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 been teaching mathematics for 20 years in the California community college and have always loved to teach and see my students succeed in their academic goals. My teaching has really evolved over the years but I saw significant changes during and after the global pandemic. I had taught online classes periodically for many years before Covid, but in 2020 when everything shut down and all my courses were taught online for a number of semesters, I was more motivated than ever to create a robust and similar to in-person online experience for my students.
For the past 4 years, I have been taking courses, workshops and attending training on how to create better online classes. I have learned how to make all the course materials accessible and how to format the courses in engaging and instructive ways. Now I am brining the humanizing element into all my courses. My online courses are completely different now, they more interactive and personable than ever before!
I will continue to adapt and adjust my teaching and my courses as the student population changes and as I learn more about how to best serve my students. One thing I plan to focus on is being a warm demander, a teacher who has high expectations but believes strongly in their students ability to achieve goals and is there to help them along the way. I will look for more training opportunities and collaboration to improve my own practice. I love teaching mathematics and seeing student achieve their academic goals, I know that students are more engaged when I provide an environment where they feel safe to learn and cared about, so that is always my ultimate goal!
I will use this liquid syllabus to share with student before the semester starts by sending it to the registered students in an email. My goal with the liquid syllabus is to create a warm and friendly welcome to the course. I have also included some important information and resource links on my liquid syllabus to help the students get a sense of the structure of the course.
This course card for my Math 31: Calculus II course online is a picture of rolling hills to the mountain tops. I love the outdoors and adventuring with my family, hiking, biking and exploring so the image is personal to me but I also compare our journey through Calculus II together to climbing a mountain!
My homepage is a landing page for the course and where the students start the course and check in weekly. Therefore I want it to feel warm and welcoming. I have created a banner, navigation buttons and a digital Google blackboard that I personalize and update weekly with a Weekly To Do List.
I have also included a Welcome video to introduce myself and say hello to the students, putting my presence and face right on the homepage.
In my Getting To Know You Survey I ask the students to share a variety of information that allows me to understand their backgrounds, responsibilities outside of school and their interests. I also also about their learning styles and what they like to see in a professor. I hope this creates a sense of inclusion because I truly care and take to heart all the information that students share. It helps me to build relationships with my students and to create or adapt lessons to serve all the students in the class.
For this introductory Ice Breaker I ask the students to make a Flip video sharing a "favorite" that tells the class a little something about the student. I give some examples such as a favorite restaurant, hike, vacation, book, video game, place to visit. If they are local (as most students are) these ideas can inspire students to try out new things and also show connections and similar interests among the students.
I include my own Flip video sharing my favorite hike in the local area, as well as my interests in the outdoors and hiking.
In this bumper video, I am introducing a new unit to a Calculus II course on Sequences and Series. I motivate the reasons why we want to and need to study Sequences and Series and then go into a very brief overview of the definitions and examples.
The Microlecture I included is one on writing the formulas for sequences in both recurrence relationships and explicit formulas. This lecture comes at the beginning of the unit on Sequences and Series in a Calculus II course and writing these formulas and finding patterns in sequences is an important skill to review and build upon for the future sections.
This site is by Katie Lucero 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.
