Dialing Up the Quality & Inclusivity of Live Online Classes

I already knew long lecture videos are a bad way to fill an hour of synchronous instruction, but this course showed very specifically how to break things up into manageable segments of interaction, instruction, and active *participatory* learning regardless of camera-on status!
– Cynthia Hamlett, Distance Education Faculty Lead, Crafton Hills College

For decades, asynchronous online courses have been the gold standard for increasing access to higher education for students who have traditionally been left out. Prior to COVID, 28% of California Community College's 2.2 million students took at least one online course (CCC Chancellor's Office, 2017). But we know that access does not equal quality. In fact, known equity gaps in face-to-face courses have been exacerbated by online courses. To improve this problem, a system and institutional commitment to providing high-quality professional development in online course design and teaching is paramount.

Every teaching modality presents both opportunities and challenges for faculty and students. When COVID surfaced one year ago, faculty across the nation scanned their digital toolkits and recognized that videoconferencing could provide an option for a digital classroom environment. As classrooms were shutdown, Zooming became part of teaching vernacular and the inequities that synchronous online instruction created for students quickly began to be recognized. Karen Costa's powerful piece, Cameras Be Damned, opened our eyes to how enabling a webcam can be a trauma trigger for students, as well as faculty. Megan Corieri, a California community college student, shared this advice with faculty in Spring 2020 article, "There have been many times that I have had to shut my camera off in class, have a good cry, and come back. We are living through unprecedented times, and now more than ever it is important to have empathy, kindness, and patience." While video conference serves as a helpful scaffold for many, it comes with a high price for others. Zoom can place an extra tax on one's already strained mental health, not to mention the inequities associated with device ownership and network access. Today, community college educators recognize the need to support the whole student more than ever.

New Course: Introduction to Live Online Teaching & Learning

an tablet showing the homepage of Intro to Live Online Teaching & Learning

This is precisely why professional development is critical to guide faculty through the twists and turns of our dynamic instructional landscape. This month, in response to this emerging need, CVC/@ONE introduced its newest professional development course, Introduction to Live Online Teaching & Learning, a 2-week, facilitated course available to California Community College faculty and staff at the low cost of $45 with the option to receive one continuing education unit for an additional fee.

In the course, participants are immersed in the role of a student as they experience instruction that models the effective use of Canvas and Zoom to support learning at a distance. Participants work independently and in small group Zoom "huddles" to learn how to design and teach effective, inclusive live sessions with an ice breaker to check the emotional pulse of students or help them make connections with peers, direct instruction using screensharing, and active learning techniques using chat, polling, breakout rooms, and external tools like Google Docs, Slides, and Jamboard. Participants also engage in live class sessions in the role of "students" that model inclusive instructional practices. In one session, they participate in a lesson in empathy that requires them to complete a collaborative activity in a Zoom breakout room while attending from a smartphone. In the United States, Black and Hispanic adults are more likely to be smartphone dependent. When teaching at an open-access institution, teaching practices must be mobile-friendly to avoid perpetuating equity gaps.

Upon completion of the course, participants receive a digital badge that verifies their new skills. The two sections we scheduled for the spring are full ... but don't worry. We'll be offering more sections of the course this summer!

Adopt the Course!

Like all of CVC/@ONE's other professional development courses, we have shared our new Intro to Live Online Teaching & Learning course in the Canvas Commons with a CC-BY license, making it simple for your college to adopt, adapt, and offer the course locally for your faculty. To ensure the quality of your own local PD, we strongly advise that the local facilitator of an adopted course complete the course with us first. In your re-use of the course materials, please attribute California Community Colleges | California Virtual College. Sharing really is caring!

To adopt the new Live Online Teaching & Learning Course, go to the Canvas Commons and search for "CVC Adoptable." That will lead you to all of our adoptable courses.

If there's one thing we've learned from COVID, it is that effective, inclusive design and teaching are central to serving the needs of all students ... regardless of the modality of instruction.

We'd like to extend a special thank you to Francine Van Meter of Cabrillo College who contributed her expertise to the development of this new course. Francine will be retiring from our system in May and has left a tremendous legacy in distance education. You will be missed, Francine!

