[logo sound]

Speaker 1: OTAN, Outreach and Technical Assistance Network.

Monica Cueva: So hi, everyone, in this presentation, we will be reporting on our DLAC 2022 final project, which is our online learning skills Canvas module for limited learners. Our DLAC team is from the San Diego College of Continuing Education, and my name is Monica Cueva, I'm an ESL/VESL instructor, I'm also our ESL technology coordinator, and now our HyFlex specialist.

Jessica Varnado-swall: Hi, my name is Jessica Varnado-Swall, I am also an ESL and VESL faculty. I'm also a faculty mentor, and our Academic Senate Distance Education Committee co-chair.

Elisia Doonan: And I am Elisia Cressa-- I'm sorry, Elisia Doonan, and I am the DSPS Adjunct Instructor. That's working with disability support service program. Thank you.

Monica Cueva: I'll start by giving a brief overview of our institution and our programs. And we are from San Diego College of Continuing Education, we are the largest provider of non-credit education in California. We serve around 40,000 students annually, and we have seven campuses throughout San Diego, and we are slowly reopening many of our offsite locations as well.

And we offer over 70 certificate programs, and all of these academic areas that you see here. So there are many options for students to find an area of interest to them.

And since the beginning of the pandemic, our institution has been very responsive and they continue to support us to provide support and equipment to our faculty, classified professionals, and students. And this includes training and mentoring our faculty, providing daily professional development opportunities for our faculty, having student laptop and hotspot distributions, opening new classes as needed, such as our online learning skills classes in ESL, our online and HyFlex student orientations, our HyFlex courses which have been so successful in the first pilot in fall and in the spring. We've now increased the course offerings of HyFlex to over 40 courses.

And in our ESL program, we are currently serving around-- a little over 5,000 students this semester, which has increased since campus closures. But is still not back to where we were pre-pandemic, and we offer classes, in general ESL, pre-vocational ESL, we just developed curriculum and started our English for Parents course which has been really successful, and we also offer many special topics classes.

DSPS is a little smaller with just over 600 students currently enrolled. And they have programs, classes, and services to help support students of all abilities.

Jessica Varnado-swall: So, I want to give you a little overview of what our DLAC 2-year project has involved. We have developed and collated online readiness and orientation materials, specifically for very low beginning level ESL students and other limited learners such as DSPS or other folks who need a little bit more basic instruction and more basic language.

This aligns very nicely with our continuous improvement goal for our institution, which was and I believe still is to develop online and HyFlex orientations to prepare our students for online learning.

So a little bit of a timeline. Of course, we all started in 2020. Planting our seeds, if you can't tell we went with a gardening theme for our presentation today. So we began the DLAC program as well as the IDEAL 101 course. In the fall of 2020, we began team building, Monica and I both being in ESL have worked together for many years. We co-chaired the teachers using technology committee together, and even put on the CATESOL event that happened at our campus together.

But we didn't know Elisia yet and it was very nice to liaison with the DSPS department and learn more about their students and how their needs overlap a lot with our low literacy ESL learners.

So we also at the end of that year did our presentation at TDLS. Then from 2021 to 2022 was when we were tending our crops, looking for our garden to grow. We created and collated our materials. We of course took the IDEAL 102 course, we have been sharing with our colleagues, we had a TDLS presentation, and we reached out to our fellow faculty at San Diego College of Continuing Education, letting them know once our module was basically finished and piloted, had our faculty and many different programs pilot these materials with their own students.

And then got some feedback, we did some revisions and added some more materials. And our plan is going forward from 2022 onward, sharing our harvest. We're planning to present a lot of conferences coming up, including CATESOL, CAPED, the CAEP Summit, TDLS, et cetera, et cetera. And we along with our distance education committee and other key players are planning on ongoing advocacy and strategic planning for digital equity at our institution. And Monica has prepared a lovely video to show an overview.

[video playback]

- Hi, everyone, I'm going to give you a quick tour of our online learning skills module in Canvas. We begin the module with welcome materials to help orient your students to online learning. We have two pre-semester surveys at the beginning. These are great to send to your students before the class even begins. I will show you our beginning level survey right now.

We've created it as a Google form so that it's easy for you to email to your students before they even have access to Canvas. And you can see this has images so that it's easy for students to understand the question as well as what the answer choices are.

And back in our Canvas module, after welcome materials, we've included a lot of videos and video quizzes to help students learn about the tools available to them in Zoom. And then we have Canvas materials. This includes quizzes, links, discussions, and pages to help students learn how to access Canvas, and how to navigate.

And lastly in our module, we have other resources which links students to over 40 videos that we've created, as well as other websites to help them continue developing their digital literacy skills. Down at the bottom of the module, we have two TEACHER ONLY resources. The last resource is something we've recently been working on, which is a list of resources for accessibility.

This includes mostly free resources. And you can see on the left, we've included a direct link to the Accessibility tool. And on the right we've included a description of the tool, and any steps that are needed to learn how to use or access the tool.

We've also included in it accessibility tools with Mac OS, iOS, Android, and Windows. And there are also plenty of other tools that you can use to make your classroom resources more accessible to your students. And that's it for our module, thank you so much.

