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 taught online classes for years. I have taken many online teaching training courses, but they were all dedicated to technical aspects and content delivery. I was interested in changing the tone of my online courses from an impersonal experience to more of a personal one for my students, particularly in light of retention issues within STEM.
While I have many hours of recorded and captioned lectures in my classes, I am still getting comfortable with using first person "selfie" video in my courses. This is probably where I can make the biggest change for my students. The biggest impacts on me from this program came from including "kindness cues" so that students see me and each other as parts of a learning community. Many of the other issues discussed in this program seem like results of students feeling unwelcome.
I need more practice with video shooting and editing, but I look forward to adding "bumper" videos and microlectures to my weekly course modules. I also like the idea of adding a liquid syllabus, but I would like them to be more concise. Since this is a writing class, I will always look for ways to improve upon providing warm, wise feedback. Students will be more involved in their writing if I am a trusted part of a learning community and not just the mighty wielder of the red editing pen.
I found the liquid syllabus designed in this program to be a bit long, but I do like the idea of a vibrant and clear overview of the course with a humanized introduction to me as a person and not just a lecturer and grader. I want to emphasize the establishment of trust with minimal distractions, so I would have a leaner version for my classes. I want students to think of me as someone who will be an active participant in their learning process.
I chose an image for the course card that showed diverse students working together on a dinosaur dig. I wanted a welcoming image that showed students from different backgrounds getting to engage in scientific research. In the past I have typically used images of dinosaur skeletons or artistic reconstructions of dinosaurs in their habitats, but I liked that this image emphasized students getting the opportunity to take part in the scientific process themselves. I understand that students might not see themselves as part of the scientific world, but this image might make a small gesture in the direction of students taking part in the learning process.
I found the process of designing a humanized homepage to be out of my comfort zone, but that's probably good for learning overall. I would normally think of cartoon dinosaurs in a college class to appear a bit unprofessional, but several peers in the program liked the look of the banner and commented that it was a welcoming element. I draw cartoonish dinosaurs in my lectures quite often, so I'm not even sure why they would bother me in this environment, since I know that a good cartoon dinosaur with "googly" eyes engages students during lectures.
Hopefully, this survey provides students with a welcoming aspect to the class in the very first week's module so that they feel included as people instead of just names on a roster. I have always had a discussion for introductions in my past classes, so the only things new to me here were making it a quiz instead of a discussion and some of the questions that were provided. My favorite question from the template was to ask students their preferred names since they can feel welcomed by this cue. I record all of the preferred names so that I am reminded to use them in my communications. I also added a funny question at the end, as I've been doing for years, to emphasize that this is meant to be a fun and welcoming activity and not a high-stakes quiz.
In the Self-Affirming Icebreaker assignment, I tried to combine the sense of belonging in a learning community with actually sharing learning strategies that students have used successfully in the past. I have had a lot of students that have struggled to "learn how to learn" so I thought this was an opportunity for students to belong through sharing, as well as hear strategies that they could employ. Since this is a writing class, struggles such as "writer's block" come up often, and are discussed in the class. Developing a learning community could foster an environment where students help each other through challenges. This is why I asked students for learning strategies and how they contributed to student success.
I decided to use the Wisdom Wall to give students the opportunity to reflect on their learning challenges and successes so that hopefully they can become better students based on their experiences in the class. Reflection on learning demonstrates the higher order understanding of metacognition. I particularly like the aspect of the Wisdom Wall where students get to "pay it forward" and help future students. Past and future students are thus connected as parts of the same learning community.
For years, I taught dinosaurs class with daily or weekly writing tips to a "captive audience" of in-person students in order to help fulfill the writing instruction requirements for 'W' classes. Ensuring that these writing tips are incorporated by asynchronous fully online students has been a challenge. With bumper videos, I envision every module starting with a writing tip relevant to the upcoming content and assignments. I could even force completion of the writing tip before the student moves on to the dinosaur content. Historically this class attracts majors from all over campus that are not familiar with scientific writing conventions, so students can see how to write like a scientist and how that experience can improve their writing for other classes as well.
My asynchronous dinosaurs lectures typically are comprised of 3 ~15-minute lectures that correspond to a 50 minute in-person lecture. The "leftover" 5 minutes could easily be utilized to emphasize the most important concept for each lecture and provide context for that concept in the class overall, fulfilling relevant learning outcomes (in this case: "Demonstrate knowledge of dinosaur anatomy..."). 15-minute lecture portions are just long enough to reduce engagement, so using a 5-minute microlecture for emphasis is appealing. Students would likely benefit from this focused emphasis on the content and the repetition. I also see the potential for the microlectures to be more "humanized" than the formality of the regular lectures (not that I am ever entirely formal).