Teaching Matters

Professional development plays a critical role in improving the teaching and learning environments of the diverse students we serve in the California Community College system. To put it plainly: teaching matters -- face-to-face and online. Nearly all (96%) of college students who entered a STEM major and chose to leave (either drop out of college or enter a different major) cited poor teaching and learning experiences as a reason (Seymour & Hunter, 2020). Black and Latinx STEM major “switchers” were more likely (88% to 79%) to cite the competitive culture of STEM courses as an influence in their decision to change majors. While STEM courses serve as a microcosm of inequity in U.S. higher education, the problems cited by STEM students are not restricted to those disciplines alone. 

White and Asian students comprise less than 30% of the roughly 2.1 million students served by California community colleges. However, they are most likely to succeed in our courses, regardless of modality. Improving teaching and learning is an opportunity to advance equity in California. Our mindsets about race and ethnicity; knowledge about and appreciation for the rich, varied experiences our students bring to our classes; and our understanding of how to apply equitable teaching practices in our courses on-campus and online are integral to improving the lives of our students, the diversity of our state’s workforce, and the future of our country. 

Connecting PD with Equity at the College Level

For decades, online courses have increased access to college for Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students, and now they have also proven to be the resilient backbone of higher education. As we reflect on the past difficult six months of unexpected disruption brought on by COVID-19 and piqued racial injustice in our communities and across the country, I suspect that each educator reading these words can recognize why continuously improving our teaching and learning practices and being compensated for one’s time are so vital. 

From my experiences, many faculty, particularly those who are part-time, can be unaware for years, even decades, about how or if professional development can be used to increase their salary. Sierra College, driven by a systemic effort to improve equity, has made efforts to help faculty navigate this process. One of the changes Sierra made was to get the low-cost online professional development courses offered through @ONE and CVC-OEI and funded by the CCC Chancellor’s Office pre-approved by their Faculty Employees Reclassification Committee (FERC) and create a clear list of those courses, along with their locally-offered workshops and other off-campus opportunities. 

@ONE and You

Thank you, @ONE. Your course has opened my eyes to the power and potential of online instruction. The tools and knowledge are priceless and will not only bring our departments' program to another level, but accelerate its success, and . . . most importantly, that of our students! - Petra Maria, Laney College

@ONE’s nationally recognized online professional development courses serve the needs of thousands of CCC faculty and staff each year. They are facilitated by CCC educators; model and foster Culturally Responsive Teaching pedagogy, accessibility, and Universal Design for Learning principles; and are available to all CCC faculty and staff at a low cost. @ONE courses can be taken a la carte or stacked to earn a certificate in Online Teaching & Design

Many colleges in our system include @ONE courses in their locally-approved online teaching preparation process. Check with your college’s professional development coordinator or distance education coordinator to learn more. If you have a story to share about how @ONE helped improve your teaching, we’d love to hear from you in a comment below!

References:

Riegle-Crumb, C., King, B., and Irizarry, Y. (2019). Does STEM stand out? Examining racial/ethnic gaps in persistence across postsecondary fields. Educ. Res. 48, 133-144.

Seymour, E. & Hunter, E. B. (Eds.). (2020). Talking about leaving revisited: Persistence, relocation, and loss in undergraduate STEM education. Springer.

New PocketPD Guide: Humanizing Online Teaching & Learning

Cognition and emotion are two sides of the same coin." a quote by Zaretta Hammond beside a brain with an "i" for information and a heart for emotion above it.

Now, more than ever, we must center our teaching practices on one thing: we are humans who are experiencing the physiological effects of trauma.

Whether you are a student, faculty, or staff, your ability to learn new things and manage tasks is compromised. Recognizing this in your own daily experiences unites all of us. These shared connections have a way of fostering empathy for one another.

Empathy is especially critical to support the needs of our California Community College (CCC) students. In 2019, a Hope Center #RealCollege survey of 40,000 CCC students revealed that:

As a community college educator, you serve the most vulnerable population of students in higher education. Our same students are now even more traumatized by COVID-19 and many will be required to learn online in the fall to stay on track with their academic goals. They are more likely to feel exhausted, confused, sad, anxious, agitated, and numb. Learning online can be an isolating experience that can exacerbate the physiological effects of trauma. Humanizing is the antidote that will support the success of our most vulnerable students and help you feel more connected and appreciated too.

