2. Add links to Vendor Accessibility information for specialty products used in your course.

  3. Create instructional content with accessibility in mind. Review and apply the following accessibility principles:
  4. Create accessible instructional content based on application.
  5. Accessibility Checkers: always use the software’s built-in Accessibility Checker (Pope Tech Instructor Accessibility Guide in Canvas, Word, Adobe Acrobat, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.). Follow the Repair recommendations provided by the Accessibility Checker to fix errors.

    Resources: 
  6. Ensure Readability Divide large blocks of text into smaller more manageable sections; avoid complex sentences; use sans-serif font at approximately 12 points. Ensure reading order is correct when screen readers are used (beware text boxes and other non-sequential methods for adding text).

    Resources: Website Readability assessment tool
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