This site provides examples of instructional resources created in the Humanizing Online STEM Academy, a professional development program funded by the California Education Learning Lab and administered by the Foothill DeAnza Community College District.
I have been through other trainings which have helped me to use tools in Canvas to make things more interesting and visual as well as adding video to the course. I wondered if this was going to be much different than the others. My online courses have had many iterations of improvements over the years, but this one came from a different viewpoint and allowed me to be more human in videos and Voice Thread conversations.
This has been a wonderful class. So many skills are needed and taught in STEM courses, that it is easy to become only professional and not human. It is great to have my course be more human now. The interactions with the students will make it more personal to them and to me. I enjoy working with my students and this will help us to achieve a more comfortable feel in the asynchronous class.
This fall, I want to spend time upgrading several more of my courses to have these features in them, an eventually all. I want to integrate more items with Voice Thread, because I really enjoy that tool. It will be a joy to work on those and see how the students respond to their "human" instructor!
Check out the link to my liquid syllabus where a lot of welcoming information is contained. It can be easily viewed on a mobile device and gives students a good sense of the course and my personality. It is sent out before the class starts. This is a great improvement over the previous information that I sent out to students.
The course card makes a difference to students because it should be warm and familiar to get them more engaged in the course. A good picture is worth a thousand words. This one reminds them that coding is a future and that they can embrace it.
The homepage has a baby on it to show that all of us are learning from the moment we are born and all through life. It can be daunting task learning a programming language, which can feel foreign. A baby has the same feeling and yet zeal for life. Each of us are on a journey of learning and this is just the next step.
The page is simple and clean. It serves as a landing page to get you to the modules and the learning that awaits.
This survey gives me a real chance to find out some personal preferences about my students to that I can interact with each of the better. I want to know how to contact them and what type of learner they are or how to pronounce their name. This is a great tool to enhance the knowledge about my students.
I love this way of getting students involved with one another. Using Voice Thread, students can create a video or audio of something about themselves and others will comment on it. It is a great way to get students used to speaking in an online course just as they would in a face to face course.
The Wisdom Wall gives students, who have succeeded, a chance to share with new students some tips on what they wish they would have known going into the course. These tips will be shared with new students at the beginning of a new course so that new students can feel more comfortable and like they have a coach who is giving them tips on what to do to be successful.
In this small video, it serves as a place to describe a sticky concept and make it more clear. It is short and to the point, many times using a technology such as Adobe Spark. This one concentrates on classes vs objects.
This short lecture is designed to teach a concept in only a few minutes so that a student is empowered by how quickly they can learn the concept. It is short enough to keep their attention and not let them get bored. They can watch it as many times as needed to feel comfortable.