[end playback]

Jessica Varnado-swall: I forgot to mention earlier that when we entered the DLAC program, we had an idea of what our final project might be and we thought we were going to go in the direction of providing accessibility training to our teachers to make sure that the materials that they have in their online classes are fully accessible to our students.

And we quickly realized that the very most pressing issue for our students is their digital literacy and their ability to access our classes. So we really decided to go more in that direction and reach out to the students directly, providing teachers with the materials. But we still really wanted to make accessibility and equity a big part of our module.

So we have done our very best to add Alt text on every image, and really think critically about what images we included in our quizzes and pages and assignments so that it's really representative of our very diverse student population that we serve in San Diego. And I know all of you do throughout California.

In terms of video, we have made correct captions on every video with capitalization, correct grammar. And we even reached out to Master Gardener. I don't know if you're familiar with Dr. Dave Berman who is a big accessibility advocate. We were able to meet with him one-on-one for specific advice on making our module more accessible and learn about some accessibility resources which we then included in our teacher accessibility guide.

And now, for the drum roll please, I'm sure you're wondering how you can get this module for your own. It is now available publicly in Canvas Commons. So you will need to log in to Canvas and then on the left navigation menu towards the bottom, there is the icon for Canvas Commons. Go ahead and click there, and you can either search for digital literacy SDCCE or we will make our slides available. You can click the link to directly go there.

Select the online learning skills module, and then there will be a blue input download button on the right. And you'll need to have a course shell to import it into, either a new development shell or a shell you already have. And then import it into that course. And we are, of course, when we notice any typos or we want to add anything, we are adding updates regularly. So make sure you go into Canvas Commons and check for any updates we will add in the future.

Monica Cueva: And as Jessica had mentioned, we have been presenting and sharing our module a lot. And at the beginning of the fall semester, this academic year, we held two workshops for our faculty at SDCCE. And after those workshops, after we shared the module with them, we asked them to complete a Google form survey so that they could give us feedback and let us know if they're actually using the module and if they like the module, if it's effective, and what changes and improvements they would like to see to the module.

And so, one question we asked them was, to what extent did you use the online learning skills module? And we were happy to see that at least almost 70% had actually taken that first step to import the module into their Canvas shell. And then there were 50% that actually used or assigned some module activities to their fall semester class. So we were happy with that percentage, and thought that was a success.

And then another question we asked was for them to select the module activities that were the most effective in preparing their students for online learning. And it showed-- the results showed that the videos and video quizzes were the most effective. And we were happy to see that because we put a lot of time and effort into creating those videos. So we were glad that they were proving to be effective.

And in addition to getting the results and feedback from our survey, another way that we've been able to cultivate our module is by using the IDEAL 102 course rubric that we developed through Destiny's course that she led us through. And we included three categories in our rubric; instruction, engagement, and accessibility.

And after we had finalized our rubric, we then used that to evaluate our module so that then we were able to make any improvements that were necessary based on the rubric.

Elisia Doonan: All right, now we have some instructor testimonial. And this is one of the instructors from DSPS. She has worked in our department since 1991. And her quote, as she says, she teaches extraordinary individuals that have been diagnosed with moderate to severe physical and developmental disabilities. Her name is Joy. Now, OK, we have 1 minute, all right, let's go.

And part of her testimonial was, she is one who used the study guide. Photos and demonstrations are simple and effective. The one of the ones that she used that she likes is the, when do I use video and the unmute one? I don't think we have time for that, but maybe I can do the student testimonials, what do you think, Monica?

Monica Cueva: Maybe we'll play that just the beginning of the--

Elisia Doonan: OK.

Monica Cueva: --video.

[video playback]

- Study online. Get ready for your online class. When do I use mute and unmute?

[music playing]

In this video, you will learn, how to mute and unmute. To check your noise level. And when to mute and unmute. How do I mute and unmute? If you see mute, we can hear you. If you see unmute, we cannot hear you.

[end playback]

Jessica Varnado-swall: All right, looks like we are running out of time.

Monica Cueva: OK.

Jessica Varnado-swall: Yeah.

Elisia Doonan: OK, I'm just going to go real quick over some student testimonials from DSPS. Some of the responses were, checking my lighting, background, and noise level is important. The icons on the screen were big and I was able to follow. It is important for me to recognize when I'm not sitting up straight in my wheelchair and readjust. And I was able to show what I learned.

Now, that is phenomenal for students to go ahead and say that. All right, we have to wrap it up. So again, as an instructor, thank you to the OTAN. She's thanking us for creating this for all student abilities. So we're fortunate for that. And we couldn't have done this without our project fertilizer--

[interposing voices]

Jessica Varnado-swall: Thank you, thank you, everyone.

Elisia Doonan: Yes, all the OTAN staff, our wonderful mentor, everyone from ESL and DSPS, our team members, family, and friends, so sorry we're going so fast. All right. And don't forget, all of our online learners, and we are rooting for everyone, yes. [chuckles]

Speaker 2: Beautiful.

[applause]

Thank you. Thank you so much.