Humanizing Online STEM Showcase
Li Qu, Assistant Professor, Cal Poly Humboldt.
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.
Reflections
Where I was.
I was not prepared to teach an online course. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I was forced to offer online courses. It was messy. I worked on videos day and night and struggled to meet students' requirements, but I was not satisfied with the teaching results. After the COVID-19 pandemic, I intentionally avoided online teaching modality.
Where I am.
I feel lucky to have received this six-week training in humanizing my course. In this course, I received step-by-step training on humanizing my course by providing a humanized home page on Canvas, a humanized course card, captions to my videos, bumper videos, micro-lectures, etc. I improved my online teaching ability through this course. After six weeks of training, I genuinely feel that I can offer online courses to the level that students feel that they are being taught by human beings, not robots, while enjoying the flexibility of online courses.
Where I am going.
After the six-week training, I have the confidence that I can teach online courses well. I have saved all the course materials and instructions for future reference. Based on what I learned in this Academy, I will prepare online courses before they are assigned to me. Sufficient time to think about the course design is essential. Giving myself sufficient time and using the tools and methods learned from this Academy, I will design my course well and use more time to think about the details. When I need to teach the course, I will revise it and enjoy communicating with students through the online teaching modality. Teaching life will be more enjoyable!
Liquid Syllabus
I use the Liquid Syllabus as the first connection point with the students. First, I provide an introduction video recorded in my garden so that students get to know my academic background and my hobby, realizing the humanized online teaching for the first attempt. Second, in this video, I also used different colors/pictures for different blocks in this syllabus so that students can feel the friendliness of this communication channel. Third, I state the students and the professor's responsibilities clearly, like we were talking in person.
Course Card
This course card has a warm color and a hand in it, humanizing the course card. The course card has a chart about the trend and relationship of revenue and cost, so it is also relevant to my cost accounting course content.
Homepage
On the home page, I provide my photo and a self-introduction video to humanize the page. I discuss how and when students can access their weekly study materials and assignments. I talk about exam policy. I also let the students know where they can find me when they have questions. The homepage provides an overview for the students in this course.
Getting to Know You Survey
This survey contains 11 questions. This survey communicates the humanizing intention by asking about students' names and the pronunciations of names, by trying to understand their study habits, study methods, work circumstances, their feelings about their course, etc. Students can truly feel that a human professor cares about them behind the screen.
Ice Breaker
In this Ice Breaker activity, I ask students to introduce themselves and discuss their experiences or opinion of getting along with people from different cultures. My university has a diverse body of students. Being able to get along with people from different cultures is important to students' college experience. Talking about people also makes online students feel that they are not facing robots, achieving humanizing goal.
Bumper Video
I use this video to motivate the students to put more efforts into learning cost-volume-profit (CVP) analysis. CVP analysis is an important topic in cost accounting and analysis. It is useful but is complicated. I use my personal experience to show how the method can help people make good decisions.
Microlecture
This microlecture is used to explain activity-based-costing (ABC) method. I use a daily life example to illustrate the method, connecting what students will learn with what they have already known to make the content easy to be accepted by the students.
This site is by Li Qu and is shared with a Creative Commons-Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 license. Creation of this content was made possible with funding from the California Education Learning Lab.