Category: Canvas

Fall 2026 MiraCosta online teaching resources & tips

Can’t believe it’s time, but it is! Welcome to fall, colleagues! Please see below for important reminders of key online education resources to help all faculty to enable student success!

Support for You

  • Our Canvas start-of-term checklist can help you prepare your classes. New to Canvas? We have lots of resources to help you get started.
  • The TIC website is a great starting point for all kinds of information and support for teaching with online technologies – see the last section of this email for specific TIC links to MiraCosta technologies supporting online teaching and learning. 
  • Ongoing faculty support – You can set a meeting with Instructional Designer Nadia Khan, for help with Canvas and teaching with tech. We have another instructional designer also available for 1-1 support, Stephanie Kelley, especially for faculty working with OER/ZTC course materials.
  • Tech Support – Canvas options include 24×7 phone and chat support. Just click the Tech Support button at lower left in Canvas! Zoom and other MiraCostatech support for faculty is available through the MiraCosta employee help desk.
  • Check out the Flex Week Calendar for lots of great workshops, including many relating to online education..

Expectations and Recommendations for Faculty Teaching Online

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 half of the fall term – see all dates and times on the MiraCosta Online site and in Canvas announcements. These workshops provide tech tips, engage students with resources MiraCosta provides to support them, as well as reviewing 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.
  • Technology Loans – Be sure to share the form for students to fill out if they need a laptop and/or wifi hotspot to succeed this semester.
  • 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, Learning Centers, counseling, career center, open computer lab staff, student help desk, health services, CARE team, and more! The Ask the Spartan chat integrated into MiraCosta’s website provides both automated responses and the opportunity to connect to Live Chat with staff from many student support areas. The Help Hut and Online Education webpages are also great starting points for students to connect with all kinds of support services when they’re not in Canvas.
  • Tech Support – Also at lower left in Canvas is a button for students to quickly access Tech Help options, including 24×7 phone and chat support from Canvas, and our local MiraCosta ITS help desk. 

MiraCosta’s Online Education Tools

It all starts with Canvas, of course. MiraCosta has a robust set of instructional technologies which can support teaching and learning within and beyond Canvas as well. Follow links for a detailed MiraCosta-specific overview (and often, recorded Flex workshops) for any tool below. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have questions about these or other resources.

Course Design Tools (Faculty only)

  • Adjust-All and TidyUP– make it easier to copy and reuse Canvas courses
  • DesignPLUS – a Canvas visual design tool
  • Pope Tech helps faculty detect and correct accessibility issues within Canvas. The PopeTech dashboard tool (via the Pope Tech Accessibility course menu item) provides a course-level guide for addressing all accessibility issues in a course in one place.

Communication Tools

  • Zoom – if you’re using Zoom, make sure you’re using a pro Zoom account through MiraCosta. 
  • Pronto is an incredible mobile-friendly and Canvas-integrated messaging platform that’s ready to use in every course.

Video Tools

  • Canvas Studio – enables faculty and students to create videos while inside Canvas. Faculty can create interactive discussion or quiz activities based on video. Auto-captioning and caption clean up tools are high-quality and easy to use, but not automatic!
  • WeVideo (formerly 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 types of interactivity to add to your videos, this is worth exploring. 
  • Camtasia and Snagit – Software to create and edit videos for those looking for more advanced creation options.

Assignment/Assessment Tools

  • 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.
  • Turnitin – help students learn to properly cite sources and avoid plagiarism. Also provides grading and peer review tools for written work. Turnitin has included an AI detection capability for instructors, but please beware of false positives should you use it. Most experts agree that AI detection tools are extremely unreliable.

Student Access Tool

  • SensusAccess provides 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. Faculty and staff have access to a SensusAccess tool on the portal that can help ensure PDFs and other files are compliant with accessibility standards.

Best wishes for an awesome autumn!

– Jim

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

DesignPLUS for Canvas

DesignPlus Flex Workshop Recordings

DesignPLUS is a user-friendly Canvas plug-in that helps you build polished, engaging, and accessible courses efficiently. DesignPLUS is licensed for all faculty at MiraCosta College using Canvas.