What is humanizing?

Humanizing starts with cultivating your human presence online to asynchronously welcome and greet your students when they log into Canvas, setting up intentional strategies to get to know your individual students as more than names on a screen, identifying those who will benefit from your high touch the most, and adapting your asynchronous online teaching accordingly. Once you've established a relationship anchored in care and trust, you are poised to become a "warm demander" (Kleinfeld, 1975) and support the cognitive development of all your students. When a human knows another human believes in them, it is our nature to lean in and try not to let that person down. That is why humanizing is the single most essential requirement in designing a fall online course.

With that context in mind, we invite you to explore the newest CVC-OEI/@ONE Pocket PD Guide: Humanizing Online Teaching & Learning, embedded below. The guide, intended to support asynchronous online teaching, will introduce you to the research and theoretical frameworks that underpin humanizing, stress the pedagogy of culturally responsive teaching that fuels humanizing, and provide you with a few concrete practices to humanize your online course. And, of course, you'll also find a few friendly faces in the guide to support you including Tracy Schaelen of Southwestern College; Fabiola Torres of Glendale Community College; and Sarah Williams of Foothill College.

This PocketPD Guide is created with Google Sites and has a handy button on the first slide that allows you to create your own copy of the slide deck. We’ve shared it with a Creative Commons-Attribution (CC-BY) license so you are free to adapt and re-use it with attribution to CVC-OEI. Sharing is caring!

References:
Kleinfeld, J. (1975). Effective teachers of Eskimo and Indian students. School Review, 83, 301–344.

Creating Microlectures: A New PocketPD Guide for you!

Photo by Todd Jiang on Unsplash

Moving from Synchronous to Asynchronous Online Instruction

When you need to quickly shift from teaching in a physical classroom to teaching online, it may seem natural to stick with your hour-long lectures and deliver them using a synchronous tool like Zoom. But if we keep the needs of our diverse students at the center of our teaching and learning efforts, we must begin to shift our focus to designing asynchronous online courses because equitable learning environments are focused on removing barriers.

Asynchronous online learning provides students with the flexibility to learn at the times and from the locations that work best for them. Community college students comprise our most vulnerable populations who are also more likely to be essential service provider workers. Many of our students are working more hours than ever before and have taken on the financial responsibilities of family members who have become unexpectedly unemployed. Requiring students to be available at certain times on certain days adds a barrier to learning.

But a flexible schedule isn't the only benefit of asynchronous online learning. It also removes the social anxiety that many students feel in group settings that prevents them from asking questions. That psychological barrier is eliminated and replaced with the opportunity to rewind and review until their questions are answered.

And by using a mix of written materials and asynchronous videos to deliver instructional content to your students, you'll be supporting learning variability, which is a fancy way of saying, "Each human brain is unique and each person learns differently."

Warming Up to Microlectures

So if you are looking ahead and planning for your courses to be online, now is the time to consider developing microlectures – brief videos that are 5-minutes or less and focused on specific outcomes. Why should you consider microlectures? And how do you get started? Those are great questions!

We hope you will take some time to peruse the new CVC-OEI PocketPD Guide to Microlectures embedded below. It includes research-backed tips for designing your microlectures, a microlecture gallery with contributions from your CCC faculty peers, and an introduction to accessible workflows using simple video recording tools – including a smartphone!

The PocketPD Guide is created with Google Sites and has a handy button on the first slide that allows you to create your own copy of the slide deck. We've shared it with a Creative Commons-Attribution (CC-BY) license so you are free to adapt and re-use it with attribution to CVC-OEI.

View all of our PocketPD Guides!

Guidance for Recording Class Sessions with TechConnect (Confer) Zoom

Photo by Allie Smith on Unsplash

Recordings of live ConferZoom sessions are sometimes used to allow students to watch a missed class session, to review an earlier session, or shared with a future class. Depending on who is shown in the recording, they may constitute educational records that are protected under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) -- the federal student privacy law. This guidance explains acceptable practices for utilizing instructional video and audio recordings.

