Category: Online Education News You Can Use

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.

Fall 2024

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

Adding Faculty Evaluators, TLC Staff, Community Ed Students, Substitute Instructors, and TAs to Canvas classes

Students and Instructors are automatically enrolled from SURF to your Canvas course several times a day.

For the roles called out below, follow the specified directions to have the user enrolled within your course with the appropriate role.

  • Faculty Evaluator: Contact Heidi Willis at (760) 795-6827 or hwillis@miracosta.edu in the Office of Instruction when you need to provide access to a peer, your chair, etc. to conduct an evaluation. On the People roster, within Canvas, the user will be assigned the ‘Evaluator ‘ Canvas role. The Evaluator Canvas role has the same permissions as the student role.
  • The Learning Centers (TLC) ASIC, STEMLC, & Writing Center: Contact Amy Paopao at (760) 757-2121 ext. 6389 or apaopao@miracosta.edu. On the People roster, within Canvas, the user will be assigned the ‘TLC Staff ‘ Canvas role.
  • Community Education Student: Contact Karen Turpin at kturpin@miracosta.edu. Include the confirmation of student enrollment through community education. On the People roster, within Canvas, the user will be assigned the ‘Student Other’ Canvas role.
  • Substitute Instructors & TAs: Work with your dean to provide access to Canvas for the substitute instructor or TA. Approved substitute instructors and TAs are handled by your dean through the Office of Instruction’s procedures. The substitute instructor or TA will be added on SURF and uploaded to Canvas for the allowable period of time. During that time, the substitute instructor will have the ‘Teacher’ Canvas role and the TA will have the ‘TA’ Canvas role.

Summer 2024 Teaching with Tech @ MiraCosta

For those teaching this summer, please see below for important reminders of key resources to help you help your students succeed! (And read thoroughly to find the new theme song for our TIC website!)

Support for You

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 during the first three weeks of summer – see all dates and times on the Student Success Workshops 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.
  • 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 Help Hut on the MiraCosta website is also a quick way for students to connect with all kinds of support services including A&R and Financial Aid.
  • Tech Support – Also 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 a laptop and/or wifi hotspot to succeed this summer
  • Class Availability in Canvas – 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. To learn more, please see MiraCosta Distance Education Class Authentication Compliance, Start-of-Term Availability Procedures, and Recommendations.

MiraCosta’s Online Education Tools

Select the link immediately after each bullet for a detailed MiraCosta-specific overview of the online teaching tools that MiraCosta supports. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have questions about these or other resources. All of these links take you to the tic.miracosta.edu website – and oh, have you checked out the new theme song I created for it? (Lyrics are at the bottom if you’re reluctant to click and listen.)

  • Canvas – of course
  • Zoom – if you’re using Zoom, make sure you’re using a pro Zoom account through MiraCosta.
  • 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.
  • Pope Tech helps faculty detect and correct accessibility issues within Canvas. 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 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.
  • 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.
  • 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 question types to add to your videos, PlayPosit is a great option. 
  • Turnitin – help students learn to properly cite sources and avoid plagiarism. Also provides grading and peer review tools for written work, and AI detection (use with caution).

A Theme Song for MiraCosta Online Education and the TIC Website

I have a goal to playfully (and seriously) explore AI more this summer. Using Suno, I created a theme song for the TIC. It’s fun and peppy and hopefully the chorus sticks in your head and reminds you to visit tic.miracosta.edu for support with your work in teaching with technologies at MiraCosta. What might a theme song for your class sound like?

Here are the lyrics:

[Verse] Faculty rock and roll tonight
Tech at Tic it’s outta sight
Learn to teach with all our might
Canvas Pronto Studio right!

[Verse 2] Courses stream through fiber lines
Online tools make magic times
Interactive grand designs
In this place where knowledge shines

[Chorus] Tic dot MiraCosta dot E D U
Teaching with tech and a future view
Canvas Pronto Studio
Faculty learn and grow

[Verse 3] Click and tap we set the pace
Digital classroom space
Interactive learning base
Join the ride embrace the race

[Bridge] Fast and loud we won’t retreat
At Tic we stand, we’re never beat
Innovation fuels our feat
Online classes feeling sweet

[Chorus] Tic dot MiraCosta dot E D U
Teaching with tech and a future view
Canvas Pronto Studio
Faculty learn and grow

Best wishes for summer success!

– Jim

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

Reset Your Canvas Course Content

Overview

From time to time, you may want to delete all of the content in a Canvas course site. This is most typically needed early in the course building process. For example, after importing content from another course, you may realize that you imported from the wrong course. The directions described below will delete all content from your course site, but leave the course roster intact.

