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.
Before beginning this course, I tried to be very conscious of equity issues in the math classroom and took steps to try to be more inviting and encouraging to students from various backgrounds. I have tried to find ways to run my classes that push back against common department practices and general trends in academia that I have seen reinforcing the long term dominance of white men in the field. However, I didn't always have good ways to translate this for an asynchronous online course. My class looked pretty similar to online courses I had taken in the past with the only humanizing element being videos with me talking through hourlong lectures like I would in a physical classroom.
I have learned quite a lot in this professional development course and I have developed several new ways of thinking about asynchronous classes from a student perspective. My classes this term will benefit a lot from the things I have learned. I think the students will get the most improved experience when it comes to peer interactions encouraged in the class. I can now go far beyond text-based discussions and use many more tools to help students get to know one another and learn from each other's experience and unique knowledge.
I will keep developing these resources and broaden their base as I go forward teaching online. I want to make sure I have things like microlectures and bumper videos for topics throughout my courses. I want to include interactive activities for students from day 1 through the rest of the semester so they never lose the connections they build. In the future, I also plan to build out my liquid syllabus to cover multiple classes and contain more useful information for students in an accessible format.
The liquid syllabus is a website I can continue to edit and build out that allows students a more dynamic look at the structure and expectations of my courses. The welcoming presence right at the top of the page is meant to invite students in and show that I will be present and approachable during our class. The colors and blocks of text separated graphically help with readability and keep the student from being overwhelmed by the multiple pages off text found in a traditional syllabus.
This is the Canvas course card I will be using for my online probability and statistics class. I wanted my course card to show students how math in general and statistics in particular are collaborative subjects where results are achieved by diverse groups of people working together. The variety of ages, races, and genders represented in the image is intended to show students that math is for everyone and that we do better work when we include everyone and celebrate our differences.
The homepage of the course starts with a big welcome and a banner showing the name and CRN of the class. This is so students know they're in the right place and feel that they belong. I include some text pointing them to important parts of the course and other documents but direct their attention to two videos. The videos feature my face and voice introducing myself and guiding them through some important pages in Canvas. I want to make sure students can easily navigate the class even if they have never used the platform before.
This survey, in the form of an ungraded Canvas quiz, serves as the first thing students are encouraged to do when starting the course. The questions are written to invite students to open up about themselves and share their story and feelings about the course with me. I hope this will serve as a cue to students that I care about them as individuals and want to mold the course to their specifications. I want them to understand that I care about their learning and will work to help them in this class.
My ice breaker assignment encourages each student to find a physical object that is important to their life and make a "show-and-tell" post. They describe that object and why it's so important to their values and in their life. I ask them to try to make connections with one another by finding things they have in common. The students then reply to each other and build a rapport that they can take with them in the rest of the class.
This bumper video introduces students to the concepts of statistical confidence and confidence intervals. This is often a tricky subject for students to understand since it's a delicate balance of uncertainty and information. The bumper video ties the idea of confidence to things students already understand in their lives and covers some broad strokes of the topic without diving into calculation or other details they will see later in the lesson.
This microlecture covers the introduction to the topic of the arithmetic mean (average) in statistics. The mean is used throughout the rest of the course in many contexts, so it's important that students grasp it early on. The lesson focuses on how to calculate the mean of a data set, the advantages and disadvantages of using the mean instead of other statistics, and uses a couple analogies to help students relate the topic to their own experiences.
