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.
Before taking this professional development opportunity, I had five years of teaching experience in Civil Engineering from three different institutions. I taught entry-level engineering courses, engineering mechanics, and senior-level engineering design courses, including capstone designs. Rather than during the pandemic, I do not have online teaching experience. I like to explore this Humanizing STEM opportunity to further improve my teaching portfolio, particularly in an asynchronous online course setting.
After taking a 6-week training with hands-on assignments, I have now learned many interesting tools for engaging student learning and interactions. Some of the notable findings include using the video filming feature embedded in Canvas to offer feedback on students' assignments, proposing a Self-Affirming Ice Breaker activity online, establishing a liquid syllabus, filming short videos via Panapto or Adobe Express, and using YouTube as the platform to publish video clips.
I will utilize the skill sets that I learned from the Humanizing STEM initiative in my engineering education. First, I will adopt some of the items above into my teaching of CE 2 Engineering Communications and Essentials, where the majority of the students are first-year second-semester students. By adding the humanizing aspects to the course materials, I hope the student engagement will be enhanced throughout the semester, which is critical for their long-term success for the studies in our program.
Using the knowledge that I learned from Humanizing STEM, I have prepared a liquid syllabus for CE 2 Engineering Communications and Essentials. Please click the screenshot on the left to access the Google Site of my liquid syllabus.
Here is the course card that I used for CE 2 Engineering Communication and Essentials. It emphasizes the communication skills in the context of civil engineering with a friendly environment.
I used a different LMS during my previous institution. When I switched to Canvas at Fresno State, I never had any homepage features in my Canvas courses. Through Humanizing STEM training, now I have learned the benefit of having a homepage, which allows my students to find key information about the course in one place.
This survey is a great tool to gauge my students' preferences on communication preference, along with a few other elements, to learn their background at the beginning of the semester. I adopted a template from the Canvas database for establishing this survey. Please check out the video to walk through the survey.
This wisdom wall assignment is to ask the current student cohorts to reflect back to the start of the course and identify something they know now that they would wish they had known then. Students will be asked to share their ideas in the form of advice for the next group of incoming students.
I established a bumper video for my engineering statics course on the topic of truss analysis. This is the first video in a online learning environment that student shall watch to kick off the entire module. I shared it with one of my teaching assistants to obtain some useful feedback on this.
This short video lecture aims to address the learning objective of understanding the concepts of elastic displacements at different building levels in the context of seismic analysis of building structures. In this lecture, I intuitively showed the displacements at different building levels, and further explained the building code implications on displacement calculation. Along with a few other video lectures, this video lecture serves as the means for flipping the classroom such that students can solve some homework problems during the class meeting.