Resources for Faculty

• Canvas Quick Start Guide
• Respondus (Lockdown Browser) Faculty Resources
• Local Peer Online Course Review (POCR)
• Canvas Teacher Guides
• Distance Education Help Desk Form
• Distance Education Appointment Form
• ODE: Twitter

The Online and Digital Education department serves faculty and students for all class types: Online, Live Online, Hybrid, HyFlex, and On Campus. They administer ECC's Learning Management System, Canvas. They support faculty needs for technology that connects with Canvas and that can be used to supplement instruction. The guiding documents for the department are:

• Distance Education Plan 2019-2022 (Board approved 8/17/20)
• Online and Digital Education Program Review 2017-2018

This department was previously named Distance Education. The name was officially changed on the Board of Trustees agenda of August 17, 2020.

Online and Digital Education Advisory Committee

The El Camino College Online and Digital Education (ODE) Advisory Committee, formerly the Distance Education Advisory Committee (DEAC), has primary responsibilities for developing policies and procedures for distance education courses that comply with local and state guidelines, Title V, and regulations. ODE Advisory Committee works closely with the Academic Senate and the college and division curriculum committees to ensure commitment to quality assurance and continuous improvement of the program.

The committee is chaired by the Distance Education Faculty Coordinator. Committee membership includes faculty representatives from all academic divisions as well as counseling, key staff members from the Department of Online and Digital Education, the Director of Library and Learning Resources,  an Academic Senate representative, and one or more ASO representatives. The committee meets every third Thursday of the month.

Minutes from previous ODE Advisory Committee Meeting.

In order to teach online or hybrid courses, El Camino faculty must either complete our Learning Online & General Instruction with Canvas (LOGIC) course or provide sufficient evidence that they are prepared to develop and teach quality online courses through our waiver process. At El Camino, a quality online course is one that provides an equivalent experience to a face-to-face class, and includes opportunities for regular and substantive contact between students and the teacher, as well as among students.

The Learning Online & General Instruction with Canvas Course

The primary method for becoming cleared to teach online at El Camino is through completion of the Learning Online & General Instruction with Canvas (LOGIC) course offered by the Department of Online and Digital Education. This course was previously titled Online Learning and Teaching with Canvas (OLTC). LOGIC is an intensive and extensive course that includes six weeks of instructor paced interaction where certification track faculty engage with previously certified faculty in weekly discussions. In addition, it is a competency based course where faculty work at their own pace to complete a series of assessments that support them in creating an Online or Hybrid course that they plan on teaching. All assessments are reviewed by the Distance Education Faculty Coordinator, and the course concludes with a final course walk-through. Full time faculty completing course content are eligible for a minimum of 15 hours of flex credit. Faculty must pass the final course walkthrough in order to be cleared to teach online at El Camino. The LOGIC format was approved by the El Camino College Academic Senate as a modification of OLTC. LOGIC includes:

• The opportunity to experience a course from the student role that's been designed with best practices in mind. This includes robust participation in discussions and submission of a variety of online assignments.
• Principles of Backwards Design for planning and developing online courses.
• Training on how to develop content in Canvas that meets accessibility requirements including basic and intermediate content development skills accompanied by assessment of course development practices in a personal "sandbox" Canvas course.
• Review of best practices for teaching online accompanied by the requirement to develop a communication plan.
• An introduction to media development for online learning.
• An overview of the course quality standards developed by the California Virtual Campus.
• An overview of other key policies informing the development and delivery of online course including laws around intellectual property and accessibility.

Faculty who already have intermediate or advanced content development skills with the Canvas Learning Management System and/or web content development will be able to move more quickly through segments of the course that provide training on those skills. Otherwise, faculty should plan on spending at least 5 hours a week during the six instructor paced weeks working in LOGIC in order to complete it successfully. Please note that upon successfully completing LOGIC you will not necessarily have a fully developed online course, however you will emerge with two fully developed content modules, supporting course materials (e.g. an online syllabus, course home page, and orientation) and a complete course map for finishing development of modules you haven't built out yet. It is strongly recommended that faculty who have limited experience with Canvas teach a technology supported course at least once before teaching an online course.

