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.
Coming from a background of community college and transciplinary departments at undergraduate and graduate levels, I thought I was pretty open-minded as far as instructors go. However, all of my experience was limitied to just taking and teaching in-person classes. Prior to the academy, I only had about three semesters worth of online teaching under my belt. I had noticed a lack of engagement from students and often pondered what I could do to help fill the void left by the lack of in-person interactions. I wasn't familiar with the Humanzing approach to education; however it was something that I was continually grasping for, yet never reaching.
Having completed the academy I can now see all the various Humanizing elements of education that my classes were missing before. I now not only have much better produced videos, but even a liquid syllabus, and tools such as the Wisdom Wall. I feel I'm a much stronger educator now having learned the tools and techniques of Humanizing STEM. Furthermore, I feel I've become a more emphatic instructor who is more senstive to my students needs.
I plan to continue honeing and sharpening the Humanizing skills learned through the academy. I especially like the process of using Adobe Spark and plan to sprinkle little bumper videos all throughout my courses from now on. Where this acadmeny ends, a new journey begins for me and Humanizing my future courses.
Learning and teaching is a collaboration that rests upon a set of expections and respectful rules. The liquid syllabus helps illuminate what to expect from this class and what I'll expect from you. Part of the reason why it's 'liquid' is because each student is unique and I respect your indivual needs. If you need any accomadations to the listed rules and expectations please let me know.
I chose this image as my Canvas Course Card because it embodies the friendship and collaborations I hope students will make with a buttress of astronomy to support and illuminate them from behind. I hope to project the sentiment that everyone is welcome here and I hope all the students become friends and collabortors with each other.
Here is a brief tour of my course Homepage on Canvas. My homepage hopefully serves as a kindness cue of social inclusion for students through it's welcoming tone and getting to know you survey and flip ice-breaker.
This Getting to Know You survey is one of the first things encountered in the course and serves to help transition students into the Humanized approach. By paying close attention to my students responses I can use their individual inputs to help build a collectively better course.
Two questions that are especially important to me are questions two and six, which ask for how to pronounce their name and how they learn best. These two questions help to both make the student feel included and allow me to help tailor the class to the best of their learning style.
My self-affirming ice breaker assingment helps shine a light into the unique hearts and souls of each student. By sharing something tangible that embodies our most important charactistics, we can all learn more about the unique individuals we are learning with.
In this Wisdom Wall assignment, recent graudates share their strategies for succeeding in the course. New students read through these entries upon entering the class, and then post their reflections at the end of the semester. Through connecting at this metacognitavely-early time, the thread of eduction continues to connect past and present students through active assesment.
This bumper video introduces some basic facts about Black Holes. As a descriptive astronomy course, black holes are one of the topics covered and students tend to enjoy learning about them. Hopefully this video serves as an enjoyable introduction to the topic.
This microlecture introduces galaxy morphology to students. The learning objectives are to introduce the various shapes of galaxies and how they all fit together on the Hubble Tuning Fork. It will hopefully help with students' learning experience by easing them into the topic of galaxy morphology.
