Summer 2025 MiraCosta Teaching Resources & Reminders

For those teaching this summer, please see below for important reminders of key resources to help you help your students succeed!

And don’t forget that this spring we added a new tool to Canvas called Adjust-All which makes copying previous Canvas courses for reuse a lot easier. It enables you to change all course item due dates and announcement publication dates in one place, rather than having to access each item individually.

Expectations and Recommendations for Faculty Teaching Online

  • The MiraCosta Online Class Quality Guidelines document – updated this spring -provides MiraCosta requirements and recommended practices for online instructors. Join our accompanying Canvas course to be inspired by (or even copy from) real Canvas examples shared by colleagues.
  • Class Availability in Canvas – Faculty teaching distance education (online, HyFlex, 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.
  • Accessibility – Please be sure to use the PopeTech accessibility checker on your Canvas classes, and use the auto-captioning and caption cleanup tools for videos created via Canvas Studio, Zoom, or YouTube. 
  • Zero- and Low-Textbook Cost Course Sections – If you are teaching one of these, please be sure to mark your class in SURF as LTC or ZTC if you haven’t already, so students know that your class has lowered that access barrier!
  • Artificial Intelligence class policy – Students want to know the “rules” around using AI in your class. There is not a blanket college policy but please review the attached resolution on Artificial Intelligence in Teaching and Learning just passed by our Academic Senate. Please check out a 1-page guide to help you craft language to share with your students if you’re still working on that.

Support for You

  • OurCanvas 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 a new instructional designer also available for 1-1 support, Stephanie Kelley, especially for faculty working on use of 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.

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 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.
  • 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. Our ITS team is also offering in-person workshops for students about Zoom this summer – 6/10, 10 – 11 am OC 12136; and 6/12, 11 am – 12 pm SAN 101.
  • 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

MiraCosta’s Online Education Tools

Select the links for a detailed MiraCosta-specific overview (and often, recorded Flex workshops) for each tool below. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have questions about these or other resources.

  • Canvas – goes without saying (well, I said it)
  • Adjust-All – as noted above, a new tool to make it easier to update course dates when copying/reusing Canvas courses
  • 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. Auto-captioning and caption clean up tools are high-quality and easy to use, but not automatic!
  • 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 (via the Pope Tech Accessibility course menu item) provides a course-level guide for addressing all accessibility issues in a course in one place.
  • 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.
  • 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 types of interactivity to add to your videos, PlayPosit is great. 
  • 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.

Best wishes for summer success!

– Jim

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

Online Ed Tips: End of Spring 2025

Dear MiraCosta Colleagues, 

Some Online Ed reminders and opportunities as you wrap up spring and start thinking about what’s next.

Canvas End of Term

After June 6, your spring Canvas classes go into read-only mode for you and your students. If you wish to remove access to any of your course materials for your current students beyond this semester, you need to do so by then. Review our Canvas end-of-term guide for details. It also discusses what you need to do if you have any students who will receive Incomplete grades.

Support for Summer/Fall Class Prep 

Summer Professional Learning Opportunities

May your summer recharge you!

– Jim

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

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.

Spring 2025

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

Online Ed News You Can Use – April 2025

I hope you have a chance to enjoy spring 🦋🌼🐝 in the beautiful world around us! In the online world, some important news, reminders, and upcoming opportunities …

Summer and Fall Classes are in SURF and Canvas

  • Course sections assigned to you in SURF for summer and fall now have shells available for you to work with in Canvas (select Courses on the left, then All Courses to see upcoming classes that aren’t yet on your dashboard).
  • If any of your fall (or summer) course sections are Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) or Low Textbook Cost (<=$40), you should designate them as such in SURF using these directions, so that the classes will have the appropriate logo in SURF. And don’t forget to inform the bookstore of your course material details, even if you are using zero-cost resources.

Professional Learning Opportunities related to teaching online

  • Tomorrow and continuing through spring: CVC webinars on Generative AI (also provides access to recordings of previous ones)
  • April 14-16: the free online Peralta Online Equity Conference – register to receive email updates and access to recorded sessions!
  • April 24, 1-2:30 pm: The CCC Accessibility Center is hosting an online workshop, “How to Create Accessible Canvas Courses with PopeTech”. Registration is NOT required – simply use the Zoom link to access. PopeTech is available in our Canvas.
  • April 25, 10 am – 3 pm: Alex Rockey of Bakersfield College is facilitating a free online Mobile Design Unconference. Register to learn more.
  • May 12 – June 8: Perusall will host an online, author-facilitated, communal reading experience (“asynchronous book club”) on John Warner’s book, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI. It has a small cost to cover access to the book. And, you’ll get to experience the social annotation tool, Perusall.
  • May 15: The CCC Accessibility Center has a free Annual Workshop with sessions throughout the day. One registration allows you to attend any sessions.
  • May 19–23: The free online Perusall Exchange conference, “Why Reading Matters to the Future of Learning,” includes some compelling speakers and also an opportunity to learn more about the Perusall social annotation tool, which we have available to use in Canvas.
  • Summer:
    • The CCC Online Teaching Conference is in Long Beach, June 16-18. If you would like support to attend, let me know! Early bird registration ends April 15. Online Ed can cover conference registration but likely not hotel or other travel expenses.
    • All facilitated and self-paced @ONE online teaching courses are free! (Be sure to click through the additional pages to see all your options.) Enroll now in a facilitated class before they fill up!
    • The online Cal OER conference is August 6-8. The call for proposals is open now through June 2.
  • Anytime: Schedule an appointment with either of our wonderful Instructional Designers, Nadia Khan or Stephanie Kelley (who specializes in support for faculty working on classes that use OER or other zero cost materials).

