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.
The pandemic threw me into the deep end of creating online engineering content. At the time, students were simply happy with any video lecture content as many instructors struggled with how to convey engineering content in a remote setting. Exiting the pandemic, online engineering courses are here to stay. However, I have noticed the varied success of my students in the online environment. I was struggling with how to engage my students, and how to have them engage each other.
Now that I have worked through the Humanizing STEM course, I feel much more equipped to teach in an online environment. Specifically:
The course integrates the introduction and use of various media/software to engage students in an online environment.
The course provides data-driven conclusions of how we can engage our students successfully.
The course teaches and introduces terminology to allow teachers to effectively discuss the challenges of the online learning.
My goal moving forward is creating inviting courses for my students that incorporate a liquid syllabus, an interactive home page, and modules focused on the progression of concepts using bumper videos to support mircolectures and assignments. No more 1-hour lecture videos! Additionally, I will be integrating assignments where students engage each other in meaningful content and a variety of media. There is a lot of work to do, but it is good work! To the future!
I have been wanting to learn more about using a liquid syllabus in my courses and I am very glad this course gave me the opportunity to explore the concepts and the tools to create the liquid syllabus.
I love how just providing a liquid syllabus a week or two before the semester starts shows your students that their course and success is on your mind before the semester starts. Additionally, students can gain access quickly to resources that will help students start the semester feeling strong and supported. A liquid syllabus is a clear intention that we are here to support student success.
I picked a picture of Fallingwater for my card as the course is intended for Civil Engineers and because the design of Fallingwater is intended to be inviting and integrated into nature, much like we hope our classes to be:)
This survey is a simple yet great tool to engage students on an individual level at the beginning of a course. By asking students for their preferences, educational backgrounds, pronouns, mental/emotional perception of the course/semester, we are fulfilling two goals at once:
We are letting the student know we want to know them at an individual level.
We aquire information that allows us to better serve our students at an individual level.
In my Ice Breaker, I have students pick personal values from a list. Then the students reflect on these values and share something from their lives that incorporates these values. By encouraging students to take a look inside themselves and share with the course, we are channeling personal connections through truth and vulnerability. With this Ice Breaker, I also have the students comment on two other student submissions to foster the connection between students. I personally love the idea of doing this with video recordings as it really allows everyone in the class to feel and connect with each other.
During the pandemic, I created 1-hour lecture videos for my courses. However, most students do not have the attention span to focus on an instructional video for an hour. Additionally, if a student wants to review a concept, they have to skim through my lecture videos to find the content. The solution to this problem is bumper videos.
In engineering, we have a lot of simple concepts that we combine together to create a complex solution to a problem. Bumper videos are a great way to provide quick instruction/reviews of these simple concepts to allow students to more easily integrate the concepts into the complex solution.
I mentioned in the "Bumper Video" section of my showcase some of the issues of having long lecture videos. Instead, I will focus on using microlectures moving forward. I believe some of these microlectures will be preceeded by bumper videos, but these short 5-10 minute lectures allow student to focus on one concept at a time. Additionally, I believe updating my course will be easier as I will need to only worry about creating short videos; I will not need to block out 2 hours of my day to record a 1 hour video. I really believe the microlecture approach is a winning approach for both the students and the professor preparing the content.
