Canvas maintenance Aug. 31-Sept. 1

Canvas will be performing maintenance on our system from 9 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 31 until 1 a.m., Sunday, Sept. 1. Canvas says that users might experience a short downtime during this period, so please inform students and plan accordingly.

 

Scott

 

Turnitin update

For those who could not attend Thursday’s Turnitin training session, you can view the recording. If you want, you can also go to the instructor help page.

 

When you create an assignment in Canvas and want to utilize Turnitin, you will still see the option to Enable VeriCite Submissions. Please ignore this. The reason it’s still there is for the possibility of students challenging grades from a recent term, and removing VeriCite will change the originality report results. The VeriCite option will remain visible for the duration of the fall semester, then a decision will be made to keep it for another semester or remove it.

 

One last thing: I am working with Chabot and District ITS to work out a process for stocking the Turnitin database with past LPC and Chabot papers. There are financial and workload implications associated with this.

 

Scott

Final Canvas reminders

For those of you teaching with Canvas this semester:

 

Attached is a checklist (with corresponding links) to help your classes get off to a good start. And here is some information/reminders to help, too:

 

1. View Canvas faculty notes and tips. One new change this semester is that in Discussions, the option for students to add file attachments is enabled by default. There are a bit too many other features to fit into this email. Since Canvas adds new features and enhancements every three weeks, make sure to go to the Canvas Release Notes page to see what’s new.
   
   
2. Publish your courses by the beginning of the day your class starts so students can access them. If you are not teaching an online or hybrid course and want to wait longer to publish your courses, that’s up to you. To publish your course, go to the course home page, and click Publish.
   
   
3. If you are teaching a DE class, contact your students prior to the start of the semester, and encourage them to self-enroll into the Quest for Online Success Course in Canvas. This is a readiness course that prepares students to succeed online. Learn more about Quest. I notified DE students by email, and many have already self-enrolled. A reminder from you would be good, especially since students who added late did not receive the my  email notification. Here are instructions you can copy and paste for your students:
   
   

a.     Go to https://clpccd.instructure.com/enroll/KDENL6. If necessary, copy and paste the URL (without the period at the end) into your browser.

b.     Log into Canvas with your W number. Your password is the first 2 letters of your first name, followed by the first 2 letters of your last name (all lowercase), followed by the last four digits of your W number. If you have already logged into Canvas and changed your password, use that password.

c.      Click the button "Enroll in Course".

d.     Click the button "Go to the Course".

e.     Complete the modules.

4. Also, if you are teaching a DE class and want to see how your course measures up to the quality standards set by the Online Education Initiative, you can compare it to the OEI Course Design Rubric. The LPC Academic Senate has endorsed the rubric as the standards to strive for in DE classes. View the Senate’s resolution. Examples that meet the rubric’s criteria can be found in the Online Course Design Guide and the Course Design Showcase.
   
   
5. Make sure all of your content is accessible to students with disabilities. Everything you need to know about web accessibility, including “how-to” tutorials, is available in a Canvas course in which you have access. Just log into Canvas, and you will see a web accessibility course in your Dashboard called Creating Accessible Course Content.
   
   
6. All online and hybrid courses must show evidence of an instructor’s regular effective contact with students, as per Title 5 and accreditation requirements. Title 5 adds that regular effective contact must take place among students, too. For hybrids, both types of contact are required in the online portion of the class. Read Hybrids @ LPC. When contacting students by email, online and hybrid instructors should use the Canvas Inbox for all of your email correspondences with students. The Canvas Inbox will automatically save the emails. Emails sent from Outlook will be archived, but they will not be available from a central location. Read more about regular effective contact. Also, view the CVC-OEI’s Student-Student Interaction Guide (contains concrete examples).
   
   
7. If you need to give students extra time or extra attempts on a quiz in Canvas, use the Moderate Quiz feature. Too many instructors are editing their quiz and adding a student’s name under Assign To in the quiz settings while removing Everyone. The result is that only that one student’s score goes into the Gradebook, while the rest do not. Learn how to moderate a quiz.
   