The FAQs below contain some specific questions about recording instructional Zoom sessions. Additional information about photos, video, and audio recording under FERPA can be found on the US Department of Education FAQs on Photos and Videos under FERPA. If you have questions about your specific recording situation, contact your college’s Chief Instructional Officer. 

Are video or audio recordings of lectures a protected student record? 

If a recording includes only the instructor, it is not a student record and FERPA does not limit its use. If the recording includes students asking questions, making presentations or leading a class (other than TAs), and it is possible to identify the student, then the portions containing recordings of the student do constitute protected educational records. Educational records can only be used as permitted by FERPA or in a manner allowed by a written consent from the student.

What Recording settings should I select in my Zoom account to best ensure students are not recorded in the archive?  

Before you schedule your meetings:

When your meeting starts, keep your Zoom view set to Speaker View (as opposed to Gallery View). This ensures that only the person who is speaking appears on the screen, as opposed to recording a grid view of all attendees with webcams enabled.

Can an instructor require students to show their video during a Zoom session/recording? 

No. This is problematic for several reasons. Students may not have a webcam or may not want to show where they are located. When you schedule your meeting, you are advised to set Participant Video to Off to allow students to opt into sharing their video. 

""

Can an instructor publicly share a screen capture of a Zoom session or recording that shows one or more identifiable students? 

No. Unless FERPA compliance through use of consents has been given. Screenshots should not be shown on Facebook, Twitter, or any other public platform.

Can students publicly share class recordings or screen captures of a Zoom session or recording that show one or more identifiable students? 

No. Instructors should tell students that they should not share the link to any class sessions, or take screen captures of Zoom sessions. Students that violate this request can be subject to the student code of conduct.

Can the instructor show recordings from last year’s class to the current class? 

Under FERPA, this situation must be treated as if the recordings were being shown to a third-party audience which requires FERPA compliance through use of consents from identifiable students or by editing out those students from the video.

If the instructor wants to allow access to a video (that shows students participating) to others outside of the class, is this permitted? 

Possibly. There are a couple of ways to use recordings that show students participating. 

  1. The instructor may obtain individualized written FERPA consents from the students shown in the recording. This type of consent can be obtained on a case-by-case basis or from all the students at the outset of a class.
  2. Recordings can be edited to remove portions of the video that show students who have not consented to the use of their voice and/or image (simply blurring a student’s image and removing their name is not sufficient, as the student may still be identified).

What is the easiest way to comply with FERPA if I am video recording my class sessions, students will be asking questions/doing presentations, and I wish to share the recording with a future class?

How do I obtain written consent from a student?

Check with your college to determine how to obtain written FERPA consent from students for instructional video recordings. Colleges are advised to have a digital consent form available to ensure it is not a barrier for students in online courses.

View Zoom's FERPA Compliance overview.

TechConnect (Confer) Zoom is supported by TechConnect and funded by the California Community College Chancellor's Office. It provides all CCC faculty and staff with an upgraded, Pro/Licensed Zoom Account. For more information and support, please visit the TechConnect website.

This document by Michelle Pacansky-Brock and CVC-OEI was adapted from works by Erin Whitteck and Jingrong (Pearl) Xie of University of Missouri, St. Louis and Rice University.It is shared with a CC-BY-NC license. You are free to re-mix it without permission, provided you attribute the authors.

Yes! Use Your Phone in Class: Tips for More Equitable Temporary Remote Teaching & Learning

A phone held in the hands of a person in a car.
Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash

Encouraging students to use their phones in class is typically not a popular topic in higher education articles. However, when students need to unexpectedly transition from face-to-face to online learning due to an emergency like the coronavirus, a phone may be a student’s lifeline. 

The California Community College (CCC) system serves roughly 2.1 million students. A 2019 study by the Hope Center found that half of CCC students surveyed experienced food insecurity in the last 30 days and 60% were housing insecure in the previous year. Students who are unsure about where they’ll get their next meal or where they will sleep at night are not likely to have the financial resources to purchase a laptop and they certainly are not going to have a desktop computer in tow. But according to a national survey by EDUCAUSE, 96.3% of community college students have a smartphone. And data from Pew Research shows that Americans who are younger, people of color, and low income are more likely to rely on a smartphone than broadband for online access. Smartphones are not luxury items for low-income students. They are critical tools that are used to pay bills, apply for jobs, participate in job interviews, conduct business, socialize with family and friends, shop, listen to music, watch tv and movies, and learn. 

