Mary Beth Pattengale's Humanizing STEM Showcase

Humanizing Online STEM Showcase

Mary Beth Pattengale, Mathematics Instructor Sierra College
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 Sierra Community College District

Reflections

Where I was.

Connecting with students in my classes has always been one of my greatest strengths as an educator. I genuinely enjoy interacting with my students, and also enjoy the math, too. And I believe my students benefit from that. However, that is precisely what has always made online classes such a challenge.

I've been teaching distance learning, and then online classes for many years, long before I had heard of the Coronavirus. Prior to the pandemic, like most faculty, I had NO video creation skills, and relied heavily on what was provided by the publishing company I was using, and on email. By the end of the pandemic, I was much further along with my video production journey, but still struggled to create content that included valuable lessons, but was also personalized. After the pandemic, but before this class, I had been improving, particularly when any new technology came along that was easy enough to learn. But still had a long way to go.

Where I am.

During this class, I have most appreciated really learning Adobe and Canva to create videos that informative but also allow my personality to come through. Though it has been time-consuming at times, I have felt energized to generate each product featured here, as well as thinking about how I can refresh my current content for future students. There is a feeling of eagerness for me right now, as I feel, for the first time in a great while, that I have the tools to produce some much better, more personal content.

Where I am going.

The course I decided to focus on for this course was admittedly the easiest one for me to "humanize." My hope was reazlied however, in that I feel like the competency I've developed so far can now be carried into the more challenging STEM courses, like calculus. I want to continue to foster that sense of community and interaction for my online students. It seems that online students are so much more adept at navigating these courses than they were 10 years ago, and I want to capitalize on that. Truly, I want us to grow together, putting our new skills and new perspectives to use.

My Liquid Syllabus

I designed my liquid syllabus to be engaging and welcoming. I wanted to include info about myself in a welcome video, but also helpful resources to help the students succed. Those include a list of expectations for both the student and for myself, my teaching philosophy, a week #1 to do list, and several resources for needs beyond mathematics that Sierra College offers.

Liquid Syllabus

Course Card

This course covers such a wide variety of interesting mathematics, hopefully completely different than topics the students are used to seeing in their previous math courses. I wanted to include 3 of those topics in the course card: voting method, Fibonacci Numbers, and ancient number systems.

Homepage

Once the student clicks on the course card, they come across my Humanized Homepage. This page is meant to be inviting, but not overly informative. I want the students to know that I'm happy to have them in my course and hopefully excite them about the course.

Getting to Know You Survey

The "Getting to Know You" survey is assigned in the first week of the course. There are several questions that will help me to better know who each student is, along with a variety of preferences. Along with their name and preferred form of communications, I ask questions like:

What are the best study habits you've found for yourself?
What is the one thing that is most likely to interfere with your success in this class?

Wisdom Wall

For this Wisdom Wall, I invite students to contribute by asking them to share their advice for success (or challenges) with their first exam with future and current students. By recording their advice, the students reflect on what they did to that benefited them on their first exam, or what they will avoid doing next time to help them navigate with success through the next exams. Then by listening to other students' advice, students see that other students have similar struggles and identify new strategies for overcoming them.

Bumper Video

This bumper video introduces the topic of Fibonacci numbers, and hopefully catches students' interest with the wide range of surprising places that they are found. I designed the video to set the foundation this fun topic.

MicroLecture

In this microlecture, I wanted to not only define and demonstrate how they can construct a Fibonacci Spiral, but also give some fascinating examples of where they may have seen Fibonacci Spirals in nature. Finally, I wanted to explain the difference between Fibonacci Spirals and other types of spirals.

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