Stay Up To Date with Changes Happening within Canvas
Visit the Canvas Release Notes/Upcoming Changes page within the Canvas Community. This page is updated by Instructure and is the central location for communicating all Canvas’s significant upcoming changes. Check the Canvas System Status Updates for real time updates about existing features within Canvas.
Transitioning from PlayPosit to WeVideo: Next-Level Interactive Learning (Recording, 54 minutes) – 1/20/2026 workshop by 3C Media Solutions team and Stephanie Gates, WeVideo Senior Customer Success Manager – Additional Resource: Q&A Article
Spring 2026 Online Education @ MiraCosta
Dear colleagues, happy 2026! Please see below for reminders of resources to help you and your students to succeed in online environments this spring. If you didn’t see my email last week with updates about new and useful tools for getting your Canvas courses ready for the semester, I’d invite you to first check that out. And definitely look for the online ed Flex workshops coming this week.
Support for You
- Our Canvas 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 another 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.
Expectations and Recommendations for Faculty Teaching Online
- The MiraCosta Online Class Quality Guidelines documentprovides MiraCosta requirements and recommended practices for online instructors.
- 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 first instructional day 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 – A new federal regulation taking effect in spring reinforces the requirement for all of our instructional tools and materials to be accessible. 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. Check out our recent accessibility workshop recordings!
- 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 one-size-fits-all answer to this question so there is not a blanket college policy. Please check out a 1-page guide to help you craft language to share with your students if you’re still working on that! Learn more about AI tools and guidance for MiraCosta faculty and students.
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 across the first nine weeks of the term – see all dates and times on the MiraCosta Online 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. Faculty are welcome to attend as well!
- 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 semester.
- Tech Support – 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.
- Online Student Support Access Points – the Student Support Hub in 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.
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 – we all use Canvas, right?
- Adjust-All and TidyUP– make it easier to copy and reuse Canvas courses
- DesignPLUS – a brand new Canvas visual design tool
- 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.
- WeVideo (formerly 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, this 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. 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.
Professional Learning for Online Teaching – Spring Possibilities
- In addition to many online ed workshops this Flex week, you can review lots of wonderful recorded MiraCosta online teaching workshops anytime (Flex-eligible, of course)!
- Feb 25-27: San Diego area community colleges are offering a joint online AccessAbility Week with online workshops.
- March 14: NCHEA is hosting a large AI-focused conference, Instruction with Imagination and Intelligence. Registration is free and open now, and the call for proposals is open through Jan. 30.
- June 23-25: The CCC Online Teaching Conference returns to Anaheim. Consider submitting a proposal (due Jan. 31)! MiraCosta faculty who are presenting can get all travel expenses covered from the Online Ed budget!
- @ONE online teaching courses are open to all California Community College faculty. Some are self-paced and available anytime. Facilitated spring courses are open for enrollment now, and are completely free. They’ll fill, so sign up now if you’re interested!
Don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions! Best wishes for a great spring!
– Jim
Jim Julius, Ed.D.
Faculty Coordinator, Online Education
Canvas Start of the Semester Instructor Checklist
Create or Import your Content
Multiple ways to begin to build your class
Copy from another class in Canvas. Your access to classes you have previously taught in Canvas continues indefinitely.
Copy in an entire course or portions of one from Canvas Commons.
Create your content from scratch in Canvas
Review Assignments, Quizzes, and Discussions
- Verify activities and content in the course are published.
- Verify dates. Due dates are added to the calendar and the syllabus and serve as reminders to students. “Available from” and “Until” dates will unlock and lock the activity.
- Verify instructions are accurate and well formatted.
- Verify assignment submission types.
- Verify number of quiz attempts is correct.
- Verify assignment groups are set up correctly. See: How to use Assignment Index Page.
- Verify assignments are weighted correctly, if using a weighted grading system. See: How to Weight Assignment Groups.
- Verify discussions are ordered logically on Discussions list page.
- Verify Quiz “Options” are correct. See: Canvas Quiz Options.
Review Course Details
- Verify total points possible in the gradebook is correct. To verify Download the Gradebook or within Canvas Student View navigate to Grades.
- Review Syllabus for accuracy and compliance with the MiraCosta Syllabus Checklist
- Verify that links are valid and operational. See: How to Validate Links.
- Customize course navigation links. Keep only the links that are necessary. For example, in most cases the following should be hidden: Files, Pages, Outcomes, Conferences, and Collaborations. If using Modules you can hide even more links to simplify navigation for students. See: How to Reorder and Hide Course Navigation Links.
- Verify Modules are logically ordered and published, if using them.
- Verify Module “Lock until” dates are correct, if using them. See: How to Lock a Module.
- Verify Module requirements and prerequisites are set correctly, if using them. See: How to add Requirements to a Module and How to add Prerequisites to a Module.
- Verify the course home page is set up correctly. See: Home Page Layout Options and How to Change the Course Home Page.
- Use “Preview” option in each quiz to check for errors.
- Use “Student View” to review the entire course. See: How do I view a course as a test student and Canvas Student View vs MCC’s Sample Student Account.
- Verify that your course complies with accessibility standards. See: PopeTech and Canvas Accessibility.
Final Preparations
- Publish your course when you are ready for students to have access to it. This typically is on the morning of or before the official course start date. See: How do I publish a course? NOTE: Some faculty like to publish their courses well in advance of the start date, but only publish a handful of elements of the course (such as the syllabus). This allows enrolled students to “preview” the class.
- For online and hybrid classes, encourage students to attend a Student Online Academic Readiness (SOAR) workshop. You may also wish to share the Canvas Student Orientation to help any students who are new to Canvas to have a resource for learning the basics.
- Especially for online and hybrid classes, send an email to your students through your SURF Roster telling them how to access your course in Canvas.
Cautions
- Canvas email (Inbox/Conversation) messages will not be sent out if the course is unpublished. Send class messages from your SURF Roster instead, prior to publishing the course.
- Pay attention to the time stamp on anything you have placed a date on. 12:00 means the very first minute of the selected day. For end dates, it is often best to choose 11:59 PM to ensure you are setting it up on the correct date.