Canvas Faculty Updates
This page details the new and updated features in Canvas for Instructors by release date.
Summer 2023 Online Teaching @ MiraCosta
For those teaching this summer, please see below for quick reminders of key resources to help you help your students succeed! If you use Pearson tools in Canvas, please be sure to see the final bullet in the first section for recent critical updates.
Support for You
- OurCanvas start-of-term checklist can help you prepare your classes.
- TheMiraCosta Online Class Quality Guidelines provides MiraCosta requirements and recommended practices for online instructors.
- Ongoing faculty support – You can request an appointment with our Instructional Designer anytime.
- 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 MiraCosta tech support for faculty is available through the MiraCosta employee help desk.
- MiraCosta technologies supporting online teaching and learning – please see the last section of this email for an overview, with links to learn more.
- Pearson users! The integration between Pearson and Canvas had a major update following the spring term. MyLab is now called PearsonAccess. Links to Pearson MyLab tools from copied courses will no longer work and must be updated. Please see the Pearson Canvas integration guide for instructors and Pearson Transition guide to learn more, and reach out to your Pearson rep if you need assistance.
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 two weeks of summer – see all dates and times on the TASC site and in Canvas announcements. These workshops engage students with resources MiraCosta provides to support them, as well as 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, STEM & MLC, online tutoring, writing center, counseling, career center, open computer lab staff, student help desk, health services, CARE team, and more! The Help Hut on the MiraCosta website is also a quick way for students to connect with all kinds of support services including A&R and Financial Aid.
- Tech Support – Also at lower left in Canvas is a button for students to quickly access Tech Support options, including 24×7 phone and chat support from Canvas, and our local MiraCosta student help desk.
- Technology Needs? – Be sure to share the form for students to fill out if they need a laptop to succeed this summer
- Class Availability in Canvas – 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. To learn more, please see MiraCosta Distance Education Class Authentication Compliance, Start-of-Term Availability Procedures, and Recommendations.
MiraCosta’s Online Education Tools
Click the link immediately after each bullet for a detailed MiraCosta-specific overview of each tool below. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have questions about these or other resources.
- Canvas – of course
- 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.
- Pronto is an incredible mobile-friendly and Canvas-integrated messaging platform that’s ready to use in every course.
- 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.
- Pope Tech helps faculty detect and correct accessibility issues within Canvas. See also Tips for Creating Accessible Course Content. Note – a new PopeTech tool will be added later this summer providing a course overview dashboard for addressing all accessibility issues in a course in one place, rather than having to go item-by-item through Canvas.
- Ally automatically converts content you share through Canvas into multiple formats for students, allowing for listening rather than reading and better access to content on mobile devices. IMPORTANT: MiraCosta will discontinue use of Ally later this summer, and begin using a different tool called SensusAccess to provide similar multi-format course material conversion options for students.
- 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 question types to add to your videos, PlayPosit is a great option.
- Turnitin – help students learn to properly cite sources and avoid plagiarism. Also provides grading and peer review tools for written work.
- Productivity Software and other resources for online teaching – this ITS website includes a number of links to helpful resources for being fully equipped when teaching from your home.
Best wishes for summer success!
– Jim
Jim Julius, Ed.D.
Faculty Director, Online Education
Connecting your Canvas Course to Various Publisher Tools
If you are using a publisher website for materials and assessments in your course, you may be able to connect your Canvas course to the publisher course site and/or integrate publisher-provided tools so that students can connect to the publisher resources from Canvas without a separate login. Some publishers also allow for ‘deep integration’ (or ‘deep linking’) between your Canvas course and the publisher site, so that assignments and quizzes are individually accessible in your Canvas course and also integrated with your Canvas grade book.
NOTE: When you adopt a third party tool for use in your class, it is your responsibility to ensure it is compliant with state and federal regulations and MiraCosta policies. Please carefully evaluate the tool for issues such as accessibility and student privacy. Contact Jim Julius, faculty director of online education, if you have any questions about this.
Enabling a Pre-Installed Global Publisher LTI in Canvas at MiraCosta College
The following publisher tools (aka “LTIs”) are currently pre-installed globally in MiraCosta’s Canvas environment.
| Access Pearson |
| Cengage Learning MindLinks/MindTap |
| McGraw-Hill Connect & Campus |
| McGraw-Hll SIMnet |
| W.W.Norton |
To connect a Canvas course to any of these, go to your Canvas course, click Settings in the course menu and the Navigation tab at the top. This enables you to alter your course menu:
Scroll down, and you will find hidden items that can be added to your course, including the publishers listed above. If your publisher is listed, drag it up to your course menu, or click the button at the right and then the +Enable option to add it to your course. Then be sure you click the Save button at the bottom of the page.
Cengage Learning MindLinks/MindTap
Cengage has numerous products that integrate with Canvas, such as MindTap, CourseMate, Aplia, and CengageNOW.
- Link to Your Cengage Textbook from Canvas – documentation on using these and other Cengage tools with Canvas.
McGraw-Hill Connect & Campus
McGraw-Hill Connect is another popular publisher being used by many instructors.