Recommendations for Faculty

Using Canvas to design a learning environment for your students is the place to start. And this archive of Shawn Valcarcel’s provides you with some great first steps. However, a Canvas course renders differently on a smartphone than it does on a computer. So, some special considerations must be made. This list is adapted from the Canvas Mobile App Design Consideration Checklist.

  1. Encourage students to download and use the Canvas Student App and provide a link to the Canvas Student Guide for iOS and Canvas Student Guide for Android.
  2. Organize content into modules and chunk content into smaller parts on Pages within a module. View the archive of Shawn Valcarcel’s Getting Started with Canvas webinar for support with this step.
  3. Use Text headers within modules to help guide student navigation. This is helpful because in the mobile app, students navigate your course content from the modules view.
  4. Use Canvas Pages to present content, instead of linking to external URLs or files. This prevents students from needing to download large files or view non-mobile friendly content.
  5. Write instructions and prompts that are platform-neutral. For example, avoid saying, “Click the blue Submit button at the top of the page,” as the mobile app does not have a blue submit button.
  6. Download the Canvas Teacher app and use it to navigate your course. Identify things that don’t work and provide alternative instructions for students on a mobile device or redesign these elements as needed.
  7. Design assessments with the tools on a smartphone in mind. They are handheld multimedia studios after all! Provide the option to record a video or audio file, take a photo, etc.
  8. Survey the external tools supported by your college. Many -- like VoiceThread and Pronto -- have a mobile app that students can download and use. These tools will also and open new mobile-friendly ideas for assessments.

Want to dig deeper? Make a copy of the Canvas Mobile App Checklist.

Recommendations for Colleges

In a state as economically diverse as California, it is critical for institutions to understand their student demographics and communicate resources to support mobile access during times of disruption. Here are a few recommendations for colleges to consider:

Visit the CVC-OEI Emergency Preparedness resources for more support through this transition.

2019 Can•Innovate Recap

On October 25, 2019, CVC-OEI/@ONE hosted the third annual Can•Innovate conference, to support the effective design and teaching of online courses through the use of Canvas. The first conference, in 2016, was held on-site at American River College. In 2018, the decision was made to convert the event into a free online conference to reach more faculty (particularly part-time faculty who often do not have funding to attend conferences), staff, and administrators.

The 2018 event was very successful, with more than 1,000 attendees and an overall satisfaction rate of 4.4 out of 5 stars. For a thorough debrief, read our summary article from last year. This year, the Can•Innovate scaled even further, reaching more than 1,400 people with an overall satisfaction rating of 4.5 stars. Our program included a keynote by Kona Jones, a national thought leader in online education, and a spotlight session by Jory Hadsell, Executive Director of CVC-OEI. Dr. Hadsell provided an overview of the impact CVC-OEI is having in the California Community College system to increase student access to high quality, fully supported courses. This includes increasing the number of quality badged online courses through local Peer Online Course Review (POCR) and the expansion of the CVC Exchange Cross Enrollment Link (ExCEL).

The growth in attendance, however, did not come from our online audience. Rather, it is attributed to the significant increase in the number of colleges that coordinated a group viewing room. In 2018, 32 colleges held a group viewing room (and we also had 5 regional hubs). In 2019, we chose to eliminate the hubs and focus on providing more support resources for group viewing room coordinators. In 2019, the number of viewing rooms increased to 65 (a 103% increase).

Within the attendee demographics, we saw the largest increases in full-time faculty (639, 37% increase from 2018), part-time faculty (493, 32% increase from 2018), and administrators (101, 30% increase from 2018) and a 16% increase in classified staff (147). These numbers demonstrate the value of free, online professional development.

Here is a detailed overview of the attendance data from Can•Innovate 2019 if you'd like to dig in deeper.

Thank you to everyone who played a role in the success of Can•Innovate this year. We had excellent speakers who volunteered their time to share their teaching practices, as well as session hosts and co-hosts (including many volunteers from colleges), behind the scenes support members, and a statewide advisory committee who worked tirelessly to coordinate the event.

