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.
At the start of this course, I thought I was doing a good job making sure that my course was accessible and approachable. I made efforts to make sure students are keeping up with the pace of the course and have the resources needed for success. I use biweekly quizzes to monitor progress, and check in with students who appear to be falling behind. However, I was not doing nearly enough to humanize my course. Students will only see my face during lab hours and office hours, all other communications are through email or voice lectures. I also made too little effort to get personal. Lectures will be focused on content and may not be as engaging to students who would prefer a personal connection with their professors.
The humanizing STEM course gave me some tools and insights that I believe will improve my course. The first "ah-ha" moment was the discussion about high and low context learners. It made me realize that I have designed my course specifically for low-context learners, and there is not enough room set up to get to know one another or spend time socializing beyond the project-based group assignments. Another insight I am thankful for is how much a face and casual communication can help students feel at ease in an online class. I always made an effort with my communications to be friendly, but I realize now that a casual video can communicate that much more clearly. I learned this not only through the course material, but also through the way this course itself is scored. Receiving video feedback from Alex made me realize just how personal an online course can feel despite being virtual. I think this was a fantastic way to communicate this point, and showed me how humanizing an online course can be through the eyes of a student.
I intend to make several changes to my online courses to improve the student experience. For now, it will be including more pages in Canvas with the purpose of adding a personal connection, and reinforcing material. I like the idea of adding an introductory video on a liquid syllabus that students can get to know their professor personally, and now I have this video that I can share with my students. I also intend to add more bumper videos and micro lectures. I enjoyed making this content and I think it will be a big part of my courses. I have already started to make a list of topics that common hurdles for students of statistics. When students are confused about a topic I will often reference a chapter or lecture to review. It would be much more helpful to them if I could reference (or even link) a microlecture that covers only the topic they are struggling to understand.
The liquid syllabus serves as the first impression for students. They will first see a warm and welcoming video and message that is designed to introduce them to their professor. This shows them that their professor is a real person, and attempts to make them more comfortable with interacting with them.
The liquid syllabus also provides a description of the course, expectations, advice, support services, and a pact between professor and student. Students will know what to expect from the class, and what they are expected to contribute to become successful.
I hope that showing a diverse group gives confidence to underrepresented populations taking this course. Statistics can be intimidating for many, and I hope that showing a group of students smiling and happy sets the tone for a positive experience. My goal is to show that all are welcome and that stats can be enjoyable!
My goal with this homepage is to keep the most common links students will need organized and easily accessed. On this page, I include a smiling picture of myself as a kindness cue. I believe that students seeing their professors smiling is an important part of making them feel accepted, welcomed, and socially included in the course.
The getting to know you survey serves as an initial communication with students to let them explain their individual situations and learning styles. I try to give them the space to tell me how they plan to navigate the course, if there is anything I should know about them that could make it difficult to turn assignments in, and also their general feelings about the topic (what emotions come to mind).
I also ask students to tell me about a hobby that they enjoy. I think this is an important kindness cue, as it is entirely separate from the course material, and it lets them interact with me in a more personal way. I think it will be interesting to hear about their hobbies, and share my own as well. This will hopefully lead to a stronger rapport.
The ice breaker I selected has students select 2-3 values from a list that are important to them. They will then reflect by writing down how these values come into play in their own life. After reflecting, they will select an object from their life that represents one or more of those core values and then will create a brief video or voice message about how that object represents their core values. After sharing their own video, they will come back and watch their peers videos. They will also comment on at least two of the videos that resonate with them and share how they hold similar values.
I think this is a great activity for fostering a sense of belonging and connecting students because it allows them to share something that is personal AND represents a core value. You are more likely to open up and connect with others when you share something personal, and this is amplified when the response you get back is positive. By having students respond to the initial post, we are fostering that collaborative and supportive framework often left out of online classes.
This bumper video is about the sampling distribution in Statistics. This concept is one that I think is easily learned, but very quickly forgotten. Students very often confuse the distribution of their data with the sampling distribution that is used to determine statistical significance. So this bumper video will serve as an emphasis of the topic and a reminder in future sections. I often revisit older topics to remind students where we are, and how it connects to new material, and this kind of bumper video is exactly what I need to add as a helpful "on-ramp" to get students introduced to the topic. But also a reminder of the concept before building on top of it.
This microlecture is designed to help students see the difference between a between-subjects design and a within-subjects design. Students need to be familiar with different experimental methods and how the design can influence statistical power. The goal of this microlecture is to give students this intuition.
This aligns with the following learning objective: Explain why a within-subjects design is more statistically powerful than a between-subjects design.