– Jim

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

Canvas End of Semester / Term

The following will help instructors understand how the end of semester is handled in Canvas, and how to update related Canvas course settings if necessary. By default, students who complete a class continue to have read-only access to the concluded class’s course materials, discussions, and grades. If you wish to restrict concluded class access, you must change the class settings before the end of the term, or get a Canvas administrator to help you after the end of the term.

Everything below applies to typical term-based Canvas classes. Canvas sandbox classes and Canvas shells used for organizations, departments, groups, etc. are not tied to any particular terms and thus remain available indefinitely.

Closing your Course

There is nothing you have to do to close your Canvas course; at the term end date (see below), your course will be set to Concluded status and moved onto the Past Enrollments course list for you and your students. By default you and your students will continue to have read-only access to the course.

Canvas Term End Dates

SemesterDateTime
Spring 2025June 612 am
Summer 2025August 1212 am
Fall 2025Dec 3112 am

Concluded Course Access

For both instructors and students, concluded courses can be found by clicking Courses in the main Canvas menu, then the All Courses link. Concluded courses are listed there under Past Enrollments. Concluded courses may not be moved back onto the Dashboard – they must be accessed in this way.

Instructors can perform the following actions with a concluded course

Instructors cannot perform the following actions within a concluded course (do these before the end of the term!)

  • Edit course content
  • Edit Grades
  • View/download Analytics
  • View/download Item Analysis within Quizzes
  • Send a message to the class within Canvas
  • Change class access settings
  • Change class navigation

Students can perform the following actions by default within a concluded course

  • View Grades
  • View course content
  • View Discussions and Assignments
  • Send a message to the instructor

Students cannot perform the following actions within a concluded course

  • View Quiz questions and answers
  • Submit discussions, assignments, quizzes, and other course activities

Restricting Students from Viewing Some or All of a Completed Course

As described above, by default in Canvas, students have ongoing read-only access to course content in Canvas after the term ends. This can be a great feature, allowing students to review key learning resources from previous semesters. If, however, you wish to limit this access, follow one of the methods below before the end of the term. (If you need to make these changes to a course that is already concluded, contact Karen Turpin for assistance at kturpin@miracosta.edu)

Method 1: Hide Course Navigation menu links

If an instructor would like to limit access to major areas of course content, one method is to hide Navigation menu links. Note that if Navigation menu links are hidden, the instructor will also be unable to access them after the course concludes. This may be appropriate if you would like to leave Grades available to students, yet close off certain course content. The instructor may copy the course into another course to regain access to hidden menu items.

How to hide Course Navigation menu links

  1. Click Settings in the Canvas course menu
  2. Click Navigation in the tabs at the top.
  3. Drag and drop the menu items from the top (viewable) area to the bottom (hidden) area or click the gear icon to the right of the menu item and select disable.
  4. Click the Save button.

Method 2: Hide select course content

For more fine-grained control, certain course content such as files, pages, modules, or module items (but not assignments or discussions where students have participated) may be unpublished. As with hidden Navigation menu links, unpublished items are also inaccessible to the instructor after the course concludes.

If you wish to hide course items where students have participated, such as discussions or assignments, you cannot unpublish those. But there is a trick: simply set the availability date to sometime far in the future.

These options may be useful if you want students to be able to access most course content, but have select content that you prefer not to be accessed/shared in the future. The instructor may copy the course into a current course to be able to revisit/reuse hidden content.

Method 3: Restrict students from accessing entire course after term end date

The term end date is the final date in the current semester as listed in the table above. If an instructor would prefer the entire course and its course materials not be visible to students after the term end date:

  1. Click Settings in the Canvas course menu.
  2. For Participation: Select Term (this should be selected by default)

3. Select the checkbox for ‘Restrict students from viewing course after term end date‘.

5. Click the Update Course Details button at the bottom of the settings page.

This option will completely remove the course from the student’s view in Past Enrollments after the end term date passes. Students will not see the course and will have no access to course materials or grades. Instructors will continue to be able to access the course in Past Enrollments.

Resolving Incompletes

If you have assigned a student an incomplete ‘I‘ grade for the semester, contact Karen Turpin at kturpin@miracosta.edu or as soon as the paperwork is complete with Admissions and Records. Karen will create a new Canvas course section based on the original course.  This new section will allow the student access to the course with the ability to submit work, and will give you access to grade the student’s work, for the time allowable by the Office of Admissions and Records.

Working with Concluded Courses to Build New Courses

As noted above, you may always export a concluded course for import back into Canvas (Text instructions), or use a concluded course as the source for copying into a new course (Text instructions | Video tutorial). If you wish to update the content of a concluded course for use in the future, but you do not have a current term course in which to do that, you may wish to request a Sandbox course to copy into and work with, since you cannot edit a concluded course directly.

Teaching a short course and/or need to close your course prior to the official term end date?

You can manually end your course by updating the course end date. This will disable the ability for students to submit any more work, and, if you select the setting enabling students to view the course after the end date, will move the course off of the students’ Canvas dashboard and into the Past Enrollments area. If you do not enable that access for students, the course will disappear from their Canvas altogether.

To change the Course Start and/or End Date

  1. Click Settings in the Canvas course menu.

2. For Participation: Select Course

3. Change the Course Start and End Dates to reflect when you want students to have full access to the course.

4. If desired, select the checkboxes for ‘Restrict students from viewing course before course start date’ and/or ‘Restrict students from viewing course after the course end date’.

In the example below, students will not be able to participate in the course, even if it is published, until Jan 16 at 12 pm. The students will no longer be able to participate in the course after May 30 at 12 pm and the course will not be available to students for viewing.

5. Click the Update Course Details button.

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