FAQs

The Humanizing Online STEM Academy is a 6-week online professional development program designed in Canvas. The Academy is conceived of as a catalyst for pedagogical innovation in STEM with the aim of eliminating equity gaps.

The Academy is designed to require about 10-hours per week (for six weeks). This time is spent completing assignments asynchronously that have staggered due dates throughout each week. The Academy has flexibility to accommodate your schedule but also has structure. This time commitment, however, varies based upon the level of technology skills a participant has, as well as their individual level of commitment.

If the grant is successfully obtained, the Academy will be offered multiple times throughout 2022-2024. More information will be available soon.

Yes.

In recent decades, significant progress has been made to recruit more racially and ethnically minoritized students into STEM majors. Despite this, more Black and Latinx students leave STEM majors more than White or Asian students and this problem is worse in STEM than any other discipline group (Riegle-Crumb, 2019). During the same time, online courses have increased access to college for diverse students, while also exacerbating equity gaps. This project is focused on improving online instruction by applying existing research-based teaching practices commonly used in seated courses to online courses.

A competitive course climate and a lack of belonging are cited as significant factors that contribute to the attrition of students in STEM major. Without humanizing, online courses can make these anxieties even worse and impact Black, Latinx, Indigenous students and women more severely. The Humanizing Academy equips faculty with the knowledge and digital fluency to to cultivate welcoming, supportive online courses anchored in positive instructor-student relationships. The research study will examine the impact of faculty development on teaching practices and on student performance, with a particular focus on Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and female students.

Humanizing is a pedagogical approach that aims to eliminate equity gaps in online STEM courses by cultivating an inclusive class climate anchored in positive instructor-student relationships. A sense of belonging has both cognitive and affective dimensions for students, and it influences persistence in STEM majors, particularly women of all race and ethnicities, as well as Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students (Immordino-Yang, M. H., 2016, Seymour & Hunter, 2020). Human connections are central to belonging; however, online courses are more likely to lack quality interactions (Jaggars & Xu, 2016) and result in isolating experiences that leave more students feeling marginalized.

Humanized online courses are intentionally grounded in positive instructor-student relationships that serve as the connective tissue between students, engagement, and rigor, and support the success of more students in STEM (Pacansky-Brock, Smedshammer & Vincent-Layton, 2020). In a humanized online STEM course, an instructor uses high touch interactions at the start of an online course to cultivate trust and psychological safety to mitigate belonging uncertainty and stereotype threat (Verschelden, 2017). After establishing a positive relationship with students, the instructor identifies who their high opportunity students are and leverages relationships with those students to become a warm demander (Kleinfeld, 1975). Through feedback that fosters growth-mindset, self-efficacy, and improvement (Cohen & Steele, 2002; Wood, 2017), all students are held to the same high standards, and high opportunity learners are guided to achieve their full intellectual potential.

All courses in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math disciplines are eligible. If you have a specific question about eligibility, please email pacanskybrockmichelle@fhda.edu.

Relationships are at the core of humanized online courses and we believe they are also at the core of pedagogical change. Those whose primary role is to support faculty who teach online are critical stakeholders in the change process. In the Humanizing Online STEM Academy, STEM faculty will complete the 6-week program with an institutional faculty support peer, who will be an active participant and complete all assignments. Throughout the process, STEM faculty will consult with their faculty support peers to apply humanizing technologies in their courses.

In the Academy, STEM faculty will work asynchronously with faculty support specialists and STEM peers from other CCCs and CSUs to reconfigure and humanize an online asynchronous undergraduate “gateway” STEM course. Throughout the six weeks, participants will create content for their online courses using visual and video technologies, and actively engage in asynchronous video and written discussions.

To learn more, view this 2 1/2 minute video.

Participants will gain a critical awareness of the cognitive and affective dimensions of belonging; learn how to create welcoming, supportive online courses; how to get to know their students online; how to identify their high opportunity students; how to adapt their teaching and target their high touch interaction to support those students; and, ultimately, how to hold all learners to high standards to ensure more STEM students achieve their full academic potential. They will also develop digital fluencies including how to host, and caption brief videos with YouTube (or an equivalent hosting service); record bumper videos and microlectures with a smartphone and free/low-cost tools (Adobe Spark and Screencast-o-matic); and develop a Liquid Syllabus using Google Sites (or other preferred website tool) to humanize pre-course contact. By the end of the six-weeks, all participants will have developed 8 Humanizing elements that will serve as kindness cues that foster social inclusion online (Estrada, Eroy-Reveles & Matsui, 2018).

The culminating project is to develop a Humanizing Showcase, a public website shared with a Creative Commons-Attribution-Non Commercial (CC-BY-NC) license, that includes the eight humanizing elements and reflections about their professional growth. The showcase will demonstrate their mastery of humanizing and also serve as a catalyst for other STEM faculty seeking strategies for improving their online courses.

Participants will engage in the use of a variety of educational technologies that will involve creating a website with Google Sites (no knowledge of HTML required), recording videos with a smartphone and/or webcam, creating graphics with Canva, and embedding images and videos in Canvas. While the Academy is designed for technology novices, participants must possess basic digital literacy skills including the ability to navigate multiple webpages, copy/paste, upload/attach files, and operate a webcam; as well as a general excitement about experimentation. Participants should be willing to make mistakes, as mistakes are integral to learning.

Humanizing is an equity-minded teaching approach that is designed to ensure students who feel marginalized in STEM are seen, supported, and challenged. Humanizing ensures faculty are knowledgeable about the non-cognitive aspects of learning and know how to support them online. It also minimizes the hierarchical power relationship between an instructor and students. However, Humanizing does not cover all the bases of equity-minded or anti-racist teaching. Topics that are not covered include examining one’s own unconscious bias, developing equitable grading schemes, designing authentic assessments, aligning course objectives with assessments, and addressing the accessibility of instructional content outside of Canvas (accessibility, however, will be baked into each assignment in the Academy).