 LPC Named Certified POCR Campus
 LPC recently became the third California Community College to be awarded Certified POCR Campus status by the California Virtual Campus-Online Education Initiative. This honor is the result of lots of hard work by LPC's Peer Online Course Review, or POCR, team, led by Christina Lee.
Faculty POCR team members who worked to secure certification were course reviewers Toby Bielawski, Kali Rippel, and Victoria Austin, along with course designers Bobby August, Jeremiah Bodnar, and Oliver Christen.
"This process was a culmination of wonderful collaboration among faculty and staff, and it represents a major step towards improving the quality of online course design for our students," Christina said. "We couldn't have done this without the participation of DE faculty and the invaluable support and assistance from Wanda Butterly and Scott Vigallon. We hope to build on our momentum and involve more faculty in improving course design standards for distance education courses."
As a Certified POCR Campus, LPC can review and align courses to the CVC-OEI Course Design Rubric, then fast-track these courses through the CVC-OEI's review process. Once alignment is verified, the courses will receive a "Quality Reviewed" badge and rise to the top of the search results when students choose classes in the CVC Exchange, also known as Finish Faster Online.
That same "Quality Reviewed" badge will be present for courses in the CVC-OEI's ExCEL exchange in 2021, when LPC is anticipated to join. ExCEL allows students to register in online classes at another California community college without filling out a separate application. |
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Academic Videos Online @ LPC
Need movies or documentaries to supplement your teaching materials? The LPC Library offers a variety of streaming video services including the new Academic Video Online (AVON). The collection contains over 66,000 titles covering theater and drama, history, business, music, anthropology, art, psychology/counseling, English/literature, science, health, sociology, criminal justice, and more. Sources include Sony Pictures Classic, 60 Minutes, Broadway HD, CNN, PBS, BBC Learning, etc. "Call Me By My Name," "Merchants of Doubt," "Volver", and "Who Killed the Electric Car" are just some of the titles available.
Find AVON and other video databases on the library's homepage under the Art, Movies, and Music tab. Speak with the librarians if you have questions. |
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DE Committee Members Win Award
Distance Education Committee members Victoria Austin and Paul Sapsford were honored Nov. 8 with Chancellor's Awards at the annual luncheon.
Victoria, an adjunct Computer Information Systems instructor for many years at LPC, has taken on several roles recently aside from teaching, including becoming a POCR reviewer, participating on the College OEI Implementation team, and working as the Work Plan Coordinator and co-Principal Investigator for LPC's Online CTE Pathways Grant. Perhaps her biggest non-teaching accomplishment was being the driving force behind what became a memorandum of understanding between the CLPCCD and Faculty Association that provides monetary incentives for faculty to align their courses with the OEI rubric and to become a local POCR reviewer.
Paul, a successful online Kinesiology instructor, is perhaps best known as the former coach of the LPC Hawks' championship women's soccer team. Stepping down from that position has allowed him more time to focus on his teaching. From his award nomination: "However, while we lost a coach, our Health and Kinesiology students now get to experience more of the brilliance and expertise that Paul brings to the classroom as an instructor." |
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Captioning Someone Else's Video
By now, you all know that videos you use within Canvas have to be close captioned. Captioning videos that you create is simple when using the 3C Media app in Canvas. But what about the videos created by someone else, particularly the videos on YouTube?
Yes, those videos are captioned. The problem is that YouTube uses an automated captioner that does not include spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc. Because these elements are missing, videos that are auto-captioned in YouTube are not good enough to use in Canvas. Here are some workarounds:
- Do a search in YouTube, and when the results are delivered, click the Filter button. Then click Subtitles/CC. This will return videos that should be properly captioned, not auto-captioned. You should still double-check your selected video to make sure the captioning is good enough.
- Check Amara to see if the YouTube video you want has already been captioned by that service. If it has not, you can use Amara to contribute captions yourself. A free account is required.
- Use the YouTube Community Captions tool to add or edit captions for a video. If the owner of the YouTube channel allows community captions, you and others can contribute to those captions. If the channel owner has yet to allow community captions, you will have to request that the owner turn on this feature.
If you need one-on-one help with web accessibility, you can make an appointment with LPC's Instructional Technology Specialist Wanda Butterly, aka The Wizard of Accessibility. Known for her Magic Wand(a), she can help you ensure that all of your Canvas materials are accessible to all of your students.
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 Upcoming Changes in Canvas
On Jan. 9, 2020, the following changes will be implemented in Canvas:
- The anti-plagiarism service VeriCite will be removed. VeriCite was replaced by Turnitin at the beginning of the Fall 2019 semester. It was decided to keep VeriCite for a semester in case students from a previous semester challenged a grade for an assignment using VeriCite.
- The New Gradebook will be enabled by default. This has been available for multiple semesters as an option. The old gradebook will go away.
- New Analytics will replace Analytics Beta. New Analytics allows instructors to track average course grades for student submissions using an interactive chart graph or table. To use this tool, you have to enable it in Settings - Course Navigation. It will not be visible to students.
- The Microsoft Immersive Reader will be enabled. This tool improves accessibility by allowing text-to-speech and making text more consumable inside Canvas by offering it in different sizes and colors. The Immersive Reader only works in Pages (not discussions, assignments, etc). It will be available as long as it remains free.
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