How One Educator Attended a Conference ... while in labor!

Last October, Ali Olson-Pacheco, an Instructional Technologist and Designer at Ventura College, received the weekly email communications counting down the days to Can•Innovate. Ali was excited about Can•Innovate, which is an annual free, online conference for Canvas users in the California Community College system coordinated by @ONE, the professional development team for CVC-OEI. Ali was excited about the idea of attending Can•Innovate with her colleagues in the Ventura College viewing room; however, she had one commitment that was a bit more important. Ali was pregnant and Can•Innovate was the same day as her due date.

Ali and her daughter almost one year later.

“I had serious FOMO. I really wanted to be there but also knew it was unlikely that I would be able to,” Ali shared. As the big day got closer, she registered for a few sessions thinking if she did go into labor, viewing the sessions from her laptop in the comfort of her home would be a good way to distract her from the stages of early labor. Although she wouldn’t be in person with her peers, she would still be able to be part of the event. Well, it happened. When Can•Innovate started, so did Ali’s labor. She stuck with her plan and attended sessions during the day before she went to the hospital. Ali recalled one session she attended in which John Lacivita, one of the speakers of the Namecoach session, presented from his newborn’s nursery. She shared, “I enjoyed learning about Namecoach, which my college had just implemented, and it was also nice to attend a conference and see the human side of a presenter like that.”

As the day progressed, so did Ali’s labor and she went to the hospital before the conference ended. Her healthy daughter was born the next afternoon at 2pm. While Ali was on leave from her role at Ventura, she watched several of the conference archives. “I wasn’t required to watch the recordings. I was just really interested in the topics and wanted to learn about them. It was nice to come back from maternity leave with some new ideas inspired by Can•Innovate,” she shared.

Equitable Professional Development

Professional development is key to spreading effective practices and inspiring educators to make changes in how they teach. But relatively few educators possess the resources to travel to conferences. Ali’s story highlights the importance of providing untethered professional development opportunities for faculty and staff that remove time and place as barriers. Last year, more than 1,100 people attended Can•Innovate -- from college campuses, family rooms, the beach, coffee shops, and beyond. And the archives have been viewed 2,000 times in the ten months following the 2018 event.

Get Ready for Can•Innovate 2019

We hope Ali’s story inspires you as much as it has inspired us. We also hope it gets you excited to attend Can•Innovate this year on Friday, October 25, 2019. FREE registration is now open! And there's still time to host a viewing room on your campus. 

Student-Student Interactions Professional Development Guide

Learning is a social process. That's why active learning has long been touted as an exemplary instructional approach for college classes -- whether they're taught in a traditional classroom or online. It's also why student-student interactions are part of the CVC-OEI Online Course Design Rubric and are now part of the Title 5 Education Code for California Community College Distance Education courses (Instructor Contact, Section 55204). Peer-to-peer interaction is foundational to developing a sense of community in your online courses. But meaningful interactions don't just happen; they are fostered through effective course design and teaching.

Neuroscientists like Antonio Demasio have shown that thinking and feeling are not distinct processes. Rather, feelings directly impact human reasoning and behavior. Thinking and feeling are inseparable from one another. And if you apply that to the way you teach, you'll notice big shifts in your students' engagement. Research shows that online classes can make some students feel more isolated, which can further exacerbate the feelings of stress and marginalization that many community college students experience. Throughout their lives, many of our students have been informed through the media and other messages that they're not cut out for college. It's your job to let them know, "I believe in you. You've got this." Just like in your face-to-face classes, validating your online students and establishing that your class is a safe place are the first steps to establishing a sense of belonging for your students (Rendón, 1994).

Providing low-stake opportunities that enable students to draw upon the wealth of experiences they bring to your class is also key. Doing so demonstrates that you value your students' diverse experiences and perspectives, as noted in the Peralta Equity Rubric. As students share what's meaningful to themselves, they will feel more included in your class and will also recognize things they have in common with their peers. When names on a screen begin to transform into human beings with rich stories, your class is on its way to becoming a community.