LOGIC is currently offered twice a year beginning in July and January. Each run of the course has 4 sequential cohorts, and certification track faculty who start the course in the first cohort have the full 6 month run of the course to complete their assessments and pass the course walkthrough. Faculty can sign-up for LOGIC using this form. If you want more information about LOGIC, you can review this public version of the syllabus.

Some other California Community Colleges in the Greater Los Angeles Region and beyond will honor the certificate earned by successfully completing El Camino's LOGIC course, but you should know that some campuses or districts within the CCC system require recertification after some number of years.

The Waiver Process

If you have taught online previously and have existing certification from another campus, you may be eligible to teach online through our waiver process. In order to have El Camino's internal training waived you must prove:

• Canvas LMS Development Certification
• Online Teaching and Course Design Certification
• Access to an existing online or hybrid course that you can present for course review

Qualifying trainings will have been completed through another college or university, or through an @ONE course.

If you believe you have met these requirements, please fill out the waiver form by clicking the button below. You will need to upload copies of the relevant certification documents in order to complete the waiver process. Once your waiver materials have been reviewed, the Distance Education Faculty Coordinator will schedule a course walkthrough with you if you appear to be eligible for waiver based on the information you've provided.

Certification Maintenance Process

The following process has been developed for the El Camino College Academic Senate by the Online & Digital Education Advisory Committee.

The department of Online and Digital Education (ODE) will notify faculty who are required to complete DE maintenance or recertification. The communication will request confirmation that the faculty intends to maintain their DE certification and will ask the faculty to indicate which option they will choose to maintain their certification and submit the materials as directed:

• Submit 10 hours of distance education related professional development that has occurred over the five (5) years since the faculty was certified or last maintained their certification. Proof of hours will be pulled from Cornerstone, so faculty do not need to submit it, if they have already submitted it in Cornerstone. Types of professional development can include:
  • Professional development opportunities listed in Cornerstone and notated as Distance Education related
  • Professional development opportunities provided by @One or CCCTech
  • Participation at distance education related conferences
  • Participation in other types of activities as described in the El Camino College Flexible Calendar Program Professional Development Categories and Approved Flex Credit Activities document that are focused on contemporary Distance Education practices
• Engage in a course quality improvement process (e.g., POCR) which will be tracked by Online & Digital Education and result in updating faculty status in the certification database.
• Participate in the maintenance track of LOGIC that will update faculty on new requirements, regulations, tools, and best practices.

The faculty materials will be reviewed for completeness. If the submission is complete the
faculty will be notified that they have been recertified and will be provided with their next
recertification date.

If a faculty member has not taught online within the previous three (3) years, they are required
to be recertified through the certification track in LOGIC which they can complete at an accelerated rate by updating an existing course to meet the assessment requirements. 

Approved by Academic Senate on June 1, 2021.

Online Teaching Waiver Form

If you have any comments, questions, or concerns, please email Distance Education Faculty Coordinator Dr. Moses Wolfenstein.

How to submit grades to Colleague using Canvas:

Note: Make sure you are using a current version of Firefox or Chrome and that cookies/cross site tracking are enabled for Canvas.

The course you are going to submit grades doesn't have to be published if it was an on-campus or off-site course, but it does help your students if you publish your course and use Canvas gradebook for progress reports. You will be able to submit a grade different from the grade that is calculated by Canvas if you have not kept all assignment records in Canvas. 

"Submit Grades to Colleague" course menu link can be enabled through the navigation tab in the settings area. Once it is visible, it is visible only to you.

• Click on the "submit to Colleague link:
  • When the page loads, you will see that there are two tabs,  Midterm and Final. Each tab is for that grading period. For Final grades please click in the "Final" tab.
  • If you have been keeping grades in Canvas, using a grading scheme, you will see your student's name listed with a grade in parentheses and the field in "Final Grade" column will be populated with the same grade. If you have not kept any grades in Canvas or if you have not enabled a grade scheme, there will be no grades visible yet on this screen. If you have any ungraded items for a student including missing items for which you have not assigned a grade. the final grade for that student will not be calculated correctly.
  • You can enter or change grades in the grade field for each student.
  • Incompletes you must use one of the following letters (IB, IC, ID, IF)and post the expiration date which is 6 weeks into the new full term.
  • When you are done entering and/or confirming the grades for all of your students, click the "Submit" button at the bottom of page.