Category: Online Education News You Can Use

Hello, faculty –

This is a quick recap with links to critical emails sent last week, for those who may have been immersed in summer until the last minute (good for you!). Please review any and all that may be of interest!

Email #1 – includes info on the new ability to merge Canvas course sections

Email #2 – includes a quick overview of MiraCosta’s primary online teaching tools, a heads-up about potential broken links in your courses, and a note about special support for CE faculty

Email #3 – includes info about online ed Flex workshops (now you can view archives of those), new Canvas-based faculty support resources, info on how to access past workshop archives, a note about updates to AP 4105, and info about Canvas support now available via chat

Email #4 – Includes key online student support resources to share with your students: the Canvas Student Support Hub, Student Orientation to Online Learning workshops, CARE resources for students in need, and support for student identity online (pronouns and preferred name)

PROJECT Trainers & Mentors Wanted – was sent by Sean Davis with a call for faculty interested in serving as compensated trainers and/or mentors for other faculty this fall to enhance our equity-minded online teaching practices. Remember to fill out the form by Friday, Aug. 21!

Best wishes for a great start to fall!

– Jim

Jim Julius, Ed.D.

Faculty Director, Online Education

Enjoying your last hours of summer freedom? Haha! This is the fourth in a series of emails about all things online leading up to MiraCosta’s fall 2020 semester. If you missed email #1, email #2, or email #3 (which, yes, was inadvertently labeled as a second #2 – oops) please check those out!

Thursday updates: all about connecting your students with support for online learning –

• Student Support Services & Resources, Online
• Student Orientation to Online Learning
• Resources to Include in Your Classes
• Pronouns and Preferred Name in Canvas – an important change

Campus Closed. Student Support Open.

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 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.

Student Orientation to Online Learning Workshops

I’ll be offering over 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 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.

Two Highly Recommended MiraCosta CARE Resources

The Reshaping Your School Schedule During Remote Instruction document has great info for students on good habits for online student success, self-care and mental health tips, online learning netiquette, Zoom tech tips, and more. Linking to it from your syllabus and course home page could easily provide students with a wealth of great tips tailored for this unique time. You may also wish to share the CARE form – students who are need of technology resources or have other major life concerns making it difficult to maintain their studies can seek help via this form. You also can fill out the form on behalf of students experiencing hardships.

Ensuring Student Identities are Equitably Presented in Canvas

• Canvas itself now supports pronouns and all Canvas users are able to select their pronouns in their Settings. An announcement in Canvas reminds all users about this. If you previously used NameCoach to support pronouns, note that it is no longer available at MiraCosta.
• Please make sure that students know that if they prefer to be known by a different name from their legal/formal name, they may indicate their preferred name via SURF – instructions are here. Preferred name is used in Canvas, on class rosters, and elsewhere around MiraCosta.

Got your Flex schedule all planned out? See you online!

– Jim

Jim Julius, Ed.D.

Faculty Director, Online Education

Hello Hello! This is the third in a series of emails about all things online leading up to MiraCosta’s fall 2020 semester. If you missed email #1 or email #2 please check those out!

Wednesday updates: all about faculty support and professional learning resources for online teaching –

• Online Ed flex workshop schedule
• Canvas-based online teaching resources for MiraCosta faculty
• Additional workshop archives of interest
• Updates to AP 4105
• Canvas support now available via Chat!

Online Education Fall Flex Workshops

Online Ed and C3TLC have coordinated a number of workshops being offered this Friday and Monday. You can see all of these workshops listed in one place; they are also included on the complete Flex workshop schedule. Please note that there are a number of other superb-sounding online ed-related offerings that are also being offered during Flex week. Of special note this Friday is that in addition to the workshops, there will be four hours of open Canvas support time offered by Karen Turpin and several faculty Canvas power users. Drop into that open support lab anytime to get your pressing Canvas questions answered!

