Instructional Continuity Update – Tuesday, March 17, 2020

Dear Faculty,

In light of President Cooke’s most recent message to the campus, we now shift our plans to work completely remotely for the remainder of the semester. All of the scheduled training sessions for next week’s transition to remote instruction will be conducted via Zoom. We are developing the slate of workshops and one-on-one support sessions – look for details on these and instructions on how to access them coming later this week. If you’d be willing to provide support through a workshop or by staffing an online consultation session and haven’t let us know yet, please send us an email about what you are interested in offering.

ConferZoom – URGENT

If you are interested in connecting with your students live online for instruction, office hours, group meetings, etc., the tool we recommend is Zoom, available in a pro version to all CCC faculty and staff through ConferZoom. If you do not have a ConferZoom account, we urge you to register for an account as soon as possible. If you currently have a free Zoom account using your MiraCosta email address, you’ll need to request support from ConferZoom to convert it to take advantage of the full range of pro features. The high demand for accounts is resulting in a wait of several days – we urge you to register for an account NOW. Please see our MiraCosta support article about ConferZoom to learn more, including how to integrate ConferZoom within Canvas.

Faculty Supporting Faculty

We are grateful for the overwhelming number of you that have reached out to us and are willing to assist in the instructional continuity effort in a variety of ways – from facilitating workshops to offering office hours next week to support our fellow faculty members. We are really blown away by the work that has already been done and the willingness to pitch in on the work ahead. We have compiled a list of the folks who have let us know they are providing support by academic departments. Please review the MiraCosta Faculty Support for Instructional Continuity spreadsheet if you’re looking to connect with a colleague for support. If you’re willing to provide such support but don’t appear on the sheet, please let us know so we can add you! 

Canvas Site with Guidance and Resources

Please remember to review the Canvas site on Instructional Continuity and Taking Classroom Activities Online (be sure to click the “Next” button at the bottom of the page for more information and resources – including the Primary Online Support Resources). 

Still Have Questions? 

We know many questions remain unanswered at this point and we are doing our best to field your inquiries to the best of our knowledge and in concert with the Office of Instruction. To this end, we ask you to submit questions via our Question Form. This will inform the continued development of an FAQ Page which will serve as a hub for all faculty issues and will soon be linked to MiraCosta’s centralized COVID-19 page. If you have more than one question, please submit multiple forms – one per question – this will help us best organize the inquiries by frequency. 

Student Orientation to Online Learning Sessions

We know that we are not the only ones making the adjustment to remote instruction. We will be providing many Student Orientation to Online Learning sessions starting the week of March 30th and continuing in the following weeks. These sessions will be approximately one hour and will be conducted via Zoom. A recorded version of the session will be available to students. Once we have a schedule in place, we will send it out. Please encourage your students to attend one of these sessions. 

Thank You! 

We appreciate the hard work and commitment you all have demonstrated in making this a collaborative effort to support each other while we do our best to provide quality education to our students for the remainder of the Spring semester. We will continue to be here for you via email, Zoom, and phone through the transition period and beyond. 

We hope that you can enjoy a safe and healthy Spring Break before we move into our week of preparation for the rest of the term. 

With appreciation,

Jim and Sean