Humanized Online Teaching Showcase
Sanae Nagai
Associate Faculty, Butte College
This site provides examples of instructional resources created in the Humanizing Online Teaching Academy, a professional development program at Butte College, funded by the Culturally Responsive Pedagogy & Practices grant from the California Community College Chancellor's Office.
Reflections
By learning in this course, I was able to learn about technologies and applications that I had not explored much before. The techniques I learned in this course are essential to enriching online courses. I teach a Japanese language online course, so communication and interactions are very important for students' learning. For this reason, I was reluctant to use methods other than live Zoom meetings. However, this course opened my eyes. From now on, I would like to actively incorporate online learning tools to help students learn better.
Where I was.
Since it is a language that I teach, my online teaching style was heavily relied on live Zoom classes. The class size is relatively small because it is the second year Japanese course. Therefore, I was able to arrange the class schedule to suit the students' schedules so that everyone could participate in live Zoom classes. Canvas was mostly used as a place to keep Zoom meeting recordings, homework, exams, and resources for the students.
Where I am.
Due to the increase in the number of students this semester, I was unable to arrange a schedule that would accommodate everyone. Normally, I encourage all students to participate in both Japanese 3 and 4 classes, but this is not possible this semester. Therefore, I have enriched activities such as supplementary practice after watching Zoom meeting recordings, or assignments with video / audio recordings. I am looking forward to applying the new tools I learned in this course for the second half of the semester.
Where I am going.
I would like to further enhance the course contents so that both synchronous and asynchronous students can receive the same learning experience. Specifically, I would like to add more microlectures and bumper videos, and I am going to increase opportunities for students to communicate with each other online. Also, thanks to what I have learned in this course, I became much more interested in apps and tools that can be used for online learning. As a result, I recently learned how to easily create multiple videos at once applying the duplicated format. I think I can utilize this to make a simpler version of microlectures for grammar and vocabulary review. In the near future, I would like to create such review materials and provide them to my students.
Liquid Syllabus
I use this Liquid Syllabus to reach out more students who are interested to pursue further leaning of Japanese language. Students might be intimidated by more complicated grammar, number of new vocabulary, or simply a new experience of online language learning.
I would like to send the important message; I will creat and support an open & safe learning environment for all the students, and I will provide resources they need to enhance their Japanese proficiency.
Course Card
I usually choose pictures of seasonal scenery in Japan for my course card. I change it according to the season during the semester so that students can get a sense of Japanese seasons.
Some examples are
Golden rice field with Japanese farm houses in late summer
Red Japanese maple trees at a temple in fall
Snow covered Mt. Fuji in winter
Cherry blossom at a Japanese castle in spring
Homepage
My home page contains my bitmoji to welcome students. I also included "About Me" video to introduce myself to the students, in which I talk about a little bit of my life introducing the things I love.
In between the two, as a welcome message, I explain that I will be a facilitator for a quality learning environment for the students and their best resource for Japanese language and culture. That's my promise!
Getting to Know You Survey
My Getting to Know You Survery has some unique questions. These questions are for tailoring the course to the current students with suchedule, contents, activities, and resources. After all, these questions are for me to know my students better for their better Japanese learning.
Wisdom Wall
I designed our Wisdom Wall to be a platform where the students can share their experience learning Japanese, tips and useful information for Japanese learning such as apps, resources, or learning methods, and most importantly their feelings and interests for Japanese learning.
In the past, the students naturally formed a cohort out of my course, and they arranged to meet outside of the online classroom to join Japanese Story Time that I help at a local library. They happly told me that that was the first time to meet any classmates in person because they started out their college education in the pandemic. I now strongly believe that students need a learning community in which they can share their experience and grow together.
Bumper Video
In this 3-minute bumper video, I focused on "aspect" which is a linguistic concept that is often difficult to understand for students who are not linguistics major. For students not to get confused with tense, I first briefly explain "tense," then went into the explanation of aspect. Using examples of Japanese verbs, I illustrated the concept of aspect, how it is different with different languages, and the difference of aspect in several Japanese verbs.
Microlecture
In this 6-minute microlecture, I explained the grammar of "~sugiru" (translates to "too much") with i-adjectives while giving students opportunities to practice conjugating some adjectives. By the end of this microlecture, the students will be able to understand and to correctly conjugate i-adjectives for "~sugiru" expression.
"~sugiru" is the featured grammar in Lesson 12, and this microlecture is a perfect introduction to the lesson. The students can also review some i-adjectives and verb conjugations in this microlecture.
The Humanized Online Teaching Academy is adapted from the Humanizing Online STEM Academy, by Michelle Pacansky-Brock, Mike Smedshammer, and Kim Vincent-Layton. This website was created by Sanae Nagai and is shared with a Creative Commons-Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 license.