To support you in your efforts to foster student-student interactions and build community in your online courses, CVC-OEI/@ONE has developed a Student-Student Interactions Professional Development Guide, which you'll find embedded at the top of this page. We've shared the guide with a Creative Commons-Attribution (CC-BY) license and provided it in Google Slides format to make it easy for you to copy, adapt, and re-use as you'd like. In the guide, you'll find:

Leave a comment below to let us know what you think and how you plan to use the guide or share your favorite strategy for fostering meaningful interaction in your online course.

Present at Can•Innovate 2019 - no travel required!

Can-Innovate brought to you by the CVC-OEI. Free Online Conference. Submit Your Proposal by August 20th.
Fabiola Torrres' 2018 presentation projected on a screen in a campus viewing room.
Fabiola Torres presenting online at Can•Innovate 2018.

Can•Innovate 2019 is scheduled for October 25, 2019, and we're ready to make this year's event bigger and better than last year but we need your help! Can•Innovate, a free, one-day conference supporting faculty and staff at the 114 California Community Colleges that use Canvas (registration is also open to the general public). Last year, more than 1,100 people joined in for a collaborative day of sharing and learning. Participants have the option to attend online from anywhere or on-campus from a group viewing room so mark your calendar today and start preparing your proposal.

The Call for Proposals for Can•Innovate is now open -- here's your chance to reach inside your bag of tricks and share a course design or teaching practice in a brief Lightning Round or a more detailed Share Showcase. All sessions are delivered online so there's no need for travel funding -- or a suitcase! Take a peek at last year's program for a little inspiration.

Announcing our Keynote Speaker

Kona Jones Bio Pic

Kona Jones, Director of Online Learning at Richland Community College will kick off our program with an inspirational presentation, Integrating Compassion into Your Teaching. Kona is responsible for the development of faculty and student technology training materials, provides instructional design support to faculty, oversees the assessment of online courses, and facilitates faculty professional development. Kona loves teaching and is an adjunct instructor of statistics and developmental psychology. Her passion is student success and in 2019 she was awarded Adjunct Faculty of the Year. Kona is also a Canvas Coach and Canvassador, contributing extensively in the online Canvas Community and elsewhere.

Registration will open in September when the full program is announced. If you have any questions about Can•Innovate, let us know!

Recap of CCC Digital Learning Day 2019

CCC Digital Learning Day 2-28-19

One year ago, CVC-OEI/@ONE held our first free, online conference, CCC Digital Learning Day. On February 28, 2019, this event was held for a second time. Our move away from individual webinars to full day, online conferences has yielded many benefits, summarized here.

CCC Digital Learning Day (CCCDLDay) 2019 was the California Community College's celebration of Digital Learning Day, an international educational event comprised of pop-up programs around the world. Our program, guided by a systemwide advisory committee, was designed around the theme of exploring digital literacies across the curriculum. CCCDLDay is distinct from our annual fall online conference, Can•Innovate, which focuses on supporting the use of Canvas across the California Community College system. For CCCDLDay, we aim to bring educators into a mindful consideration of the many opportunities and challenges that digital learning brings to our mission to prepare students for a successful life. This year, the program was designed to be provocative and raise questions that don't always have answers. And, like all of our conferences, we strived to ensure student voices remained at the center of our inquiry.

The Highlights

The 2019 program included 15 speakers including a keynote presentation, Create: Igniting Our Collective Imagination, by Bonni Stachowiak, host of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast. A full day of sessions followed, featuring the teaching and learning innovations of CCC faculty and students, including an inspirational student panel moderated by professor Fabiola Torres from Glendale Community College. Matt Mooney, History Professor at Santa Barbara Community College, presented with his former online student, Amber Greene. In Making Creativity SPARKle, the two reflected on the impact of Matt's choice to transform a summative assessment in the course into a student-generated video about a historical topic. Donna Caldwell, from Adobe, shared a demo of Adobe Spark, providing attendees with the how-to knowledge for Matt's innovative practice. Librarians, Cynthia Orozco of East Los Angeles College and Aloha Sargent of Cabrillo College, examined the need for information literacy to be embedded in Canvas courses and shared examples of open educational resources available for use in Canvas. The day wrapped up with two sessions that took us back outside of Canvas and invited participants to join in on "Create" challenges. Chelsea Cohen of Laney College and Gena Estep from Folsom Lake College demonstrated creative uses of Twitter that engage students in networked, global learning. Last, but not least, Liz du Plessis from Barstow Community College and the California Online Community College presented alongside Mayra Avila, one of Liz's online students, and shared how she uses Google Maps to foster collaborative, contextual learning of historical content -- and everyone in the audience had a chance to drop their own pin on a map too. Search the Canvas Commons with "CCCDLDay" and discover a few golden nuggets shared during the day!