Online Education Canvas-based Resources for MiraCosta Faculty

The MiraCosta Distance Education Handbook and the PROJECT Online Teaching Foundations course are two resources you may not be aware of. The DE Handbook covers all kinds of details about policies, procedures, guidelines, and recommendations for online teaching at MiraCosta. The PROJECT Online Teaching Foundations course was put together this summer and includes many recordings of Zoom presentations made by MirCosta faculty and other online teaching experts this summer, as well as a lot of great activities and resources. While there is still a bit of finishing touch being applied to both of these resources, they are ready for you to begin exploring and using.

More Online Ed Workshop Archives

We’ve been offering online workshops and recording them for years! Explore what’s available in our workshop archives page. We also have a separate page with all the great workshops conducted during our instructional continuity transition week in March. If you’re looking for help with a tool or online teaching topic that’s not on this fall’s Flex schedule, you can probably find a recording on one of these pages to help you out. And viewing those recordings is, of course, Flex-eligible.

Updates to AP 4105

AP 4105 – MiraCosta’s administrative procedure on distance education – was updated in the spring to ensure MiraCosta is aligned with California Title 5 regulations on distance education. Most notably, student-to-student interaction is required for all distance education classes as an expansion of the definition of regular effective contact. You’re encouraged to review this AP and make sure you’re on the right track as you set up your classes.

A New Canvas Support Option: Live Chat

You may be one of the many faculty who loves the Canvas 24×7 phone support. Or, you may be one who (like me) would prefer a chat. If you haven’t clicked that Tech Help button at the bottom left corner of Canvas recently, you may not have noticed that Live Chat with Canvas Support is now an option, for both faculty and students. Just be aware, these days they are BUSY! You may need to be a little patient to get through to a rep, but it’s still a great way to get unstuck on Canvas issues as quickly as possible.

Tomorrow: Student support resources!

– Jim

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

Hi! This is the second in a series of emails about all things online leading up to MiraCosta’s fall 2020 semester. Check out email #1 if you missed it.

Tuesday news: 

• Quick reminders about online teaching tools available at MiraCosta
• Broken Links: Now, more than ever
• CE Faculty can call on a superhero for support

MiraCosta’s Online Teaching Tools

Click the link immediately after each bullet for a detailed MiraCosta-specific overview of each item below. This is not intended as a comprehensive review of all technologies for online teaching supported by the college, but rather a quick look at the essentials. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have questions about these or other resources.

• Canvas – of course is the #1 tool for most faculty. We’ll have a Canvas Basics workshop this Friday as well as four hours of open online Canvas support by expert staff and faculty (details coming tomorrow). Even for experienced Canvas users, our Canvas Start of the Semester Instructor Checklist is a super useful set of reminders as you set up your fall classes. (Unfortunately, as detailed below, some of the links on our Canvas support pages to Canvas guides may be broken. Check out the new home of Canvas’s official Instructor Guides – also an enormously helpful resource.)
• Zoom (specifically, ConferZoom) – Suddenly, we’re all Zoom users, and many of our classes are now incorporating Zoom. Make sure you are using the professional-level Zoom account available through CCC’s ConferZoom! We’ll have a Zoom Basics flex workshop on Monday (details coming tomorrow).
• Canvas Studio – This great tool enables faculty and students to create videos while inside Canvas. Faculty can create interactive discussion or quiz activities based on video.
• PlayPosit – MiraCosta has been piloting this video interaction tool for several years; it’s now available to all faculty. Studio is a great place to start, but if you’re looking for more question types to add to your videos than Studio offers, PlayPosit is a good option. We’ll have a PlayPosit flex workshop this Friday (details coming tomorrow).
• Turnitin – Many faculty use Turnitin to help students learn to properly cite sources and avoid plagiarism, as well as to assist with grading and peer review processes for written work.
• Academic Integrity and Canvas Exams and Proctorio – Proctorio remains available at MiraCosta through December 2020, funded by the CCC system. If you are conducting high-stakes objective assessment online, check out these resource articles.
• Creating Accessible Course Content – by regulation (and in terms of good practice) all online course materials should be compliant with accessibility laws. Our guide has tips for how to do this!
• Productivity Software, Hardware, and other resources for working from home – this AIS website includes a number of links to helpful resources for being fully equipped when teaching from your home.

