Category: Online Education News You Can Use

Happy new year! I hope everyone had a good break, despite the weirdness of our world!

Flex workshops launch tomorrow: Friday, Jan. 15

Flex week starts tomorrow with lots of great online ed-related workshops, including some Canvas open lab hours for anyone seeking expert Canvas support. There’s also a workshop on an awesome new communication tool called Pronto, available college-wide this semester, and a workshop to make sure you’re ready for the new Zoom that arrived over winter break. Friday ends with a workshop featuring seven MiraCosta online faculty mentors sharing some of their top tips for online teaching. And there are many more super workshops coming next week!

Online Teaching Tool Updates

• Check out Pronto, an incredible mobile-friendly and Canvas-integrated messaging platform that’s ready to use in every course now.
• As you’re hopefully aware, Zoom was updated over break. Many of the changes are seamless but review our updated faculty Zoom support site for details. With the new Zoom comes a new Canvas integration that’s a huge improvement on what we had previously.
• Accessibility and Universal Design are important elements of equity and inclusion. We have a new, more powerful tool built into Canvas called Pope Tech that helps faculty detect and correct accessibility issues. (This replaces UDOIT, if you had used that.) Another tool, Ally, is here for spring. Ally automatically provides files you share through Canvas in multiple options for students. For instance, PDFs can be listened to (great for those who would prefer to listen). PPTs can be accessed as PDFs (great for those without PPT). Word documents can be viewed as HTML (great for mobile devices).
• The big change you’ll notice in Canvas is an update to the Rich Content Editor. If that makes you nervous, be sure to attend Karen Turpin’s 10 am Flex workshop tomorrow!
• Finally, Proctorio is no longer available at MiraCosta, as had been communicated in late fall.

Student Orientation to Online Learning Workshops

In collaboration with the library, I’ll be again offering over two dozen Student Orientation to Online Learning workshops this spring – see all dates and times on the TASC site and in Canvas announcements. These workshops help to familiarize students with the resources MiraCosta provides online to support them, as well as to adopt 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.

Student Support Resources to Share with your Students

Campus may be closed, but our amazing array of student support services and resources are just one or two clicks away. Point your students to the Student Support Hub in Canvas. Share the link and point them to the Student Support button on the left in Canvas for 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, and more! The new Help Hut on the MiraCosta website is also a quick way for students to connect with all kinds of support services, and the tutoring hub gives access from the website to all the academic support resources found in the Student Support Hub within Canvas.

Reminder: Merging Canvas Course Sections

This was once again available to faculty starting this fall. See our guide to learn more about merged course sections in Canvas, and if you’d like to request this, see the guide to the SURF dashboard for merging course sections – be sure to do so ASAP!

Don’t forget to refer to our useful Canvas start-of-term checklist to keep you on track as you finalize your spring classes!

See you online!

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

To: All Faculty, IS Deans

Some important updates and additions to the tools available for online instruction at MiraCosta are happening starting next week. Here’s a quick overview of what’s headed your way! Look for Flex workshops and follow-up emails early in the new year to learn more about all of these.

New Rich Content Editor in Canvas

The Rich Content Editor (RCE) in Canvas – the toolbar everyone uses when entering content, discussion replies, etc. in Canvas – is getting a major overhaul. The What is the New Rich Content Editor? Canvas guideis a great place to start learning about it. You may also be interested in a comparison of the old and new RCEs. This change happens next week on 12/23, but it’s possible for you to try out the new RCE now if you like. In a course where you want to try it, click Settings in the navigation menu, then click the Feature Optionstab, then toggle on the RCE Enhancementsoption. This will impact any students still active in your course, so it’s best to use a Sandbox course or one where students are done using Canvas for the term.

New Zoom, New Zoom Integration in Canvas

As you hopefully read in Anthony Ginger’s recent email, MiraCosta will soon start managing its own Zoom. If you haven’t read the email and you are a Zoom user, it’s essential that you do. Many aspects of this change will be seamless; however, a major one that faculty need to be aware of NOW is that access to current Zoom meeting reports will be lost following the change occurring Monday evening, Dec. 21. If you need to hold onto meeting reports for any reason, you’ll need to download them before the changeover. Going forward, another point is that all Zoom links for meetings and recordings will change. You MAY need to update links to meetings and recordings if you wish to use them in the future. Zoom is trying to implement a fix very soon that would seamlessly transition old Zoom links over to the new link– hopefully this will work and you will not need to do that manually. We’ll monitor how well that works and update you in the new year.

With the new implementation of Zoom will come a MUCH improved Canvas integration. For those of you that have preferred to use ConferZoom.org directly to manage your Zoom meetings, you’ll now be able to do basically everything using the new Zoom integration within Canvas. If you were using the existing Zoom-Canvas integration tool, it will be replaced next Tuesday following our Zoom account migration. If you’re interested, you may download an instructor guide for the new Zoom integration within Canvas.

Pronto: New Tool for Mobile-Friendly and Canvas-Integrated Communication

We will have an all-college pilot of Pronto this spring. Pronto is an app that integrates with Canvas and really enhances communication beyond what Canvas provides, enabling group messaging, file sharing, video chat, announcements, and more in a very mobile-friendly way. Pronto has already been adopted by dozens of CCCs, and we had a small group of faculty trying it out late this fall. More information will come when Pronto is ready for everyone to start using, but if you’d like a preview of what it looks like in Canvas, check out a 6 minute video.

New Accessibility Support Tools in Canvas: Ally and Pope Tech

Ensuring your Canvas courses are accessible and inclusive is getting easier. This spring, Ally will automatically make course files you’ve added to Canvas available to students in multiple alternative formats that are device- and user-friendly. Pope Tech is a tool available now in Canvas that will help you perform more complete accessibility checks and fixes than our current tool, UDOIT. UDOIT will be removed in the new year and we’ll encourage all faculty to make use of Pope Tech to ensure our courses are accessible to as many learners as possible.

Goodbye, Proctorio

Very few faculty were relying on Proctorio, and with the discontinuation of funding for this tool from the Chancellor’s Office, it will be removed from Canvas over winter break. If you hadn’t heard that this was a likely possibility previously and you are concerned about this tool going away, please reach out to me so we can discuss alternatives.

Now, don’t obsess about all this over break! Disconnect and enjoy some down time!

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