Category: Online Education News You Can Use

C3-2-1 Newsletter – Fall 2021 Week Four!

Hello, Faculty Community! 

Celebrating being an HSI (Hispanic Serving Institution) does not start and end with this week.

These weekly newsletters feature 3 resources related to teaching and learning, 2 online tips and tricks, and 1 question for reflection.

Looking for archived resources, tips/tricks, and questions?

Revisit the past editions of the C3-2-1 Newsletter here. 

Want to share? 

If you have some resources, tips/tricks, and questions to share, please contribute to the newsletter using this C3-2-1 Form.

C321 Newsletter

(3) Resources

1. National Hispanic Heritage Month Resources for Teachers

National Hispanic Heritage Month is celebrated from September 15 to October 15. The mid-month start date marks the independence anniversary of five countries: Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. It is followed by Mexico’s Independence Day on Sept. 16 and Chile’s on Sept. 18.

There is much more to learn here and plenty of ways to include timely material and activities in your classes. 

2. Five Minute Fixes to Simplify Online Teaching

Tuesday, October 5 at 8 pm in Zoom

Want to make a quick fix that makes a difference? See how you can simplify your online teaching. We’ll share ideas for how to prevent students from getting lost, liven up discussion, stop spending so much time grading, and answer fewer student questions—presented by Laura Paciorek and Lisa M. Lane, sponsored by MiraCosta Online Mentors.

3. Faculty Show & Tell – How Do You Build Community?

We had our first faculty Show & Tell session this week, and the participants shared some great icebreakers and community-building exercises. The title link includes some rough notes on the activities faculty walked us through. 

We would love to hear what you want our future sessions to focus on – Faculty Show & Tell Topics Form.

We hope you will join us for future sessions!

When: Tuesdays at 2 pm
Dates: Sep 14, Sep 28, Oct 12, Oct 26, Nov 9, Nov 30
Zoom Room: Faculty Show & Tell

(2) Online Tips and Tricks

1. Comment Library in SpeedGrader

The Comment Library allows instructors to save and reuse commonly used text feedback in SpeedGrader. As an instructor, you can add new comments and delete existing comments in the Comment Library. This tool can serve as an excellent time-saver when grading! The feedback you add to the Comment Library is accessible from each course you are enrolled in as an instructor in Canvas.

2. Enabling live real-time captioning in Zoom

When hosting a meeting in Zoom, you can enable an automated live transcript. The quality of these automatic captions is remarkable and can greatly benefit participants by making your meetings more accessible.

(1) Question

What do you need? What do you have to offer and share? 

Stay joyful,

Sean Davis
Joyful Teacher in Residence 🙂

Ensuring Online Class Availability to Students by Monday 8/23/2021

Dear Faculty,

I wanted to give a quick reminder/heads-up that faculty teaching distance education (online and hybrid) classes are expected to make their classes available by mid-day on the Monday of the week in which they begin. This ensures a minimum of confusion for students, and compliance with student authentication requirements for distance education classes.

This has long been an expectation in practice, and the MiraCosta Online Educators subcommittee of the Academic Senate further clarified and strengthened this expectation last spring. To be clear, this is true for hybrid and scheduled online classes as well. If you have a scheduled meeting with your distance ed class and prefer to “reveal” the class to students during that first meeting, you may keep most components of the class unpublished until then, but the class itself should be published along with basic information such as a syllabus and/or class home page.

If you would like to learn more about the rationale behind this practice, and/or to view some recommendations for good practice in helping your students learn how to get started with your class, please see MiraCosta Distance Education Class Authentication Compliance, Start-of-Term Availability Procedures, and Recommendations.

If you’re looking for last minute help this weekend, remember that we have 24×7 phone and chat support from Canvas (click Tech Help at the bottom left of Canvas). And if you’d like more than just Canvas support, our MiraCosta peer faculty helpers are ready for you to contact them – see their details here!

Best wishes for a great start to the semester!

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

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

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