MCC’s CTL will offer several workshops to support faculty and staff with best practices for instruction and work routines. Topics include Foundations of Course Design, Canvas tools (beginner and intermediate), and Change in Practice with Google applications. This fall the CTL will also offer accessibility training for all faculty. Departments have been designated two training dates in a given week for all residential and adjunct faculty to attend one training. Techniques from this training should be applied to all instructional design and will be useful during the Canvas course audit for accessibility. Workshop details are available on the CTL calendar.
Join us for Lunch & Learn: Spanish on Mondays and Thursdays this semester starting on August 29th in AS191. This informal workshop is offered to all MCC faculty and staff. Drop-in anytime and bring a sack lunch to learn and practice conversational Spanish.
OER (Open Educational Resources) hold great promise for reducing costs and increasing access to required course materials. Community colleges around the country (Washington, California, Virginia) have joined in with national efforts to increase the production and use of OER materials. Washington’s OER project saved students over $1.25 million in just the 2011-12 academic year, and over $5.5 million since 2011.
The main goal of the Maricopa Millions Open Education Resources (OER) Project is to reduce educational costs for students. Spending less money on textbooks and materials will foster greater access to materials for students, which may enable them to stay on track with completing their courses.
The Maricopa Millions OER Project includes developing a strategic, sustainable OER infrastructure that would include: awareness, professional development, OER development and technical support, marketing and technical structure. In order for OER to be successful at MCCCD, we have established an OER strategic planning and implementation team to establish and oversee specific OER outcomes over the next 5 years.
The driving objective for the project is to save MCCCD students $5 Million Dollars over the next five years through the use of OER materials. And we’ve already reached our goal in 2 1/2 years, but we’re not stopping there.
This Maricopa Millions OER project, through an internal grant process, supports the adoption, adaptation, and development of complete OER course materials for high enrollment courses in the MCCCD. The final product will be OER course materials that can be easily adopted and modified by other faculty (including adjuncts) teaching that course. Phase 1-3 targeted high enrollment courses. In Phase 4-5 we welcomed all courses to be submitted for the grant.
In Phase 6 we continue to welcome all courses to be submitted for the grant. However, most math courses and the following courses (ENG091, ENG101, ENG102, RDG091, CHM130LL, GBS151, PSY101, PSY230, BIO156, CHM130, CHM150/151/152, HES100, and SWU292) are not eligible, as they have already been funded and/or developed.
Astatement of interestis requested by 5pm on Wednesday, February 17, 2016. If submitted, this information will be used to introduce faculty who may have interests in creating the same course in an effort to encourage collaboration. The statement of interest is not required but strongly encouraged.
Proposals are due by 5pmon Wednesday, March 9, 2016. Group proposals will be accepted and are encouraged.
Grant proposals are now being accepted for OER Development Grants. For more information regarding the OER Development Grant program, please visit our website .
Register TODAY! MCC’s CTL will offer workshops as part of the MCCCD Spring Trainings Series. Collect tickets, trade cards and take souvenirs for teaching and learning back to your classroom. Workshop details are available on the CTL calendar. The CTL is featuring the OER Ideation Circle during the spring semester. Participate on the main campus and MCC-RDM CTL as scheduled on Mondays. Afternoon sessions available on Tuesdays. Ideation Circles provide space to collectively explore educational topics.
The CTL will be featuring an OER Ideation Circle during the Spring semester. Ideation Circles require a small group of faculty or staff from any area of the college who come together for at least a semester to discuss a teaching and learning topic that they can delve deeply into during group discussions. Annapurna Ganesh and other Education Studies faculty have formed an ideation circle on the topic of Open Educational Resources (OERs).
You are invited to explore and learn about OERs. The group intends to meet regularly (twice a month) in the CTL to exchange and share ideas. The same ideation circle will be offered at two different times Mon 10:15 – 11 and Tues 4:30 – 5:15, you are welcome to choose either time to participate.
See the CTL calendar for the dates of the OER Featured Ideation Circle. The first session will be offered on February 8 or 9. Bring your questions, resources and ideas as we discover OERs together. We will be meeting in the CTL lobby at the Southern & Dobson campus. MCC-RDM faculty will be meeting in the CTL spot located in the PV instructional support room (adjunct office area).
In an effort to help instructors learn more about why students are withdrawing from their courses the eLearning Committee is making available a ‘withdraw survey’. Instructors maintain their own surveys along with student responses using Google Drive. In addition to improving their own courses based on this feedback, instructors can choose to share this information with the eLearning director who, along with the eLearning committee, can look for trends and identify possible solutions for improving student success.