   
8. If you want students to have access to your class before the first day of the semester, go into Settings, change the Term start date and time, then check the box that says: Users can only participate in the course between these dates.
   
   
9. The LPC DE Committee has developed recommendations, along with answers to frequently asked questions, that are intended to aid instructors—particularly new instructors—in determining how many students to add and when to add those students near the beginning of the semester. View the recommendations and FAQs.
   
   
10. The LPC Online Learning web site includes a link called Faculty Resources, which was created for you. It provides information and resources for instructors online learning at LPC. The section also includes the DE Handbook.
    
    
11. For financial aid and auditing purposes, you should record the last day of attendance for students who drop DE courses. This can be done easily in Canvas. In your course, go to the People page, click on the three dots on the right side for a student, and select User Details. This brings you to the student’s Profile page. Simply enter the date in the box under Last Day Attended. If a student dropped prior to Census, you can't enter the student's LDA into Canvas because that student simply disappears from the course. The best you can do is note the date elsewhere after monitoring your class roster in CLASS-Web.
    
    The last day of attendance is not the last day a student logged into your course; it’s the last day a student actively participated in class. Read Federal Title IV and Last Day of Attendance.
    
    Here is LPC’s DE drop policy:
    
    The instructor may drop students who miss the first meeting of a course. The first meeting of online or hybrid Distance Education courses is the first day of the class as specified in the class schedule listing.  For these courses, instructors may drop students who do not log into their Canvas course and/or complete indicated activities by the third day of classes. DE instructors may drop students if they have not submitted work and/or accessed the class for two consecutive weeks. For Summer courses, DE instructors may drop students if they have not submitted work and/or accessed the class for one week.
    
    
12. If you need (or want) a banner for the home page of your course, the attached file is a template to use. Just open it in PowerPoint, modify it, save it as a .PNG file, then upload it into Canvas.
    
    
13. If you plan to use the online proctoring tool Proctorio, you need to understand how it works. View a faculty web page on Proctorio. You should put information about Proctorio into your welcome letter and syllabus. Here are links to an example welcome letter and an example syllabus. Both contain student language about Proctorio. Feel free to use it.
    
    
14. You can also use NameCoach, a pronunciation and gender ID tool. NameCoach allows students to record their names and note their gender. Because of privacy reasons, only the instructor will be able to hear the recordings and see the genders noted. To use NameCoach, just enable it in the course menu. It’s self-explanatory from there.
    
    

15.   Because of an issue this past summer with students not being able to see results of automatically graded quizzes, it is recommended that you use Canvas’ New Gradebook. Follow the instructions below to enable it in your course(s): Access a course, click Settings, click Feature Options, click the switch to enable the New Gradebook. Learn how the New Gradebook works. The old Gradebook goes away in time for the Spring 2020 semester.

16.   If you want to merge sections in Canvas and have not already done so, read the Merging Sections in Canvas page, and follow the instructions carefully.

17.   Wanda Butterly and I will provide faculty technical support. During nights and weekends, you can call Canvas directly at 1-833-300-3467. For students, all daytime support will be handled by LPC’s technical support desk, and they can call Canvas to get their nighttime and weekend questions answered. The student Canvas number is 1-844-600-3467. You might want to note this in your classes.

Good luck with your courses!

Scott

 

Turnitin anti-plagiarism service

LPC Faculty,

 

As you probably know, the district has purchased a one-year license to use Turnitin within Canvas as a replacement to the VeriCite anti-plagiarism service. The plan is to install Turnitin and remove VeriCite on Aug. 13. That day is also the target for beginning to migrate all of the student submissions in the VeriCite database to the Turnitin database (this is supposed to be done for you). The district is also planning to host a Turnitin training Aug. 15 at Convocation (time and room TBA).

 

Scott