Warning about Deleting All Course Content

WARNING: This step deletes all existing content from your course. Take steps to preserve any content you want to keep (for example, copy and paste to a Word doc, copy select course elements to a sandbox course, import the course into another empty shell, etc.) before proceeding. DO NOT complete these steps in a current term course that is currently in process!

Reset Course Content in a Canvas Course

Canvas Guide: How do I reset course content?

1. Navigate to the course with the content you wish to delete.

2. From the course navigation menu, click the Settings link.

Settings

3. In the sidebar, click the Reset Course Content link.

Reset Course Content

4. Click the Reset Course Content button.

A completely new course shell with a new ID (the number following “https://miracosta.instructure.com/courses/…”) will be generated. All users previously enrolled in the course will remain enrolled.

Made a Mistake?

If for some reason you reset your course and it was a mistake report it as soon as possible. We have Test and Beta instances of Canvas we may be able to refer to for the content and/or to restore the original course.

Contact Karen Turpin, Instructional Technology Specialist at kturpin@miracosta.edu or Canvas Faculty Support 24/7 at 1- 833-345-2890 for assistance.

AI Resources for Faculty – Summer 2024

Dear MiraCosta faculty colleagues,

Generative Artificial Intelligence is on just about everyone’s minds these days. As we head toward summer, I’m sharing some resources and thoughts that I hope you’ll.find helpful for AI-related planning, exploring, and – perhaps – play.

Crafting AI Class Policies

The Academic Senate’s AI Task Force this spring agreed that many students are uncertain about what AI use is acceptable, and that the answer is not a college-wide policy. Every discipline, every faculty member, every course section, every assignment may have different approaches in whether AI use is required, banned, or somewhere in between. It’s important that we as faculty are clear with our students on this matter. In fact, AAC just updated the MiraCosta Syllabus Checklist to add a recommendation about having a class AI policy.

In consultation with the AI Task Force and the MiraCosta Online Educators committee, I’ve created a one-page guide to creating an AI class policy. It offers a range of starting points and considerations for elements to include in your policy, as well as links to sites where you can find examples to draw upon. Please view your class policy as the beginning, not the end, of conversation with your students about AI.

Where to Start with AI Tools

The AI toolset is emergent: constantly evolving and updating. Some tools may be more important in your discipline than others. Having said that, I would urge everyone to spend time exploring. Be playful! Ask questions from serious to absurd. Explore the limits of AI’s capabilities. Try it for non-academic summer things: recipes, travel ideas, event planning, hobbies.

I’ll mention two specific tools that I think are worthwhile starting points in your AI exploration.

1. Microsoft Copilot (when used with a MiraCosta login)

Basic Pros (as of now)

  • Provides free high quality generative AI (GPT 4) access to all MiraCosta faculty, staff, and students, including generation of code, text, and images. It will also analyze images.
  • Provides security and privacy that is uncertain when using non-institutional AI tools.

Basic Cons (as of now)

  • Copilot chats cannot be saved for later reference or shared for others to view, making it less valuable to process-based teaching and learning.
  • Does not accept files as input. Does not run code it generates.

2. OpenAI ChatGPT

Basic Pros (as of now)

  • GPT 4 is now available for free to all users via the new ChatGPT 4o (o = “omni”) release (see Con #1, though)
  • ChatGPT 4o is multimodal, accepting input via voice, text, file, image, and even simply by interpreting what’s on your screen, and providing output via voice, file, image, and code.
  • Chats are automatically saved for future reference and continued exploration, and may be shared with others.

Basic Cons (as of now)

  • Free access to GPT 4 is limited, resulting in inequitable experiences for students who pay for a full account vs. those who cannot.
  • OpenAI’s business practices are questionable.

AI “Detection” Cautions

We will likely revisit this institutionally over the next academic year, but many of you may be exploring how you can detect AI usage in student work over the summer. Short answer: when AI is used in not-very-sophisticated ways, it may be detectable by you or a technology. But relying on that detection will become ever more problematic as both AI and our students become more sophisticated. Some reading:

The Importance of Collegial Conversation

Talking with your colleagues, especially within your departments, about AI is so important. I’m happy to connect with you through the month of June, and our Joyful Teacher, Jim Sullivan (jimsullivan@miracosta.edu), will be available throughout the summer. We’re already planning on developing related faculty support resources to share with you this summer, and ongoing Flex conversations in the next academic year. We’re in this together!

– Jim

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

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