Instructional Technology Guides for Faculty
Reach Self-Paced Online Teaching Training
This self-paced training course helps you learn how to begin building an accessible course that keeps you engaged with your students and offers students a rich and organized learning experience.
At the conclusion of this training, you should be able to:
- Build at least 30% of at least one of your upcoming online courses.
- Implement accessibility and regular effective contact guidelines in Canvas.
- Use the OEI Course Design Rubric to guide the design of your online course.
What is the Online Education Initiative (OEI)?
The California Virtual Campus – Online Education Initiative (CVC-OEI) is a collaborative effort among California Community Colleges (CCCs) to ensure that significantly more students are able to complete their educational goals by increasing both access to and success in high-quality online courses (copied from the OEI Course Design Guide).
CVC-OEI Course Design Rubric
The CVC-OEI Course Design Rubric contains the online course design standards developed and adopted by the CVC-OEI. The Rubric is intended to establish standards relating to course design, interaction and collaboration, assessment, learner support, and accessibility in order to ensure the provision of a high-quality learning environment that promotes student success and conforms to existing regulations.
The CVC-OEI Course Design Rubric is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 International License.
Peralta Equity Rubric
The Peralta Equity Rubric is an addition to the OEI Rubric, that can also serve as a valuable guide as you build your course. It is a research-based course (re)design evaluation instrument to help teachers make online course experiences more equitable for all students. The rubric’s criteria include: addressing students’ access to technology and different types of support (both academic and non-academic); increasing the visibility of the instructor’s commitment to inclusion; addressing common forms of bias (e.g., image and representation bias, interaction bias); helping students make connections (e.g., between course topics and their lives; with the other students); and following universal design for learning principles.
Additional Resources
- 4 Expert Strategies for Designing an Online Course from Inside Higher Education
- Actively Engaging Students in Asynchronous Online Classes
- Synchronous Online Classes: 10 Tips for Engaging Students from Faculty Focus
- The 10 Biggest Myths About Synchronous Online Teaching from Educause
- Best Practices in Designing Online Courses from Las Positas College
- Set Up Your Course Structure
- Consider importing our Reach course template to save you time on your course build. Import the template from the Canvas Commons by searching ‘Reach template’.
- Import previous course content from a previous semester if needed.
- Customize Course Navigation Menu (3 minutes) – Reduce the areas of your course that students can access to simplify navigation and keep students from viewing items in your course that they don’t need to.
- View Your Course as a Student (4 minutes) – This process allows you to see your course as your students will.
- Check for Broken Links – Canvas’ Link Validator helps you check all the links in your course at a glance for issues.
- Publish Items, Modules, & Your Course (3 minutes) – Publish the parts of your course that students need to see and remember to publish your course itself when you’re ready for students to see it.
- Manage Course Start & End Dates (3 minutes) – Check when your course is visible to students and make any changes to that availability that you need.
- Send Students a Welcome Email and/or Announcement – Before your course begins, send students a message introducing yourself, and letting them know how they can access the course and what they need to do first to start the course.
Canvas is our Learning Management System (LMS). This is where all of our courses are hosted and where all of your interaction with students takes place.
Logging In to Canvas
- Faculty, Staff and Students can access our instance of Canvas at https://reachinst.instructure.com/.
- Login with your Reach email address (@reach.edu, @my.reach.edu, or @reachinst.org).
- Your password will be your SonisWeb password with ‘CV’ in front, so if your SonisWeb password is ‘123456’, then your Canvas password is ‘CV123456’.
- If you ever have any trouble logging in to Canvas, you can always click ‘Forgot Password?’ and a password reset email will be sent to your Reach email.
Getting Started in Canvas
Customizing the Course Navigation Menu (3 minutes)
Managing Course Start & End Dates (3 minutes)
How do term dates, course dates, and section dates work in Canvas?
Publish & Unpublish As Needed (3 minutes)
Tips & Tricks
Ending Your Canvas Course
Getting Canvas Help
- When logged into Canvas, click on “help” located in the left margin to access the Helpline.
- Phone: 877-308-9004
- Live chat with Canvas support:
- Chat (Faculty & Staff): https://bit.ly/
facultycanvassupport - Chat (Students): https://bit.ly/
studentcanvassupport
- Chat (Faculty & Staff): https://bit.ly/
Additional Resources
Logging in to Zoom
- Step 1 – Activate Your Account: A Zoom Account Activation email was went to your Reach email address. In this email, click Activate Account to access your Reach Zoom account.
- Step 2 – Sign In to Your Account Online: You can login to your Zoom account on the web at any time to access your profile and other settings, at zoom.us/signin. Once you’re logged in, use the panel on the left side to navigate the Zoom web portal. You can update your profile, schedule a meeting, edit your settings, and more.
- Step 3 – Add Zoom to Your Canvas Courses: Add Zoom to your Canvas courses and schedule course meetings there, so that students see your Zoom meetings in the Canvas calendar and receive announcements when meetings are created.
- In addition to scheduling Zoom meetings through Canvas, we also recommend sending students the meeting dates, times, Join links and meeting reminders via Canvas Announcements as well.
- Step 4 – Download Zoom: You can download the Zoom Desktop Client for Mac, Windows, ChromeOS and Linux, as well as the Zoom Mobile App for iOS and Android from our Downloads page
Getting Help with Zoom
Login to your Zoom account at zoom.us and click the chat icon at the bottom right corner of your screen. You can also find helpful guides and video on the Zoom Support Portal.
Video Guides
- 5 Tips for Successfully Hosting a Meeting on Zoom (4 minutes)
- How to Record Zoom Meetings (3 minutes)
- How to Share Recordings (3 minutes) – Remember to use your @reach.edu, or @reachinst.org account to login to YouTube.
- Securing Your Meetings & Virtual Classrooms (7 minutes)
Written Guides
How to Create a Turnitin Assignment