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.
Like many of my colleagues have experienced in the past 4 years since the start of the Covid period, I have been overwhelmed with attempting to learn an enormous amount of new technologies to deliver my online courses. Feel pulled in every direction to do things one way or another. To then turn around the folllowing semester to learn about a even better way of doing things. Where I was prior to this course, anxious that I would walk away feeling completely loss.
Not lost and relieved is the best way I can describe where I am now. This course structure and guidance has modeled and demonstrated in its deliver of information how we all can manage to create a more humanizing STEM courses. I am walking away more confident with my handful of tools I can implement with some degree of confidence immediately.
I plan to immediately this week go into my online course I will be teaching next week and embed the material I have created these past 6 weeks. And as I continue to create content, I will implement a more humanizing course with bumper videos, icebreakers and non-edited weekly videos of encouragement.
The intention of using a liquid syllabus is to convey a warm first impression. In the syllabus the student will see my teaching philosophy, a list of expectations for the both of us, course resources, how to get started in the course, and fun photos and video.
I choose to use this image of a person solving a math problem on a whiteboard because gender and ethnicity is vague. My hopes are for my students to potential see themselves as being represented in the course.
This will be the first page the student views when entering the course through Canvas. My hopes with the banner and picture of me with one of my dogs are project a feeling of warmth. The homepage also gives some directions as to how to begin the course and the means to reach out to me with any questions.
The "Getting to Know You" survey is assigned in the first week of the course. One reason for having this survey is for students to have a feeling that I as their instructor cares to get to know them. The other reason is so I have an idea of who they are and how I can better assist them with their success in the course. A couple of questions I ask are:
What was the last math class you took and long ago?
What is the one thing that is most likely to interfere with your success in this class?
My Sel-Affirming Ice Breaker allows my students to view me in an uncomfortable position of being in a video. I think it is important for them to realize all of us struggle at some point or another. And it is important to lean into those moments to allow for growth.
The flip format gives us all an opportunity to experience the diversity of our class in what objects they choose to represent which words from the list that was provided in the assignment. After viewing my response, the students are to make their own response and to make comment on two other post. This is a great way for them to know they are not alone in the course.
My goal in teaching mathematics is to assists students in training themselves into becoming a problem solvers. Often students do not know where to start with a problem, This lesson, that I call the Circle of Information always gives student starting spot in how to tackle problems in STEM. There are three aspects to the circle; equation, graph, or data. No matter what the problem is, it will be one of these three and the goal of the student is to move into one of the other 2 to help understand the bigger picture.
I chose a lesson in completing the square. This lesson is one of the most important lessons for the student to master. Mastering this topic assures me that students are going to be able to apply this same technique in other topics in mathematics, for example the graphing of a quadratic in vertex form. This video is one of the longest ones I make and will surely be one that most students will review multiple times. Which is the gem of learning online, the ability to pause the video and review the material as much as needed.
This site is by Vicki Day 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.