If you're like many faculty, you've probably noticed the sharp increase in courses being offered online. This shift into the online learning space, especially after the pandemic, has made it possible for students to learn in more ways than just sitting in a classroom. It opens the door for students balancing work, family, and other responsibilities, but it has also brought new challenges for faculty as we think about how to design engaging and effective courses.

Thankfully, here at Mt. SAC we have a small but dedicated team called the Faculty Center for Learning Technology, or FCLT. In this episode we talk with them about course design tools, video options, and strategies that help make online and hybrid learning work well for students.

While teaching online can be challenging, it is also worth the effort when it expands access and supports student success. The FCLT team also invites faculty to stop by, connect, and take advantage of the support they offer.

Resources:

Canvas Faculty Center: https://mtsac.instructure.com/enroll/RLCAAP

FCLT Website: https://www.mtsac.edu/fclt/

FCLT Appointment Maker: https://outlook.office365.com/book/[email protected]

Accessibility Canvas Center: http://bit.ly/MtSAC-Fast5

Canvas Studio Guide: https://community.instructure.com/en/kb/canvas-studio-guide

Cidi Labs Guide: https://www.mtsac.edu/studio13/dlmd/canvas_themes_templates.html

Run time: 18 min, 08 sec

To Find the full transcript for this episode click HERE

We're kind of like an editor is to an author. We're just trying to help you make your work the best of what your goal is. And so people often return because, you know, it's like a very constructive relationship to help somebody figure out how to do what they wanted to do in their class. And it can be very empowering to realize, oh, there's a way faster way to do this thing that I've been doing the long way.

Welcome to the Mount San Antonio College Podcast. I'm Chisa Uyeki, a Mt. SAC professor and librarian, and I'm pleased to be your host for this season. Our goal is to keep you connected to our campus by bringing you the activities and events you may not have time to attend, to share the interesting things our colleagues are creating and innovative ways they are supporting and connecting with Mt. SAC students. Join me as we explore Mt. Sac.

If you're like many faculty, you've probably noticed a sharp increase in courses being offered online. This shift into the online learning space, especially after the pandemic, has made it possible for students to learn in more ways than just sitting in a classroom. It opens the door for students balancing work, family, and other responsibilities, but it also brings along new challenges for faculty. As we think about how to design engaging and effective courses. Thankfully, here at Mt. Sac, we have a small but dedicated team called the Faculty Center for Learning Technology, or FCLT. In this episode, we talk with them about course design tools, video options, and strategies that help make online and hybrid learning work well for students. While teaching online can be challenging, it is also worth the effort when it expands access and supports student success.

The FCLT team also invites faculty to stop by, connect, and take advantage of the support they offer. Let's jump into our conversation with the FCLT.

So I'm sitting here with the members of the Faculty Center for Learning Technology, and we're just going to have them introduce themselves.

Hi everybody, my name is Hugo Aguilera, Applications Training Specialist from the FCL team.

Hello, I'm Michelle Newhart. I'm an instructional designer in the FCLT.

Hi, I'm Eva Figueroa, also an instructional designer in FCLT.

So maybe you can tell us a little bit about what the FCLT does and how you support faculty with their online courses.

The way we support faculty tends to be trying to train the trainer. We want to help faculty learn the tools in a way that supports good pedagogy. And that meets all the rules, and then kind of beyond that to use their imagination to make the best course that they can with what is available. We also do a lot of things that are meant to be passive resources, so we keep all of that stuff, we write it and maintain it, we think about ways that we can communicate that will reach faculty through newsletters and things like that, and then we do a lot of behind-the-scenes infrastructure for everything to do with Canvas and with distance learning.

So from your perspective, what have been some of the major changes when it comes to learning online, whether that's students' expectations or how faculty have had to adjust to teach with these new tools that are available? If you could speak on that a little bit.

I don't think it's been published yet, but I've heard it in a couple of committee meetings and workgroup things that the student survey that was given through research, one of the things that came back out of that was that students really like video content and especially videos made from PowerPoint into interactive things. And I think it kind of ties into RSI, actually, regular and substantive interaction, like this idea that adding more interactivity into the course, adding, adding questions into a rich content element, something like a video, really helps students know what they're supposed to focus on. And, you know, if you do your questions in such a way that you're helping them focus and target the right things to actually pay attention to, you're adding sort of the lens of your discipline in watching that video through what you're contributing. And that's— that can be very helpful, especially with something where students have a lot of experience watching videos for entertainment, you know, but how do you watch it for learning, and those are a little different. And so making it interactive can really help them understand how to learn from the right dimensional things that you want them to take away from that video or to consider.