DesignPLUS includes four primary tools:

  • Sidebar – a suite of rich content editor tools that help you create organized, accessible, engaging, and visually polished content in Canvas with ease.
  • QuickStart Wizard – design tools available when you are editing new content in Canvas (a new page, assignment, discussion, etc) to quickly add visual design elements or adopt existing templates.
  • Cidi Labs Multi-Tool – a time-saving tool that lets you quickly set up an engaging home page and create accessible templates for reuse across Canvas. It also can help you quickly build repeatable, consistent module structures. You can also adjust due dates and delay announcements using this tool.
  • Upload/Embed Image Tool – a tool that enables you to discover, add, edit, and place course images in Canvas

DesignPLUS Sidebar

When you are editing Canvas content, select the sidebar icon at top right to launch the Sidebar tool, which will then appear on the right. The Sidebar tool includes many enhancements to the Rich Content Editor in Canvas, enabling you to easily add a variety of attractive and engaging content elements.

Getting Started with the Sidebar

Learn more about the DesignPLUS Sidebar (Tap to open a list of resources).

Sidebar Basics

Sidebar Resources and Guide

Sidebar Training Videos

How do I build a basic page?

How do I build a home page?

DesignPlus Accessibility Tools

DesignPlus Accessibility and Usability Tools Overview

DesignPlus User Guide Canvas Course

DesignPLUS QuickStart Wizard

The QuickStart Wizard button appears when you open a new page, assignment, or syllabus for editing. Activating the Wizard gives you access to templates for the entire page, or pre-defined content blocks of different types to help you customize the page.

Getting Started with the QuickStart Wizard

Cidi Labs Multi-Tool

The Cidi Labs Multi-Tool shows up in the left course navigation menu of your Canvas course. You will be asked to authorize Cidi Labs to access your Canvas account. Once the Multi-Tool is set up, you can select from a variety of tools to help rapidly develop and update your courses. Watch the Multi-Tool orientation video to learn more about what it can do for you.

Getting Started with the Multi-tool

To learn more, see Multi-Tool FAQs.

DesignPLUS Upload/Embed Image Tool

This tool enables you to manage course images directly in Canvas. Upload, crop, resize, and embed images anywhere in your course, or quickly add free, high-quality images from Pexels and Unsplash. To access the Upload/Embed Image (U/EI) tool, go to apps through the Rich Content Editor (RCE). The first time you access the tool, you will be asked to authorize Cidilabs to access Canvas so this tool is available for you. Watch the Upload/Embed Image orientation video to learn how this tool works.

Getting Started with the Upload/Embed Image Tool

To learn more, see Benefits of using the Upload/Embed Tool or Adding the Upload/Embed (U/EI) Tool to the Rich Content Editor (RCE)

Additional DesignPLUS Support

DesignPLUS Customer Support: [email protected]

DesignPLUS Knowledge Base and FAQs

DesignPLUS User Guide

DesignPLUS Library of Designs and Templates

For support or training, contact instructional designer, Nadia Khan: [email protected]

Turnitin’s LTI 1.1 integration was disabled at the end of the Fall 2025 semester

[The following message was sent to faculty 10/13/2025 who were identified as to have used Turnitin LTI 1.1 within Canvas]

You’re receiving this message as a MiraCosta instructor who has used the Turnitin 1.1 LTI in spring, summer, and or fall 2025. Turnitin 1.1 is an older version of the Turnitin tools and it appears that Turnitin is removing support for it. While it works at this time, Turnitin has removed the documentation for it. We hope it remains viable through the fall term, but we plan to disable it over winter break. We advise that you update your use of Turnitin going forward.

Your two options are:

·         Turnitin 1.3 LTI – if you wish to continue using Turnitin similarly to how you have been, for plagiarism detection and grading/feedback, this is recommended.

·         Turnitin Plagiarism Framework – this option enables you to use Turniitn for plagiarism detection but use the Canvas grading/feedback tools

The links above will provide more detail and links to Turnitin guides. If you have further questions about which Turnitin tools best fit your approach to assessment, and/or about how to make the switch, please reach out to instructional designer Nadia Khan for support.

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