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!

View all of our PocketPD Guides

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.

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. 

Register Now!

What's New with @ONE - the Online Network of Educators?

Happy New Year!!

Yes, that is what I meant to write. I know it’s July, but we operate on a July-June fiscal year, so this is the time the @ONE (Online Network of Educators) team reflects on last year’s work and gets ready to tackle a new set of goals. And we couldn’t be happier that we are entering the new year with two new instructional designers - Liz du Plessis and Shawn Valcárcel!

Liz du Plessis was the instructional designer at Santa Rosa Junior College for three years before more recently working for the fully online college (“CalBright”). Liz has been active with @ONE as a facilitator and presenter and is also an adjunct history instructor. Shawn Valcárcel comes to us from Mt. San Jacinto College, where he worked as an instructional designer. He is also a part-time online music instructor and has worked with @ONE in the past. Shawn and Liz join our current Instructional Designers, Helen Graves and Cheryl Chapman. You can see profiles and contact info for all of our team on our website. 

Highlights from Last Year

Thanks to the hard work of our entire PD team and the CCC educators who facilitate our courses, contribute to Pocket PD articles, and serve as course reviewers, we were able to bring you the following in 2018-2019:  

A Look Ahead

And those are just some of the things our team has been working on! Here are two more:

Adoptable @ONE Courses are now in the Canvas Commons

Many of you have asked for copies of our courses so that you can use them as part of your local professional development programs. Helen Graves has been hard at work to respond to this need. Thanks to Helen, you can now find nearly a dozen CVC-OEI/@ONE adoptable courses in the Canvas Commons, including some of our most requested four-week courses, courses to support peer online course review and use of the rubric, and the self-paced accessibility courses brought to us by the CCC Accessibility Center. To find these adopable courses:

Please note: Our adoptable courses are licensed with CC-BY license, which means you're free to adapt them provided you attribute CVC-OEI.

*If you do not see a link to the “Commons” in your Canvas menu, contact your campus Canvas Admin to request that this feature be enabled.

New Names for Our Certificates

@ONE has gone through changes over the last three years, and so have our certificate programs. Several years ago,  we replaced the original Online Teaching Certification with the Course Design Fundamentals Certificate. In 2017, we also introduced a second certificate in Online Teaching Principles. Since then, we have heard from many folks that it’s no longer clear which certificate is the right one to use for “certifying” faculty to teach online, or which one DE Coordinators should recommend to new faculty. 

We hope these small changes we’ve made to the names will help clear up any confusion:

Certificate in Online Teaching & Design

Formerly: Certificate in Course Design Fundamentals

We recommend this program for preparing/certifying faculty to teach online and to prepare staff and instructional designers who support online teaching. The certificate prepares participants to develop and teach effective, interactive, and accessible courses that promote student retention and success. 

Cheryl Chapman is leading a project this summer to redesign the 12-week Online Teaching and Design (OTD) course. It will continue to be one option for participants to earn the certificate, although Online Teaching and Design course may have a new name after the redesign! Look for a launch of the updated “OTD” in the fall. 

Advanced Certificate in Online Teaching Principles

We’ve added “Advanced” to the title of this certificate to reflect that we recommend this certificate for experienced online teachers, DE support staff, and instructional designers who are ready to explore how their humanized presence in the course along with culturally responsive and dynamic teaching practices can positively impact students.

Join Us!

While you are learning more about our certificate program, we invite you to put in your proposal for Can•Innovate 2019 and mark your calendars for October 25! Also, see what your CCC colleagues are talking about on Twitter using the hashtag #CCCLearn.

There are so many great things happening in our system right now and we want you to be a part of the conversation!

4 Ways to Make Sure Students Are Watching Your Videos

Was your college education largely spent sitting in lecture halls and classrooms listening to professors talk (…and talk…and talk)? Even if that works in face-to-face situations—and research is showing otherwise—it’s not going to fly in the asynchronous world of online learning. So, what’s an online instructor to do? Watch this and find out!

Want More Ideas?

Here are my top 3 resources for you.

You’ll find consistent themes running through all these (like keep it short!) but each resource has its own flavor and offers new tidbits for you.

Student-Student Interactions Professional Development Guide

Make your own copy.

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.

Get tips for writing a great proposal.

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!

Get updates

Why Group Assignments Are Worth Your Attention

The newly-released updates to Title 5 regulations for online learning include a specific requirement of regular effective contact among students.

It’s time to move beyond discussions and embrace the wealth of benefits collaborative learning experiences provide to students (and instructors). C’mon, I dare ya!

Resources

A nice series from Carnegie Mellon University

Other helpful ideas and guidelines

10 Research-Based Steps for Effective Group Work

Online Students Don’t Have to Work Solo

How to Design Effective Online Group Work Activities

I've developed a "plug 'n' play" module on using groups that you can include as a resource for your students. It also has a list of all the Canvas Guides for instructors on using groups. Do a search in the Canvas Commons for Group Project resources (the course card is a pile of Labrador puppies).

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!

View the CCCDLDay archives!

Two Canvas Blunders You Can Easily Avoid!

Did you know there’s a “wrong” way to add content onto a Canvas page? This little mistake is often the cause of broken links when you import your content into the next semester’s course shell. Come learn the best method for adding images, files and links in Canvas. (And the secret of what to do if your images suddenly aren’t displaying correctly.)

An Equitable Ice Breaker Using Google Maps

Does your online ice breaker need a refresh? Chelsea Cohen has a great idea that will get your students connected and take the edge off the start of a new course!

In the 4-minute video embedded above, she will take you on a tour of her course and show you how she blends a Canvas Discussion with an interactive Google Map to create a 2-part assignment. Her students, who are English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) learners, drop a pin on a Google Map that designates their home town and add a photo of that location. As you will see, the map transforms into a contextual representation of the students’ backgrounds, inviting them to share meaningful experiences.

If you use Google Maps in your course, include a link to Google's Accessibility in Google Maps page to ensure all your students can engage with the content. And offer an alternative pathway for students to contribute their content if they experience challenges.

Let Chelsea be your guide -- click the video above and enjoy the ride!