Here are some resources on using McGraw-Hill Connect with Canvas:
- Connect – Canvas Resources (for instructors)
- Pairing your Canvas course with a new Connect account or an existing Connect account
- Deploying Connect assignments to Canvas
McGraw-Hll SIMnet
SIMnet works similarly to Connect.
Access Pearson (MyLab & Mastering)
Pearson users! The integration between Pearson and Canvas had a major update following the spring 2023 term. MyLab is now called PearsonAccess. Links to Pearson MyLab tools from copied courses will no longer work and must be updated. Please see the Pearson Canvas integration guide for instructors and Pearson Transition guide to learn more, and reach out to your Pearson rep if you need assistance.
- Pearson MyLab & Mastering has tools and resources for a number of different disciplines, and luckily they all use the same interface for deep integration with Canvas.
- Pearson Canvas Integration Guide for Instructors – MiraCosta College Canvas has the Pearson LTI 1.3 integration Pearson Access.
- Pearson Transision Guide – for migrating a copy of a previous LMS course paired with LTI 1.1 to 1.3
- Pearson Higher Education Support/ Customer Service & Technical Support Website
- Pearson Higher Education Help & Support Website – help articles for faculty and students
- CustomerSuccess@Pearson.com – Email questions to Pearson Customer Success.
W.W.Norton
W.W. Norton primarily does books, but they also have tools like InQuizitive. See:
- How to Add a Norton Digital Learning Tool to a Canvas Course
- Canvas – How to add an InQuizitive link with LMS Integration
Is your publisher not on this list?
Many LTIs can be installed at the course level by a faculty member. Contact your publisher for more information and directions on how you can install their tool at the course level. And please keep in mind the note at the top of this page about faculty responsibility for compliance of third-party tools with state and federal regulations and MiraCosta policy.
Requests for the installation of Global LTIs must be made to the Online Education department through your department, and will only be done when multiple faculty are using the tool. We are not able to add global LTI’s on demand. Adequate evaluation and testing is required prior to installation of Global LTIs. As mentioned above, individual faculty may independently install publisher LTI tools in their Canvas courses.
Some individual publishers can be found in the Canvas App Center, which is the mechanism for individual Canvas users to add LTI tools into their courses. Here are a few guides to the Canvas App Center.
End of Spring 2023 Online Ed Tips
Dear MiraCosta Faculty,
Hooray, summer is almost here! But first, some reminders and opportunities as you wrap up spring classes and begin 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 Wrapping Up Classes and Summer/Fall Class Prep
- Connect with our Instructional Designer, Nadia Khan – she’s around all summer
- Connect with a peer Online Mentor – available until June 6
- For those teaching summer or fall classes that are Zero- or Low-Textbook Cost, don’t forget to update your course section ZTC/LTC designations in SURF
Please Clean Up Zoom Recordings
- The cloud storage for our Zoom recordings is well beyond contracted capacity. If you can take some time to delete unneeded Zoom recordings, it will help us all out. Log into your Zoom account and click Recordings on the left-hand menu. Select all recordings that you do not need and delete them.
- If you have any meetings set up for automatic cloud recording but you rarely use the recordings, consider changing that setting so that you only record what you need.
Summer Professional Learning Opportunities
- The Online Teaching Conference is in Long Beach, June 21-23. Early bird registration has been extended through May 24. Contact me if you’re interested in funding to support your registration.
- There are some great @ONE online teaching self-paced courses. (Unfortunately, the facilitated summer courses seem to be full.)
- A free online conference called Cal OER returns for its second year, Aug. 2-4. The call for proposals closes June 12. Conference registration ($25) is open now.
- When’s the last time you explored the TIC website? Start on the tic.miracosta.edu home page and see where it leads you – there are many great resources including workshop recordings, tutorials, examples, and guidelines for online teaching.
Have a super summer!
– Jim
Jim Julius, Ed.D.
Faculty Director, Online Education
Turnitin now tries to detect AI-generated text – Spring 23
Hello, MiraCosta faculty –
Turnitin, which is integrated into Canvas and available to all MiraCosta faculty, has just begun providing an additional evaluation of the likelihood of submitted text having been generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI). You can learn more about Turnitin through MiraCosta’s guide for faculty, and you can read more about this new AI detection capability, from Turnitin. At this time, Turnitin has automatically made this function available at no additional cost, although they have said that institutions will need to pay for this capability starting in 2024.
This release has been somewhat controversial; you may wish to read an article summarizing concerns with false positives that this technology may generate. In fact, Turnitin themselves provides guides for both faculty and students for dealing with false positives. It’s important to note that the AI detection results are available ONLY to instructors, not to students, if you enable students to do a Turnitin self-check on an assignment. As ever, we recommend that if you choose to use Turnitin with your students, you do so in a positive, formative, process-oriented manner. Please also keep in mind that our AP on Intellectual Property requires certain instructor disclosures and options for students when using software such as Turnitin.
If you have questions about Turnitin, AI, or anything else after reviewing the links above, please don’t hesitate to connect with me.
– Jim
Jim Julius, Ed.D.
Faculty Director, Online Education