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 am a mathematics instructor at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, California. The Canvas site for my asynchronous, online course, Math 022, Discrete Mathematics, and my syllabus, have been functional and almost exclusively text based since the course's inception in 2021. My course was, and remains, highly structured, and many students appreciate that, but for many other students, the course has not been inviting, and has had little visual appeal.
By attending the Humanizing STEM Academy in the summer of 2023, I learned to create videos that use visuals and voice-overs to better capture the interest of the student. As one deliverable of the academy, I created a publicly accessible, liquid syllabus, that is more visually interesting and works to engage the curiosity and interest of prospective students. My Canvas course portal has also been updated to be more humanized, working to engage students as individuals and members of a forming, mathematical community. At the academy, I learned to make bumper videos and micro-lectures and one of each has been added to my course sections.
The changes to my syllabus and Canvas course were introduced in my two asynchronous sections of discrete mathematics in the fall quarter, 2023, at Foothill College. As of this writing that quarter has not yet finished and I must look forward to the working opinions of my students. To continue my journey to fewer, shorter, and more interesting lectures, I am planning on introducing more bumper videos and micro-lectures quarter-by-quarter, with a goal of accepting student contributions, to better engage their interest and activity. It is a never-ending work in progress.
My liquid syllabus overviews the essence of the course: its instructor; its popularity; its summary of the mathematics underlying computer science; its structure and schedule.
I want the syllabus to welcome the students to an intellectual journey that has already been successfully taken by many students over many years. I want them to know of the importance of a survey course in mathematics to the understanding of topics and methods of computer science.
I want them to feel welcomed and supported from the first day of class through the final exam. I introduce myself in a short video to show that I am approachable. I give advice for success in the first week and the entire course. I present the required material and links for immediate help and pledge to be available for conversation.
Discrete mathematics is a time consuming climb to a higher understanding of the mathematics underlying computer science. Students need to grasp concepts in a sequence to make progress. The climb can seem daunting at first, but the succession of topics makes a doable scaffold. I chose a picture of a young person on a climbing wall with colorful handholds in different shapes. The handholds can represent both the topics in discrete mathematics and the helpful scaffolding in the course.
The video is me explaining my discrete mathematics homepage. I tried to show kindness and social inclusion by have a light-hearted banner featuring a graphic of students have fun, asking questions as they climb and fall through my course.
My survey is short and open-ended. I want the students to think about themselves and their goals for the course. And I want them to tell me what will cause them problems and what will help them succeed. We are going to build a mathematical community, but at this point I want to know more about them as individuals.
My wisdom wall is a place for students to express themselves in a video, offering advice to future students on how to "climb the discrete mathematics wall" or "navigate the discrete mathematics forest."
My bumper video is a meta-lecture. It offers a simple strategy for solving logic problems encoded in a context of knights, who always tell the truth, and knaves, who always lie. Students use logic in language, mathematics, and everyday behavior. It's part of the machinery of sentient beings. But, just as self-reflection can be difficult because it looks inside, logic problems can be difficult because they also look inside. This short strategy video is meant to break through the common complaint: "I don't know how to start."
This short, focused lecture discusses one difficulty that is experienced by many students when they first study the characteristics of infinite sets. Two finite sets with the same cardinality, must have the same size, which is intuitively taken to mean they have the same number of elements. Two infinite sets, however, can have the same cardinality and yet one of the infinite sets can be a proper subset of the other. How can they have the same size? One surely has more elements than the other?
