Before joining the Humanizing Online STEM Academy, I felt like I was great with building a rapport with my students when teaching in person, but I struggled to connect with them when teaching online. I found myself seeking all knowledge I could find to help me get my students to be more interactive during our online class, but I consistently have the same 2 or 3 students speaking up whenever I ask a question.
I am the tortoise in that famous story. While I am not in a race, I feel like I am slowly making it to the finish line, although I have just started my journey on humanizing my course. I feel better equipped to humanize my course with the goal of making my course more equitable for all of my students by adding more videos, words of encouragement, and Canvas pages showing better instructions and more course details. I have learned a lot about the software that I did not know was already available to me, and how to use that software in my online course in ways which would best serve my students.
Something I learned that I did not realize is that teaching online is best when offered asynchronously. I thought students would appreciate the teacher being present during their online classes. Now, thanks to this humanizing course and the online student interviews, I understand how I can have a great presence and rapport with my students through video, rubrics, and proper course design. My college does not offer my online courses as asynchronous courses yet, but I would like to see if I can change that to ensure that we are meeting our students' needs. Therefore, I plan to survey my students to see if they would prefer asynchronous online chemistry courses. If they do, I would like to work with my colleagues to build out that course and get it offered within the next 12 months.