Online News for our Online Spring 2021!
Happy new year! I hope everyone had a good break, despite the weirdness of our world!
Flex workshops launch tomorrow: Friday, Jan. 15
Flex week starts tomorrow with lots of great online ed-related workshops, including some Canvas open lab hours for anyone seeking expert Canvas support. There’s also a workshop on an awesome new communication tool called Pronto, available college-wide this semester, and a workshop to make sure you’re ready for the new Zoom that arrived over winter break. Friday ends with a workshop featuring seven MiraCosta online faculty mentors sharing some of their top tips for online teaching. And there are many more super workshops coming next week!
Online Teaching Tool Updates
- Check out Pronto, an incredible mobile-friendly and Canvas-integrated messaging platform that’s ready to use in every course now.
- As you’re hopefully aware, Zoom was updated over break. Many of the changes are seamless but review our updated faculty Zoom support site for details. With the new Zoom comes a new Canvas integration that’s a huge improvement on what we had previously.
- Accessibility and Universal Design are important elements of equity and inclusion. We have a new, more powerful tool built into Canvas called Pope Tech that helps faculty detect and correct accessibility issues. (This replaces UDOIT, if you had used that.) Another tool, Ally, is here for spring. Ally automatically provides files you share through Canvas in multiple options for students. For instance, PDFs can be listened to (great for those who would prefer to listen). PPTs can be accessed as PDFs (great for those without PPT). Word documents can be viewed as HTML (great for mobile devices).
- The big change you’ll notice in Canvas is an update to the Rich Content Editor. If that makes you nervous, be sure to attend Karen Turpin’s 10 am Flex workshop tomorrow!
- Finally, Proctorio is no longer available at MiraCosta, as had been communicated in late fall.
Student Orientation to Online Learning Workshops
In collaboration with the library, I’ll be again offering over two dozen Student Orientation to Online Learning workshops this spring – see all dates and times on the TASC site and in Canvas announcements. These workshops help to familiarize students with the resources MiraCosta provides online to support them, as well as to adopt 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.
Student Support Resources to Share with your Students
Campus may be closed, but our amazing array of student support services and resources are just one or two clicks away. Point your students to the Student Support Hub in Canvas. Share the link and point them to the Student Support button on the left in Canvas for 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, and more! The new Help Hut on the MiraCosta website is also a quick way for students to connect with all kinds of support services, and the tutoring hub gives access from the website to all the academic support resources found in the Student Support Hub within Canvas.
Reminder: Merging Canvas Course Sections
This was once again available to faculty starting this fall. See our guide to learn more about merged course sections in Canvas, and if you’d like to request this, see the guide to the SURF dashboard for merging course sections – be sure to do so ASAP!
Don’t forget to refer to our useful Canvas start-of-term checklist to keep you on track as you finalize your spring classes!
See you online!
Jim Julius, Ed.D.
Faculty Director, Online Education
Using Canvas’s NEW Rich Content Editor (Zoom Recording, 49 minutes) – 1/14/2021 workshop by Karen Turpin
Spring 2021 Online Education Workshops
Registration
MiraCosta faculty no longer need to sign up for Flex activities in advance. After attending a Flex workshop, record your participation on your Flex transcript under the “Record Activities” tab, selecting the “Scheduled Activities or Workshops” activity type. Visit the Flex website for more information.
Archives
After Flex week, go to the Workshop Archives to see recordings and resources from workshops below that were held online.
Spring 2021 Workshops
A full updated list of all Flex workshops – including many other great workshops supporting online education – can be found at: Spring 2021 Flex Workshops
Friday January 15, 2021
Canvas Open Lab
9:00 AM – 10:00 AM
Karen Turpin
Audience: Everyone
Format/Location: Online via Zoom
This session is designed to give you open time to work with Canvas in a collaborative environment featuring expert staff ready to support all your Canvas questions. Attendees may be online from anywhere, with opportunities to interact with fellow participants and Canvas experts. This is intended to be useful for anyone from beginners to advanced Canvas users, and is open entry/exit – show up anytime and stay as long as you like.
