Dear MiraCosta Faculty,
As we near the much-needed winter break, here are some reminders and resources to help you reach the finish line, and perhaps, to begin spring preparation.
Canvas End of Term
After Dec. 31, your fall 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.
Speaking of Canvas, if you like, you can read more from Instructure about the Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage that affected Canvas last week.
MiraCosta Online Mentors and Instructional Designer Support
If you’d like help with any semester wrap-up tasks, or as you begin working on spring classes, some of our MiraCosta peer support faculty are available over break (yes, they will continue to be available in spring, hooray), and our Instructional Designer, Nadia Khan, is available as well over the break and into the spring. Click either link to make a connection!
Please also check out the helpful “five-minute fixes” and “more than five-minute fixes” videos some of our amazing Online Mentor faculty have created to inspire and support your online teaching!
SOOL is Now SOAR
We’re changing the name of what used to be the Student Orientation to Online Learning to SOAR: Student Online Academic Readiness. In partnership with librarians, we’ve already lined up 20 workshop times for the spring semester – please feel free to recommend this to your students as you build syllabi and welcome pages for your classes! As always, we’ll have Canvas announcements reminding students of sessions each week. And as always, you can check to see if your students have attended one of these workshops in order to incentivize their participation.
Upcoming Professional Learning Opportunities
- The Online Teaching Conference. Is scheduled to take place in person this summer, June 29-July 1, in Long Beach. More details will come in 2022, but the call for proposals is open now through January 31 if you’re interested in presenting.
- @ONE has opened registration for free spring webinars on equity, with two focused on grading practices. You can also register for a number of @ONE online teaching courses starting in early spring, and they are offering 25% discount on courses starting before April with coupon code PD4U_2022. Let me know if you’d like financial support to register for one of these.
Spring Online Ed Flex Planning – Got Something to Share?
I’m pulling together Flex week online ed workshops around topics including student-instructor interaction, student-student interaction, accessibility, and proactive support of students through monitoring engagement and progress. I’d love to include diverse faculty voices/examples in these sessions – please let me know if you’d be interested in sharing your practices in one of these workshops!
Wishing you peace, joy, and rest for your winter break!
– Jim
Jim Julius, Ed.D.
Faculty Director, Online Education
