At the beginning of the course, I had mostly used video and peer-to-peer assignments as content delivery and to meet state requirements for regular and substantive interaction in my online courses. I taught a hybrid Biology lecture before the pandemic, back when Flip was FlipGrid. I was fortunate enough to stumble across it as one of the embedded apps in Canvas at Ventura College and I was looking for a way to have students practice explaining chapter topics before coming to our in person meetings each week. I expected perfunctory responses from the students and was delighted when they used creativity and sincerity to share ideas and respond to each other. It was the start of my belief that an online learning space can create a sense of intimacy that some students will never experience in an in person class with 30 other people in the room, sitting in rows, facing a white board.
I am excited to bring these humanizing strategies and the new tools into my Spring courses. By starting students off with an ice breaker and a welcome survey, to name just a couple new activities, they will be brought into a learning community where they can expect to feel valued and included. It is an important precedent to set because learning works better when each learner is actively involved and confident that they can succeed. This is an important reason to encourage student buy-in early in the class, especially in STEM courses where so many students have erroneously been sent the message that they aren't "good at science".
I plan to make some foundational changes in the course that will make it more human at our college. I am revising the course outcomes and student learning outcomes in the curriculum to be student centered and measurable, but also to make them more readable and applicable from a student perspective. I also plan to collect objectives from each of the programs that microbiology students tend to want to attend to make the objectives for microbiology more aligned with career skills. This will humanize the course because students will be able to see that the activities are aligned to course outcomes that are aligned with skills they need to succeed in their chosen career. This way, students will feel more internal motivation to put in the effort and time needed to engage with classmates to learn course concepts in a way that will allow them to solve problems and make important decisions related to microbiology.