Using Canvas’s NEW Rich Content Editor
10:00 AM – 11:00 AM
Karen Turpin
Audience: Everyone
Recording: Using Canvas’s NEW Rich Content Editor (Zoom Recording, 49 minutes)
Canvas has a redesigned Rich Content Editor (RCE) for Spring 2021. The new RCE is intended to improve the user experience across Canvas tools. The toolbar includes a condensed, more intuitive look, menus are grouped by common icons and interactions, and generally, more editing area is displayed. Join us to learn all about the new RCE that is now globally available throughout Canvas.
For more information, visit the:
- New RCE Basic Guide
- New RCE Video Guide
- Complete set of New Rich Content Editor Guides
- Rich Content Editor Comparison Document
Canvas Open Lab
11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Karen Turpin
Audience: Everyone
Format/Location: Online
This session is designed to give you open time to work with Canvas in a collaborative environment featuring expert staff ready to support all your Canvas questions. Attendees may be online from anywhere, with opportunities to interact with fellow participants and Canvas experts. This is intended to be useful for anyone from beginners to advanced Canvas users, and is open entry/exit – show up anytime and stay as long as you like.
Zoom Has Changed: What Faculty Need to Know
and Do
1:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Karen Turpin
Audience: Everyone
Recording: Zoom Has Changed: What Faculty Need to Know (Zoom Recording, 1 hour and 2 minutes)
MiraCosta College is now hosting our own Zoom, which means there are a number of changes you need to account for. The Zoom link is new, as is your login process. The Zoom LTI (integration tool) in Canvas is new and MUCH improved. Learn the updated ways to access Zoom, create meetings, and share recordings in Canvas with or without the LTI. Learn how to get Zoom help locally. Finally, you must update links manually for existing Zoom recordings and meetings that you want to continue to use and share, and this session will ensure you know how.
Create and Facilitate Better Student Engagement in Canvas with Pronto – Demo & Use Cases
2:00 PM – 3:00 PM
Matt Baugh (Pronto) with MiraCosta faculty
Audience: Everyone
Recording: Create and Facilitate Better Student Engagement in Canvas with Pronto – Demo & Use Cases (Zoom Recording, 1 hour and 2 minutes)
Learn how to get started with Pronto, an app that integrates with Canvas and enhances communication beyond what Canvas provides, enabling group messaging, file sharing, video chat, announcements, and more in a very mobile-friendly way. Pronto can be used outside of Canvas too, and is open to everyone at the college – student services, clubs, committees, etc. – all can have rich mobile-friendly group synchronous and asynchronous communication through Pronto.
Advice from MOM: MiraCosta Online Mentors Share Online Teaching Tips
3:00 PM – 4:30 PM
MiraCosta Online Faculty Mentors
Audience: Everyone
Recording: Advice from MOM: MiraCosta Online Mentors Share Online Teaching Tips (Zoom Recording, 1 hour and 22 minutes)
A team of MiraCosta faculty provided mentoring support for online teaching to over 60 colleagues this fall. In this workshop, eight faculty mentors will share some of the top tips they have to offer on both pedagogies and tools (Canvas, Canvas Studio, and Zoom). Their advice will help you engage your students more deeply in learning, and will help you to accomplish your online teaching more efficiently and effectively
Tuesday January 19, 2021
Experience the Student Orientation to Online Learning
7:00 PM – 8:15 PM
Jim Julius & Steven Deineh
Audience: Everyone
Recording: Experience the Student Orientation to Online Learning (Zoom Recording, 1 hour and 20 minutes)
The Student Orientation to Online Learning is offered dozens of times each semester to help MiraCosta students to be more prepared for success as online students. The session includes discussion of important habits and attitudes of successful online students, opportunities to gain comfort with Canvas and Zoom tools, a review of key support resources and services online, and a brief librarian-led introduction to the online library. Experience the SOOL for yourself – you will probably learn some things you didn’t know about MiraCosta’s amazing online support for students! We’ll also review how student participation in the SOOL is reported so that any faculty member can incentivize their students to attend.