I Don’t Like That You’re Broken …

Broken links are a fact of life on the web, and developers of online courses need to be vigilant. Canvas has a helpful tool for checking all links in your course at one fell swoop … the Canvas Link Validator. This may be especially important for you to consider due to two recent developments:

1. In case you hadn’t noticed, MiraCosta’s shiny new website debuted this summer. Links to MiraCosta website resources you may have included in a Canvas course likely aren’t working now! The A-Z index on the new site may be a helpful way of re-finding the correct links. There will be a Search function on the new site, but it depends on giving Google the time it needs to index the full site. If you get frustrated trying to find the right links, Kristen Huyck, MiraCosta’s stellar public information officer, has told me she would be happy to help any faculty members – please reach out to her: khuyck@miracosta.edu .
2. Canvas last week updated the websites where their awesome instructor and student guides live. They’ve promised that links to the old guides will redirect to the new guides, but so far it doesn’t seem to be happening consistently. You might give this a few more days, but if you embed student Canvas guides in your courses to help students out (a great practice!) you’ll want to double-check this at some point before the semester starts.

Instructional Design Support for CE Faculty
If you teach a Career Education class, we have a grant-funded Instructional Design expert available to support you in your course design efforts. Her name is Liesl Madrona and the faculty that worked with her last year found her extremely helpful. If you’d like to hear more about this opportunity, please reply to me.

Until tomorrow …

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

As our first-ever mostly-online fall semester approaches, I hope everyone is doing well! I have a lot of info and resources to share, and will be sending an email each day this week with a few updates.

Monday news:

• Combining Canvas courses for those teaching multiple sections of a course
• Professional Learning opportunity: @ONE’s Humanizing Challenge is Aug 11-13
• Summer term classes in Canvas become read-only on Aug. 14

It’s Back! Merging Canvas Course Sections!

If you teach multiple sections of the same course, you may know that MiraCosta has not been allowing combination of multiple course sections into one Canvas shell due to FERPA concerns. Faculty, admin, and staff met several times over the last year to not only figure out how to address the FERPA issues, but also to put into place a new SURF dashboard that enables faculty to make this occur without any additional gatekeeping or case-by-case handling of this technically.

Given our mostly-online nature at present, this should enable faculty who are teaching multiple sections of one course to (if they desire) not have to put as much time into managing class content and activities (duplicating/updating the same things across multiple Canvas courses) and rather to focus more time on supporting individual students and enhancing the quality of their course. For faculty who do request a merged course in Canvas, there are some important guidelines you will need to follow to ensure that FERPA compliance is maintained. 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.

Looking for Online Teaching Inspiration? @ONE’s Humanizing Challenge is Aug. 11-13

@ONE’s Humanizing Challenge “is designed to equip faculty with knowledge of culturally responsive pedagogy and a toolkit of online teaching practices that will support students who are experiencing trauma as a result of racial injustice, stereotyping, and other forms of marginalization.” If you’re looking for fresh ideas on truly connecting with your students online this fall, I encourage you to check out the Humanizing Challenge home page, and decide which sessions will be most useful to you. Sessions start tomorrow (Aug 11) and continue through Aug. 13.

We will be announcing local online teaching workshops for Flex week in the next couple days, but if you’re looking for something ASAP, please take advantage of this CCC professional learning opportunity.

Summer Canvas Classes Become Read-Only After Aug. 14

After Aug. 14, summer Canvas classes go into read-only mode for faculty and students. If you taught this summer and wish to restrict access to any of your course materials for your current students after that date, please review our Canvas end-of-term guide and take action prior to the 14th.

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