Humanizing Online STEM Showcase
Becky Colaw, Psychology Instructor, Bakersfield College
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.
Reflections
Where I was.
When I started this course, I had very limited tools that I used in my online courses. I used Canvas Studio as my only form of video. I would have told you that I thought I did a pretty good job humanizing my courses because I am very involved in giving feedback, and I have lecture videos or my online classes and video introductions, all of which are captioned. That was all positive, but I had no idea what humanizing really meant and what a difference it can make in my classes to use all these tools and to understand what is important and motivating for my students. The interview activity was very enlightening to me. Talking to two students who have been in online classes and who told me what was helpful and what was challenging opened my eyes to things about which I need to be more intentional.
Where I am.
Right at this very moment, I'm a little overwhelmed. I've learned so much, and I am excited to use it all in all of my classes, but it is going to take time, so I am just trying to focus on one class at a time, starting with my statistics class. I'm also very excited to see how this impacts my students. I have a lot of work ahead of me, but I believe the results are going to be incredible for my students and for me. I think it will increase motivation on both ends. Making my classes look appealing is fun to me, and using the tools I learned that they are much easier than I thought I get intimidated about technology, but it was all fairly simple, and the learning curve was not bad at all.
Where I am going.
As I mentioned before I have a lot of work to do. I am going to start by finishing my statistics course. I am thankful that it is a late start class so I have several weeks to work on it. It is going to require adding more student-to-student interactions with discussion boards and more bumper videos. I also need to work on my lecture videos, creating them as microlectures which will take some time. After I get statistics where I want it to be, I will work on my psychology courses. The lecture videos for my online psychology course are terrible in my opinion; I want to work on those as soon as I can.
Liquid Syllabus
I have enjoyed working on this liquid syllabus so much, and I think it will be a very useful tool for helping my students get to know me better as a person, not just as an instructor. At this point, I have most of the get-to-know-me information on the front page, and I have a second page for my stats class. I plan to add pages for each of my other classes as well, and I want each one to have a general weekly schedule in them. That was something presented in a flex week class I took last year that I think will be very helpful to students in terms of knowing expectations. I went ahead and sent the link to my liquid syllabus with a note that it is still in progress to my students for the fall semester. I hope to get feedback from them as well. I will continue to do that moving forward in future semesters.
Course Card
I chose this course card because it shows students working together. The students show some diversity, and I also like that the student on the right end looks like he is smiling. I hope the image helps students to feel a little less intimidated by statistics.
Homepage
First of all, I love the background of my banner, which is just one I found online, but it's a cheerful color, in my opinion. I also think seeing the picture of their professor out in the world, in this case, in nature, makes me seem more real and, I hope, warmer. I added the video because when I was an online student, it was always a little challenging for every class to figure out how the instructor set up their online course. This just gives a quick little overview to hopefully help them feel more comfortable with my arrangement in Canvas. It also has important quick links to get them to places they may need. I hope these things indicate to them my desire to be helpful and to provide tools to help them succeed.
Getting to Know You Survey
This survey invites the students to share things that are important to them, personally and academically. It shows that I have a desire to know them individually and to teach them in a way that is most helpful to them. It shows respect for their individuality.
I want to include the survey during the first week of the class, so I have this information as early as possible. I will probably include it just after my welcome page.
Ice Breaker
My ice breaker asks students to think about their values. I really like this question because it makes them think about who they are. I also think asking them about values lets them know that I want to know them on more than a surface level. The instructions indicate that it will help them come to understand what they have in common with other students, which I think will help them to build community.
Using video allows them (and me) to put faces to names, which facilitates humanizing the course. I think hearing people talk and seeing them is important relationally. It will help me to feel more connected to my students and should do the same for them with each other.
Bumper Video
Learning mean, median, and mode is foundational to statistics, and students must understand it early on in the course, or everything else is going to be challenging. I created this short bumper video to give them a taste of mean, median, and mode with a microlecture to follow. Hopefully, this bumper video will help them to see that it's not too hard (after all I can explain it in just over two minutes) and give them a taste of what is to come. It is short, which will meet those who have difficulty attending for long, and it may be enough for some students to learn the concepts. Between this bumper video and their reading, they may get the concept and not even need to watch the microlecture.
Microlecture
The learning objective for which my microlecture is aligned is "The student will understand the different types of measures of central tendency and how to calculate them." In this video, I moved more slowly than in the bumper video and added more detail about mean, median, and mode. Again, this is foundational for the rest of statistics. I tried to keep it short, yet be thorough in my explanation. I encouraged students to watch it more than once if necessary and to reach out to me if they were still struggling to understand after watching the video. It also sets things up for future microlectures. I hope showing them the math step by step helps them to feel more comfortable with the mathematical steps. That is usually what student are most worried about.