You just have to do little bits and keep doing those small changes every semester, and each time you're going to be making improvements that are going to positively impact your students.

Yeah, I am really glad you mentioned that. It doesn't have to happen all at once. You start with one visit, and maybe you figure out, OK, how do I record videos and include little quiz questions inside the video? And it just starts with one video. So we talked a little bit about the videos. Is there another small change that you see faculty make that has had a big payoff for students?

It's hard to pick one. But another tool that comes to mind that I want to highlight is CityLabs because it helps professors make their courses look nice, but it also has a lot of built-in features for accessibility and helping courses look consistent, features that help to orient students, that help to make a course more interactive for the students, um, going through the course. So I think Of all of the tools that we have available, that's possibly one of my favorites. That and Canvas Studio. City Labs as a company really puts a lot of thought into their tools. And, you know, they, they worked in a unit like ours when they first started. So they have that background that they put into designing their tools and making them really work and address the challenges that we face.

Let's actually listen in on a recording that you shared with me of where you sit down with the faculty to walk them through City Labs. Let's listen in and see what it's like to sit in on one of these one-on-one sessions.

Hi Franklin, how can I help you today?

Hi, I was wondering if you could show me a few tips in using City Labs. I'm having some difficulty with the new City Labs format from how I used it in the past, and I just wanted to see if you could show me on how to choose a template.

Of course. Oh, I love City Labs. I'm excited. I love meeting with professors about City Labs. Okay, so I'm going to click edit on this page. As you know, you can only get to City Labs when you're editing a page. Mm-hmm. So anywhere with a rich content editor will give you the option to use City Labs.

And then there, they did reorganize things quite a bit.. So if you want to edit, like one of the features that I use a lot is the changing the colors and the spacing. So you could either click on this little paint and then that opens up the style editor that allows me to change the color when I make it a blue color as the border. So then there's my blue around there. And if I wanted to change the picture, things like that.

So, okay. And the institutional images that were on that screen earlier when you were looking up the images. Yeah, that institutional last icon there. Are there going to be more put into the system? Are those updated regularly for faculty?

We can put more. So if you— if there's something different that you're looking for, let us know.

And yeah, I think it would be great to have more images of students in various tasks. Some of these are great. I love the cartoonish question bubbles and the puzzle pieces and Legos. And every now and then I want to get crazy and use the bananas or the avocado wallpaper. But at a certain point, I kind of struggle sometimes looking for a good image of a stock photo of students engaged in work, which is always a good thing to put at the top of a Canvas page.

Right. Yeah, that's a great idea. I'm adding— writing that down so I can follow up and look for more student images.

All right, that'd be great. Thank you so much.

You're welcome, thank you!

So that was really nice. It sounded like you walked a professor through City Labs that adds images, banners, and more visual elements to the pages that we create and assignments that we create. Are there other tools that come to mind that help our courses be more engaging to students?

Yeah, there's two come to mind that are related to video, there's Canvas Studio, which is like an all-in-one tool for recording videos, editing videos, storing— it has unlimited cloud storage— and also adding a few different types of interactions. Like they can add quizzing, students can comment on a video timeline, and professors can add in annotations.

And the quizzes can be built into the video at any point, whether it's at the, you know, a couple times in the middle or all at the end.

Yeah, at any point in the timeline, that's really cool. Instructors can add in questions. And then WeVideo is— it was formerly PlayPosit and now it's called WeVideo. And they also added in a studio recording studio in their tool as well. So that's very new. That just happened like before the start of the term.

Oh, that's cool.

So this—

how is WeVideo different from Canvas Studio?

So WeVideo has more types of interactions, and they also have different features that include like text-based information as well as a live broadcast feature where synchronous courses instructors can use it in their synchronous course to show a video and have the students interact with kind of like a Kahoot but with video. So it has more interactive options.

Have faculty given you any feedback on the importance of these tools at all?

I've definitely heard from the faculty who have gotten comments from their students. Oh, good, good. They like— the students appreciate the faculty when they make their videos.

Yeah, and then it's just all that work of like including quiz questions, and it makes it a lot— it seems a lot more interactive.

PlayLab is another one because they have built-in safeguards You know, for the privacy concerns.

Is that the one that's AI-based?

It is a custom AI bot maker, and it's built for educators by educators. It is free for Mt. Sac, California community colleges.

