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 have taken online teaching principles and course design certification courses and I have created liquid syllabus and welcome videos before but I was camera shy person, not liking to see my face in the videos. I wanted everything I create to be perfect and professional which stopped me from humanizing the class with real me. I use bitmojis and images to replace my live presence.
This Humanizing STEM Academy gave me a wonderful opportunity to collaborate with STEM faculty and got the opportunity various tools hands-on. Now I am more comfortable to show my face on the videos and still exploring the best ways to create videos using different tools and the time involved with this process while I juggle with different things. I putting on my student hat now.
I want to make my course more interesting and appealing to my students. In this showcase page, I have shared my experiments with you all. I have a list of todo things and list of things to modify to make my videos better. As it takes time to work on creating these humanizing elements, I am focusing on one course at time. Once I humanize the whole course, then it will be lot easier to follow the process for other classes too. Hope I don't get many different preparations next semester. Either way, I excited for this adventurous humanizing journey!
I love using liquid syllabus in my class due to its mobile friendly welcoming nature. Also, the changes we make will be updated everywhere it is posted. This gives us the flexibility to collaborate and co-create with our students.
I usually use our college colors to create my course card. I was able to use bitmoji and Canva to create the course card this time. I wanted to make it welcoming with a humanizing touch as the students will be seeing this as a door to enter the Canvas course.
This will be the landing page of the course for the first week. I have my picture for students to see me and provided various methods to contact me. Besides providing how to pronounce my name, I assure them that I am available to assist them to succeed in the class. Additionally, I have provided the link to the orientation video where I will guide the students on how to navigate through the Canvas course.
This is a short survey with four questions. I included a handshake image to go along with the idea of meeting virtually and knowing more about the students. I shared my commitment in helping the students and I wanted them to be honest in answering these questions. Main idea of asking these questions is to guiding to the correct resources so that they are ready to start this online course.
Creating an Ice Breaker Activity using Flip was lot of fun. Thanks for providing the step by step instructions for us to follow which was so detailed and handy to create this assignment. I have not used this assignment in the class yet but I am excited to see how students respond to this activity.
This bumper video will be posted as my chapter opener for the Derivatives chapter. I tell my students to have growth mindset when they struggle with Math problems. Creating this bumper video was one of the challenging things for me. I had to try it multiple times to get it to this one. It is still a work in progress but I know I will get better at it as I create more of this. Along with this video, I get to share my experience on how my "Growth Mindset" and determination helped me in creating this video.
In my calculus 1 class, students learn various derivative rules. Chain rule is one of the rules that helps students find the derivative of the composition function. I have explained the rule with an example to demonstrate this method.