The Growth

We saw significant growth from last year in many areas.

Download the full CCCDLDay 2019 report.

Thank you for making CCC Digital Learning Day a success. Mark your calendars for Can•Innovate, our next free online conference, on Friday, October 25, 2019. The Call for Proposals opens next week!

Register Now for CCC Digital Learning Day: Free, Online Conference

In October, more than 1,100 educators across California's community colleges and beyond joined us for Can•Innovate. We are happy to announce that our next free, online conference, CCC Digital Learning Day is now open for registration!

#CCCDLDay, brought to you by CVC-OEI/@ONE, is the California Community College's contribution to the national Digital Learning Day effort. Our theme for 2019 is Exploring Digital Literacies Across the Curriculum. The program has been crafted to engage you and your peers in a day of experimentation and creation, as we rethink and refocus our traditional notions of literacy and imagine how we might teach new digital literacies in all disciplines. You'll see teaching innovations that use Adobe Spark Video, Twitter, and Google Maps and Tour Builder to assess student learning, make relevant connections with content, and engage students in meaningful dialogue. Our day also includes a session led by librarians about information literacy and 3 sessions that include student speakers (hooray!).

Register for one or two sessions or join us for the entire day -- from anywhere. All sessions are delivered online in Zoom so you don't have to worry about traveling!

Program Overview

Our event kicks off on Thursday, February 28, 2019 at 9am PT with a keynote presentation, Create: Igniting our Collective Imagination, by Bonni Stachowiak, host of the popular podcast, Teaching in Higher Ed, and Director of the Institute for Faculty Development at Vanguard University.

The remainder of our morning program includes two sessions that will take you on a deep dive of Adobe Spark Video, a free, easy-to-use video creation tool. At 10:00 Matt Mooney, faculty at Santa Barbara Community College, will join us with one of his students, Amber Greene, to share how he is using Spark Video to transform his tests from drab to dazzle! After Matt and Amber's session, you'll have the opportunity to see a demo of Adobe Spark Video by Donna Caldwell, from Adobe Education. Donna will entice you to participate in our CCCDLDay Create Challenge too. Join in for a chance to win a cool prize from Adobe! We've intentionally left the lunch hour open to encourage you to dabble with Adobe Spark Video and get started on your video creation.

Our afternoon program kicks off with a student panel at 1pm, hosted by Fabiola Torres from Glendale College. Student panels are always the highlight of any event so we're considering this a must attend session for everyone! At 2pm, we're joined by Cynthia Mari Orozco, from East Los Angeles College, and Aloha Sargent, of Cabrillo College, two librarians who will present, Scaffolding Information Literacy in Canvas.

Our final two presentations feature more teaching and learning innovations and one more student too! At 3pm, Chelsea Cohen of Laney College and Gena Estep of Folsom Lake College will showcase how they are each using Twitter for Networked Global Learning. Their examples will redefine formative assessment as you know it and illuminate a whole new way to think about hashtags and brief messages. Finally, at 4pm, Liz du Plessis, from Barstow College and the California Online College, and her student, Mayra Avila, will be our guides for Mapping Content and Contexts with My Maps and Tour Builder by Google. That's right! Google Maps can do a lot more than help you get to your next destination. It can also foster real-world connections in your courses.

Excited? We are too. Share your excitement by sending a Tweet with the #CCCDLDay hashtag.

If your college is not yet hosting an on-campus viewing room for CCC Digital Learning Day, sign up now! Viewing sessions and creating content with your peers is an awesome way to learn and grow. But if you aren't on campus, no worries. #CCCDLDay is designed to support you no matter where you are.