Awesome, okay.

Um, the chancellor's office had like started a partnership with them, and that's how we our team learned PlayLab. And then Mount Sac, one of the Mount Sac professors, Tiffany Kuo, who teaches music, got a grant for Mount Sac to have a partnership with PlayLab. And so the last year we had PlayLab-led cohorts for learning PlayLab.

And what have been some sort of some of the final products that people have created with PlayLab?

So there have been a wide variety of bots that they've made. PlayLab calls them apps. Some are student-facing. A lot of their instructors like to make, um, like I've seen syllabots so students can, you know, ask their questions to the syllabot, answer. They've done like, you know, little tutors for the course content. There have been some that are employee-facing. So like some, there was a department chair who did one as it was a chair bot. Interesting.

So it answered questions that the faculty would ask to the department chair.

And then I'm sure there had to be like a little disclaimer like, hey, verify this information.

Yes, all PlayLab apps say like AI makes mistakes. Sure. You know, please check, check for accuracy or whatever. Yeah, and there's, you know, people have used it for like the faculty and classified contract to help you find answers to your questions. So there's just so many like infinite uses and it's easy. Like that's one of my, was one of my concerns when I first learned it was like, I don't, I've never made a bot. I don't know how to do this.

And again, it sounds intimidating, but once you get into it, yeah, it can be actually kind of fun and interesting and actually support pedagogy in very meaningful ways. How can we start to kind of see this work as an investment? And especially let's bring in your— how your workshops can assist.

Yeah, we work with a lot of groups. Immediately coming to mind, our IT department, POD, shout out to them, by the way. I'll speak about in terms of making an investment, like the knowledge of learning Canvas, right? One thing about Canvas is that it doesn't have to be It doesn't have to be overwhelming to get into it. You can make it as simple or as complicated as you want. It's not just for online classes. So if you come to our training and you learn how to use these tools, you can learn as, or implement as little or as much as you'd like or you feel comfortable with. Canvas makes that simple in that you can build the course, you can then easily copy it over to a live course, iterate on it if you use a sandbox. If you go to the helpdesk.mtsac.edu, you can request as many sandboxes as you'd like really, which are empty course shells inside of Canvas that let you build stuff, let you learn, let you explore, let you experiment without anybody ever looking at what's going on in there that you could then very easily transfer to a live CRN course at a later date.

So it's, yeah, the tools are kind of set up so that you can really go in there and leverage the technology as much as you feel comfortable doing. And yeah, the more time you put in, the better things will look, the better things will operate, the better the student experience will be ultimately. You build knowledge and you build the confidence, and it's a good investment in your own time because technology can save you time in the long term.

Yeah, I'll just add that the students are their investment. That's why we're all here. We wouldn't be here. We wouldn't have jobs if it weren't for the students. Every bit that they improve in their course is an investment in their students. And I think coming back to their why, each instructor has a why, why they became instructors, why they continue teaching. So I think coming back to your why and reflecting on that can help you to, you know, reinvigorate, re-motivate you.

I think even when you know a lot about these tools, which all of us do, knowing it is one thing and implementing it is something else. And I mean, I can't stress enough that Courses are live things, you know, and it's always iterative. You're always kind of tweaking things, changing them a little as you go along. It's important to have that human-centered focus of it, like what's supporting your students, what's supporting equitable circumstances for your students in your online courses. You have to be invoking the students' why as well. And you have to remind them why they want to be there. I mean, this is an old-fashioned motivation thing, right? Your presence can become something that motivates them to impress you, to make a relationship with you, whatever it is. The research is pretty clear on that too, and their own reasons for being there and mastering that particular material.

And we know that that's accomplished better if they interact and have to do something active in their learning process. And so I think distance learning has moved much more in that direction, and we really want to help people create that kind of experience for students because we know it helps with retention and success.

Yeah, I love that. And I just want to once again encourage everybody to come visit the FCLT. They're available through one-on-one appointments, through workshops, and, you know, we even heard mention of visiting entire departments or doing a group setting. So they're here to support faculty. And thank you so much for sitting down and talking with me. Just thank you, thank you so much.

Thank you for listening to the Mt. San Antonio College Podcast, brought to you by Mt. Saks Pod Office and created in partnership with Avant House Media. Original music created and edited by Neera Azira. Be sure to check out our growing library of over 230 episodes and let us know your thoughts. You can reach me, Chisa Uyeki, at [email protected]. Wishing you an amazing year and happy listening.