Resources for Deans

If you have faculty who you want to teach online, they need to be certified to do so at El Camino. There are two paths for certifying faculty who are not already cleared to teach online here:

1. Successful completion of the 6 week Online Teaching & Learning with Canvas (OLTC) and passing the final course walkthrough.
2. Approval through the Distance Education Waiver process.

At current there is no re-certification process for faculty teaching online at El Camino. However, some other California Community Colleges (CCCs) do have such a process and the Department of Online and Digital Education is exploring that possibility. If you have thoughts on re-certification, please let us know.

Online Learning & Teaching with Canvas

OLTC is an intensive 6 week course that includes up to 2 additional weeks for course development before faculty present a final course walkthrough to demonstrate their competency at building a basic online course in Canvas, and their plan for effectively delivering the course. 8 weeks is nowhere near enough time to develop a full 3+ credit course.

It typically takes an experienced instructional designer upwards of 100 hours to develop a high quality course that includes rich media, rigorous authentic and standardized assessments, and professional original video content. Bear in mind that instructional design is its own discipline, and high quality instructional designers have years of experience doing course development, an advanced degree in instructional design, or both.

Courses that heavily leverage publisher content can take less time to develop, but even then it will take your average faculty member at least 30 hours to get a brand new course set up with materials they've customized to make their own. Faculty using publisher materials that they haven't adapted or at minimum framed with their own introductions, annotations, and opportunities for interaction are generally not teaching a quality course. In particular, a course must have regular and substantive interaction between the faculty members and the students in order to qualify as a distance education course according to state and federal policy guidelines which dictate Title IV financial aid.

All of this is to say, unless you have additional support for course development, your faculty can be certified but will not be ready to teach immediately after completing OLTC. A faculty member who is teaching a full course load will typically need an additional 12 to 18 months to do course development on the side before they are ready to teach that course online. That number can be radically reduced if they are already teaching a heavily technology enhanced face-to-face course that they can build out as a purely online experience.

The Distance Education Waiver Process

Faculty who have taught online previously and have training with the Canvas LMS, or who have equivalent training for teaching online with Canvas from another CCC are eligible for the waiver process here at El Camino. In order to complete the waiver process, the faculty member simply needs to fill out this form, and schedule an appointment with Dr. Wolfenstein for a course walkthrough of an existing online, hybrid, or heavily technology supported course.

• Placing Substitute Faculty in a Canvas Course form
• AP 4105: The administrative procedure governing distance education at El Camino. This AP is currently in the revision process in order to update it and align it with changes in state policy language.
• Guidelines for Course Observers: This guide aides observers when doing course site observations in conjunction with Faculty Evaluations.

This should look familiar if you have built Hybrid classes before.

After pulling up the section in SOFF, you go down to the “Schedule Print Times” portion, and you can add an additional entry, where you identify the Instructional Method as “Online Lecture”. You fill in the days and times and leave the location blank. This is exactly the same thing we do for hybrid courses, just without a Building and Room.

It’s also possible to delete the original non-scheduled hours there, but that could give the impression there was no additional asynchronous content.

This leads to the course looking this way in the searchable schedule:

ITS is looking into masking the location information there so that the TBAs don’t cause confusion.

• The FinishFaster Search Tool: You can look up the courses El Camino and other partner California Community Colleges offer online on the CVC-OEI home page.
• The CVC-OEI Ecosystem: A link to the different tools provided by the state.
• The OEI Course Design Rubric: We use this rubric here at El Camino as a tool for guiding and evaluating course development so as to maintain the best possible alignment with state standards. This rubric is used by state reviewers to certify courses for the quality badge in the FinishFaster course search tool.