Wednesday January 20, 2021
Mission Accessible: New Tools for Spring 2021
2:00 PM – 3:30 PM
Liesl Boswell
Audience: Everyone
Recording: Mission Accessible: New Tools for Spring 2021 (Zoom Recording, 1 hour and 23 minutes)
Canvas provides faculty a foundation and a wealth of built-in tools to create inclusive experiences for all students, and MiraCosta College is also adding a couple new tools in Canvas to enhance accessibility and inclusivity in spring 2021. Pope Tech helps faculty to go deeper into course content than the tools Canvas provides to detect and improve accessibility. Ally automatically converts files faculty add to their Canvas courses into multiple formats for students. Learn how to leverage all of these tools to build an accessible and usable learning environment. Free digital goodies for course development!
Continuing the learning and conversation with Pronto, a new mobile-friendly, Canvas-integrated, powerful communication tool: Demo and Use Cases
4:30 PM – 5:30 PM
Matt Baugh (Pronto) with MiraCosta faculty
Audience: Everyone
Recording: Continuing the learning and conversation with Pronto, a new mobile-friendly, Canvas-integrated, powerful communication tool: Demo and Use Cases (Zoom Recording, 1 hour and 8 minutes)
Learn how to get started with Pronto, an app that integrates with Canvas and enhances communication beyond what Canvas provides, enabling group messaging, file sharing, video chat, announcements, and more in a very mobile-friendly way. Pronto can be used outside of Canvas too, and is open to everyone at the college – student services, clubs, committees, etc. – all can have rich mobile-friendly group synchronous and asynchronous communication through Pronto.
The SAFE Topics Podcast – Two Episode Release and Semester Finale
Hello campus community!
The S.A.F.E. Topics Podcast team is wrapping up the semester with the release of two episodes! We are finishing up our series on Universal Design for Learning (UDL). In the episode, “Student Voices: Climbing Uphill Both Ways,” we hear from Haillie Hill (Theater) to get another student perspective on UDL. In the semester finale, “Quality and Quantity – Student Voices as Data,” we hear from Kimberly Coutts (Research Analyst) to get their perspective on UDL (*releasing later tonight!). Listen in as we wrap up the Fall 2020 semester with two great releases.
Ways to Listen!
What to Listen For
Student Voices: Climbing Uphill Both Ways
- Who is Haillie and what are her educational goals?
- The feeling of anxiousness at this point in the semester.
- What has made learning challenging during this time?
- Internalizing the feelings of being an online student.
- Online group projects, good or bad?
- What has made learning easier during this time?
- The importance of communicative professors.
- Getting assignments in earlier before they’re due.
- The ability to see updated grades.
- Recorded lectures are a huge plus to follow along with content.
- The fear of reaching out to the DSPS office.
- Vibing well with professors when they are open in the beginning.
- Students have feelings too!
Quality and Quantity – Student Voices as Data
- Bias and data.
- The importance of having an open mind when reviewing your data.
- “Bad news bias.”
- Quantitative vs Qualitative data.
- The reliability of campus wide surveys.
- Data over the course of time and comparing it to right now.
- Success/retention rates are skewed now because of EW’s (excused W’s)
- Definitions between success and retention.
- Are we collecting data of the student experience right now?
- Asking students: what does not help with your learning and success?
- Asking students: What advice would you give to faculty to improve our courses at this moment?
- Qualitative feedback for a teacher may be the most important thing for teachers and students to come to an agreement.
- The importance of maintaining communication.
- Plug from Office of Research, Planning & Institutional Effectiveness.
- Kim: Here to answer questions to help drive good decision making. Happy to help and eager to help any time!
The S.A.F.E. Topics Team
curry mitchell – Faculty, Letters (Co-host)
Sean Davis – Faculty, Sociology (Co-host)
Kelly Barnett – Intern and Music Technology Student (Audio Editor)
James Garcia – Associate Faculty, Sociology (Show Notes, Online)
Connect with Us
Stay great,
S.A.F.E. Topics Podcast Team