Preview The Withdraw Survey
Instructions
Login to the Google account you wish to add the form to.
Enter a name for your response spreadsheet and click ‘OK’. (This will create your own copy in your Google Drive which you can edit and where your students’ responses will be kept.)
Go to your Google Drive and open the response spreadsheet you just copied. (Normally this will open up automatically when you create your own copy.)
From the spreadsheet menu select ‘Form’ and then ‘Edit form’. (This will create and open the form which you can edit. This is the form students will see when they complete the survey.)
Add your course sections and make other edits as you see fit.
When you have completed editing, click the ‘Send form’ button (top right) to send your students a link to the survey. You can also copy the link and paste it into emails or other documents for student access.
Calling all faculty! The “some day when we leave WebCT” is drawing near! It is finally time to leave the Jurassic Era that is WebCT and move into the 21st Century – enter, Canvas!
In September the governing board approved the RFP award for the new Learning Management System to a company called Instructure with their LMS, Canvas. MCC has been selected as the first Maricopa school to move to this new system. As part of the migration from WebCT to Canvas the CTL will run two different programs in an effort to work collaboratively with the college and the unique needs of each department and hopefully, ease the migration process for everyone. Currently we anticipate that all faculty will be using the Canvas system beginning Summer I, 2012.
Canvas Pioneer Program
Summary: The Canvas Pioneer Program is a voluntary program with no stipend given. Faculty that are teaching a late-start spring course beginning no earlier than March of 2012 may apply to this program. The 25-30 faculty that are selected will receive early training and access to the production system and will be the first faculty teaching within the new Canvas LMS. They will be asked to share feedback on their migration / transition to Canvas, they will be asked to complete a survey about the training, migration, and teaching process, and they will be asked to deliver a survey to their students asking for feedback.
Selection will be based on uniqueness, discipline/department, technologies, and teaching and learning techniques so that we may fully test as many aspects of the new system as possible. A variety of departments is desired so that we can ensure we test the system early with your departments unique online teaching and learning needs.
Canvas Pioneer Application for Late-Start Spring 2012:http://tinyurl.com/canvaspioneer
Applications will be accepted until November 17th, 2011 at 5pm.
Canvas Faculty Mentoring Program
Summary: The Canvas Faculty Mentoring Program is a program for residential faculty with a maximum stipend of $2000. The selected “faculty mentors” would be given training and access to the Canvas system first so that they could help support other faculty during the migration process. These mentors will be used to staff Canvas open labs and to be liasions within your departments to ensure that all faculty have the support they need during this transition. Currently we anticipate that all faculty will be using the Canvas system beginning Summer I, 2012.
Faculty Mentor responsibilities include:
Completing Canvas and/or Quality Matters training sessions,
Staffing 3 open labs a month from March 2012 through September 2012 (inclusive of summer)
Communicating Canvas updates to their assigned departments/chairs.
Selection will be based on location/department/discipline, availability during the summer months, experience in the current LMS, and experience with the Quality Matters rubric.
Canvas Faculty Mentoring Application:http://tinyurl.com/canvasmentor
Applications will be accepted until November 17th, 2011 at 5pm.
Questions? Concerns? Please contact the CTL: ctl@mesacc.edu or 480-461-7331.
The Gold Star Pilot is getting ready to begin. A faculty selection committee met to review the 25 Gold Star applications using the rubric presented at the Gold Star website. The following courses were anonymously selected for participation in Track 1, the Gold Star Pilot Redesign Program:
CIS 105 – Chris Held
PSY 132 – Maria Chavira
CIS 162 AD – Juan Marquez
CIS 233 DA – Lo-An Tabar-Gaul
PHI 101 – Sandra Woien
SPA 102 – Elizabeth Atencia-Oliden
MHL 153 – Kelly Lake
MAT 121 – Shawn Wood, Kimberly Johnson, Karen Appel
The following faculty members are serving as Mentors to the above course designers:
Many readers might have wondered where we were during the posts in between November and the start of Spring Semester. We had a little challenge with our blog software, but we are obviously back online now, thanks to James Bowles who has been serving as our new Systems Administrator.
As for myself, I’ve been very busy since returning to the CTL after a semester-long sabbatical leave to finish a master’s degree in Educational Technology at ASU. It’s done and I’m back and although I’ve been really struggling to find time to do everything I want to as well as serve the needs of the CTL faculty it’s been fun.
