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 started teaching computer engineering courses since the Spring semester of 2017. All my courses were offered in-person until COVID 19 pandemic arrived. As a result of the pandemic, all of us had to teach our classes online. I offered all of my classes following a fully synchronous mode at that time. During that time, I invested in recording my lectures and posting them to my students. This practice proved to have positive impact on students' learning since they have the opportunity to access and review the lecture at their own convenience. Right after we started recovering from the pandemic, I wanted to keep these positive components in my classes, and hence, I decided to offer some of my classes in hybrid mode (50% asynchronous and 50% in-person). However, my hybrid classes lacked important components that may have better humanized them, which could have led to stronger online community and engagement for the students in the asynchronous portion of the class.
Now being exposed to the Humanizing STEM Academy workshop, I recognize that while my hybrid classes incorporate valuable elements like recorded lectures, the asynchronous portion lacks important components that could better humanize the online learning experience.
My goal is to enhance the humanizing aspects to foster a stronger online community and improve engagement among students in the asynchronous parts of my hybrid courses.
An important part of any asynchronous class that I learned about during the Humanizing STEM Academy is the liquid syllabus. The liquid syllabus is a key component for humanizing any asynchronous class, especially to give a warm welcome message to your students in advance to the official start of the class. The liquid syllabus contains kind cues, welcome messages and videos, and helpful instructions to help your students navigate the class and feel belonging to it.
I chose the shown course card to send an early message to my students that our class will be interesting and fun rather than complex. This way I hope I help them feel welcomed and relief some of any possible stress that they may carry with them about this topic. I believe this is an important small detail, especially that ECE 174 is an advanced and heavily technical course. In this course students learn about very complex design concepts related to the architectures and hardware organization of microprocessors.
The Homepage is the first place that students arrive at when they visit the Canvas shell of the ECE 174 course. It contains helpful instructions for students to understand better how to navigate and interact with the course material. In addition, the Instructor Contact Information section sends some kindness cues by encouraging students to communicate their questions or concerns to me. I provide the students with different methods to reach out to me through in-person visits to my office, virtually through zoom, or by email.
The "Getting to Know You" survey is a valuable tool to help the instructor learn important information about the student's perspective. My survey provides the student with 15 questions targeting some of the simple student's preferences. The following are two example questions:
What would you like me to call you?
What is the best way to reach you? (If email, text or phone, please provide)
These questions will help me adapt the way I communicate with the student, and at the same time gives the student a feeling that I care about their preferences about this matter.
I plan to provide this survey to my students during the first week of class.
I plan to assign the "Wisdom Wall" activity to my students near the end of the semester. The goal is that the students at this phase of the class could provide helpful advices to the future students who will take this class. The wisdom wall will be made available to new students at early stages of the semester, so that they can hopefully benefit from the posted advices from previous students who took the class before. By doing so, the new students will also recognize that other students faced challenges and struggled throughout the class, same as they do.
This short video will introduce students to the concept of modular addition. After watching this short video, the students will be better prepared to come to our in-class meeting and learn about more details about the modular reduction. This way they will be skilled with the proper tools to help them work on activities that require mapping global addresses to local ones.
The students in ECE 174 will be working in groups on a term project targeting the HDL prototyping of a five-stage pipelined MIPS processor, demonstrating its functionality through simulation, and analyze its space and time complexity targetting Intel's FPGA devices. In particular, the students need to use the Quartus tool in order to be able to generate space and time complexity reports. This lecture video will familiarze the students with the Quartus tool and how it is used for timing analysis.
