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class and prefer to “reveal” the class to students during that first meeting, you may keep most components of the class unpublished until then, but the class itself should be published along with basic information such as a syllabus and/or class home page.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