I have been designing Psych 63, Introduction to the Psychology Major, for over ten years. Its focus on both student success during the undergraduate major and career options and success following graduation covers a lot of territory. Psychology at Fresno State is a very large department; we currently have 2,000 majors, with about 350 students per semester taking Psych 63. For a long time I taught a class here and a class there, and hoped the other professors had a good approach to their own teaching. Over the pandemic, I shifted my approach and began developing an online asynchronous component to the course that was given to all of the semester's students to make sure that all of our students were given equivalent learning opportunities.
As I continue to develop Psych 63 I am focusing on increasing student belongingness and engagement to increase the effectiveness of the students' learning. Though I learned earlier that shorter videos are better, many of my included videos are pushing 20 minutes, so I'm rethinking the chunks of material. At the same time, I am continuing to increase my focus on conveying a warm emotional presence through my videos, I am much more comfortable with Canvas design than I was and am focusing on improving course navigation to enhance the expression of my engagement with the students.
I plan to decrease the length of my videos while increasing the frequency of new material. Next semester I plan to make a weekly short video introduction to each module. My current written introductions are friendly and descriptive, but freshly recorded video introductions will be more topical and engaging. I feel that small weekly videos will welcome my students into my life and engage them with storytelling in a way that will help them feel my investment in them. I am really working on being more comfortable with making brisk off-the-cuff videos. I also plan to create small groups of students in the classes next semester to enhance student-to-student interactions and build an increased sense of community in my classes.