Sydney J. Harris
On behalf of all of the classified staff, administration, Board of Trustees, faculty, and students, let me welcome you to Lake Tahoe Community College. LTCC is a small but mighty educational institution that focuses on the highest quality of instruction that is student-centered at its core. As you begin the journey of teaching at LTCC, please feel free to reach out to any of us along the way.
Please use this section of the T&L Website to get going on your new class prep. Just click the button to go.
Hello and welcome to Lake Tahoe Community College. We are all excited to have you on board as a new part-time faculty member at LTCC. My name is Scott Lukas and I serve as the Faculty Chair of Teaching and Learning. My position focuses on many aspects of providing you support for the journey ahead as you move from our hiring processes to a classroom assignment. Throughout your first quarter at the college, please reach out to me (as well as your department chair and/or dean) as questions about teaching come up. We are all here to help!
Depending on your status in the hiring process, you may have some odds and ends to attend to in Human Resources or the Instruction Office. Any of the required documents needed to create a payroll packet for you—such as your I-9 documentation, TB clearance, etc.—must be turned in as soon as possible so that you may be paid by the first pay period. If you have questions about any of these documents, please reach out to the fine and helpful staff in Human Resources,, so that you may wrap up these procedures. We thank you for your immediate attention to any outstanding documents that are needed by the college.
Once all of your documents are completed, you are official in terms of your hiring status. At this point, you may have been assigned your first class to teach—perhaps in this term or in a future one. If there are full-time faculty in the discipline in which you teach, you can contact the department chair to get help with any needed classroom materials. If you do not have a full-time faculty member in your department, please feel free to reach out to Ali Bissonnette or Brad Deeds, our two deans of instruction. They are super friendly, creative, and willing to help!
LTCC faculty teach in three possible modalities: face-to-face (in the traditional physical classroom), DE (distance education in Canvas, our LMS or Learning Management System), and LTCC Rising Scholars (formerly ISP or Incarcerated Student Program). Each of these modalities differs in terms of the pedagogical, resource-related, technological, or other issues that you will encounter, so it is important to reach out to people on campus who can best meet your immediate teaching needs. In addition to contacting your department chair or dean, as applicable, please reach out to me with any and all pedagogical or teaching concerns. For example, you might want some advice on a plagiarism statement for your syllabus, or you might be curious about the opportunities for honing your teaching craft in your field. If you have questions about the technical aspects of Canvas in distance education, please connect with Treva Thomas, who is our Coordinator of Distance Education. As an example, you might want to learn about how to use the Announcements feature in Canvas. If you are teaching in LTCCRS, if you have a program-specific question—for example, you want to learn about how often you should return your graded work to the LTCCRS office—you should reach out to the great LTCCRS staff who are found at the back of the college library. They are willing and able to explain the ins and outs of teaching our significant yet non-traditional ISP students.
Once you have figured out the first steps of your LTCC class, we would like you to complete some short trainings related to being a new faculty member at the college. These are located in two places. One is a web site, www.ltccteachingandlearning.com. When you visit the site, you will discover a plethora of resources related to the College and its various offices and staff, being a faculty member, practical things like using the Library or ordering textbooks, and specific tracks related to F2F, DE, and LTCCRS teaching modalities. Over time, the training will be further developed and additional videos and other resources will be added. The second site of the training is a Canvas shell. If you are interested in this option, please reach out to me and I will get you going on the Canvas shell. Once you have had a chance to look over and work with these materials, please do not hesitate to stop by my office, send me an e-mail, or set up a virtual meeting so that we may discuss any of the issues, topics, or contexts in more depth.
In addition to these initial resources and trainings, we offer ongoing workshops on a variety of teaching and learning topics. You may access information about upcoming workshops or view previous workshops on video at the following address:
https://ltccteachingandlearning.com/workshops
You will be notified of future trainings by e-mail, so please take advantage of the opportunity to engage in dialogue about teaching with your fellow faculty. We all may learn something new from other instructors. LTCC also offers an Associate Program for part-time faculty. The program has various levels, but the initial level may be achieved after completing 24 units of teaching at LTCC. At that time, you will be allowed to enroll in an Excellence in Teaching Workshop that will allow you to a higher per-unit salary for your teaching. If you are curious about this program, please have a look at Article 6 of the Faculty Contract.
We are still working on dates for the 2022-2023 Excellence in Teaching Workshops, so be on the lookout for more information about this excellent opportunity for professional development.
I know that this has been a lot of information to receive, but I wanted to reach out at this early stage in your LTCC faculty career and offer more opportunities for professional teaching engagement with myself, your fellow full- and part-time faculty, college administration and staff, and many others. We are all here to help, so please do not hesitate to reach out.
My on-campus office is B101A, which is just across from the Reprographics Office (take the first left when you enter the main building and main doors at the front of campus). If you are not local to the South Lake Tahoe region, please reach out so that we may connect via phone, e-mail, or video conferencing.
Thanks and welcome to Lake Tahoe Community College. We, and our students, are fortunate to have you teaching for us.
Scott
The LTCC faculty are united in many respects. We are all members of the LTCC Academic Senate (covering academic and professional matters) and all a part of the LTCC Faculty Association (the group, CTA/CCA, that represents us in workplace matters like salary, benefits, and working conditions). Throughout this LTCC Teaching and Learning Onboarding Experience, we will emphasize the many ways in which are all connected as fellow faculty members. At the same time, we do need to acknowledge some differences in our experiences, especially as these may relate to our onboarding efforts here at LTCC.
Some of the differences that we should acknowledge in our faculty experiences at LTCC include:
Whatever your experiences, we hope that you will reach out to your fellow faculty members for advice on your journey at Lake Tahoe Community College.
In this video (and text below), we cover some of the experiences that you might have as an LTCC faculty member. Please check out the video.
Welcome from Our LTCC Faculty and Administration https://youtu.be/0UuaNBh0nPE
Overall Onboarding Introduction https://youtu.be/7X6PJ-M2G0Y
Diverse Faculty Experiences https://youtu.be/jUhaXf4NHEA