This site provides examples of instructional resources created in the Humanizing Online Teaching Academy, a professional development program at Butte College, funded by the Culturally Responsive Pedagogy & Practices grant from the California Community College Chancellor's Office
I think I started the course quite nervous, in part because of everything that's going on with my family and how much prep I had this summer--I had to completely develop a new queer lit class and a new Puente class, and those are face to face, so that work has been competing with this work the whole time, and I felt I didn't really have enough time to be as present as I wanted to be in the course. I also knew my online courses needed a lot of work and was looking for new tools to make them more personable and keep students more engaged.
I definitely have more tools now and am making good use of them, not only for my online course but also my face to face courses. The liquid syllabus works especially well for those, for example, so I've been working on creating a liquid syllabus for each one of those to send students the week before classes start. I still have some reservations about sending them a whole week in advance, so my compromise will be to send them out by Wednesday the week before and making sure I have zero expectations that they engage at all before the first day.
I think I've always been on a journey to make my teaching better, and I also know when I get stressed or overwhelmed I have a tendency to fall back into old patterns and behaviors that make me a less effective teacher, but I think I'm getting better at building in systems and processes that will be sustainable for me as well as for my students all semester. I think if we really want to humanize our courses, that starts with having truly human expectations of ourselves and our students and working against all of the toxic, dominant work-culture behaviors that have been deeply instilled in us. I've learned you have to decrease work-load and maximize the learning impacts of the work you do, set up an ongoing and sustainable feedback mechanism, with a little more up-front, so we can all do less as the semester comes to a finish and we're all tired. I think we just have to be extremely mindful and purposeful about everything we do, but do this in a way that doesn't add more stress and unnecessary work. This course has helped reinforce all of these ideas.
As you know, I had some reservations about the liquid syllabus, in part, because I do like the Google Doc interactive syllabus that students can communicate with me about as they read it. It's just been a meaningful and inspiring way to start digging in and really talking to one another before the course gets rolling, and students make tons of comments and have whole conversations on there, so it's been great. That said, I've come around on the liquid syllabus, and I think it will be quite useful. It also forced me to pare down a lot of my wordy descriptions and imbed more images and video, which I think is a huge improvement, and it also allowed me to remove more stuff from my Google Doc syllabus, which now makes that document and assignment even more manageable for my students and me.
I really like the way my course card turned out, though I kind of wish the more teacher looking person were not a white woman and the student of color wasn't holding the apple card--that kind of bothers me, but it's still kind of a fun image. I might keep shopping around Canva for an image I like better, since I ended up paying for it for this next month. I am going to create a welcoming home page for my face to face courses, since we don't meet till Tuesday, so I definitely want to adjust the card image for those two and might find something I can fully get behind.
I always used the course modules page for my student home page because I thought it was the easiest and most straightforward, but I kind of like the idea of the humanizing home page with more video and imagery, less text, and a quick link to getting started. I also learned how to use the Canvas buttons, which is super cool and will use these to link the Google Docs to all of those assignment prompts from now on. It looks nicer than just the ugly link there at the bottom and just makes the course seem more put together.
I already had a pretty extensive survey at the beginning of all of my classes because our campus still doesn't have a great way of generating meaningful instructor data--the data we get includes all sorts of things, like students who withdraw at any time for any reason, including incompletes and later grade changes in your failure data, and all kinds of other things that make it hard to use. If I keep my own data, I know the stories behind that data, and that's more useful for me then. I know who fails, who withdraws, when, why, etc... and can learn from these and keep trying to make things better. I can also see which populations seem to be disproportionately flourishing in my courses and think about why that might be and how I could do similar things in different ways for the groups that are not doing as well.
Moving my icebreaker activity to a video discussion has been a revelation. I'm on the fence about making video replies necessary because I think more people will reply to one another if they have text, video, and audio comment options. I know that was a huge gift for me, since I wanted to respond to many people's videos, but if the response had to be a video response, I'd probably only do one and have to wait until I was comfortable being on camera, had good lighting, etc...Still, your data that when students were required to do it, they got more comfortable doing it really meant something, and I saw that with video in my own self in this course. I definitely got more comfortable being on camera, so I think just having a few assignments where video submissions are required but keeping the comments open to encourage as much peer response as possible is probably a good compromise.
I'm particularly pleased with my response to this assignment, and it was super helpful for me. I know I've needed to do something to diffuse some of the stress students face moving to the research project, but given all of the other work I had to do this summer, I probably wouldn't have gotten to it. This assignment gave me the nudge I needed and forced me to do something that I know will really help students. If I have students withdraw, it's usually about this time in the course, and this might help keep them in the course and motivated to engage in the project. I also loved the Adobe Express tool. I can't believe how easy it made it to make really professional looking videos. I have one criticism about it, but that only applied to my mini lecture, so I'll cover that below. I went over on this assignment, but I had to complete the explanation of a process that really ends up taking us a total of 6 weeks, so I think doing that in about 6 minutes was pretty good.
I really like this microlecture, but I'm going to have to supplement it with a lot of instruction in other forms, like an announcement where I fill in some of the gaps I couldn't address in the video. This assignment also forced me to meet an important need. I have a quotations quiz that I am now going to replace with a new one. The other one caused too much confusion and was terrible onerous to grade, so I'm going to use this video, embedded in a page with some additional tips and clarifications to prepare students for an easier version of the quiz with more multiple choice answers that are easier for them to figure out and automatic responses like you did for your quizzes that give more in-depth explanations if they get the answers incorrect. I'm going to make the quiz worth no points, though, since that will incentivize them to retake it until they are happy with final score. The 0/0 didn't really do that for me, and I probably would have figured that out and just left my answers as is and moved on to other assignments if we had done more of these--especially with the limited time I had. I know it's even worse for most of our students, so I'll probably do that part differently.
So back to the lecture. I think it definitely fulfills the course objective of helping students integrate their sources into their own views, and I think the visuals are engaging. I used water images to capture a sense of fluidity that we're going for when we integrate quotations. I did struggle with the lack of options for formatting text in the slides and the limited choices we had for slide formats. I probably just need to practice more with the tool, but I used the screenshots because I simply could not format the block quotes clearly--everything in the slides that was text was always centered, and I didn't see any way to change that. I would have just given up and used the Canvas Studio screen shot on a document, but my screenshot video capability on Canvas is not working on either of my computers. I contacted Dave about this, and he couldn't figure it out either. It worked one time on my other computer, and then I started having the same problem on that computer too, so I really think it's a glitch with Canvas Studio. Anyhow, I still think the lecture is useful, and I will instruct them on the page to pause the video and read the example quotes carefully, and then press play, so it's clearer to them what I'm talking about and they can just listen to my explanations instead of trying to listen to my explanations and read the quote examples at the same time.
All in all, though, I emerged from this course with things I could really use to make my courses more engaging and personable and address some major issues I knew I had with certain parts of my online course immediately. That's an amazing gift, and I'm very grateful.
