San Diego Mesa 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 Foothill DeAnza Community College District.
At the beginning of this course, I was at a place where I was comfortable with all of my online and hybrid courses, but I was starting to see the cracks that had developed over the years. An assignment with unclear instructions here, a course topic I had to respond to multiple emails there, a problem with students disappearing halfway through the semester. I was looking forward to reengaging with humanizing course design to jumpstart some much needed upgrades to my courses.
This experience has allowed me the time to dive deeper into some tools I haven't been able to implement yet. I am excited to try using Flip in a welcome discussion and in a Wisdom Wall next semester. Additionally, I have updated my course home page, student survey, liquid syllabus and somewhat stale welcome videos. I have also created two new videos that I can incorporate directly into my class this semester to improve learning around the topics of remote sensing. I also learned a lot about being a warm demander in my communication with students. This can be through wise, helpful, actionable feedback or through emails.
I believe these elements go a further in giving online students insight into my personality. I am hopeful these new elements will communicate to students that I will be present in the course and on their learning journey. I look forward to increased student success and retention!
This summer, I hope to continue this momentum to refresh this course and move onto other courses. I look forward to the fall when I can fully implement the new student survey, video discussions, and home page. I plan on soliciting feedback on the video discussion to see how students are responding and how it improved the sense of community. I would like to update my liquid syllabi for other courses. Moreover, this course has reminded me that I like learning new skills and tools to connect with students. I will continue to seek out professional learning opportunities at my institution and beyond that help me humanize my course and improve student learning.
My new and improved liquid syllabus welcomes students to the course, and gives them a sense of the supportive online classroom environment they'll be joining. I added a new instructor video and updated some of the language in my teaching philosophy to acknowledge how much students' lived experiences will help in this course.
This course card provides students with a more welcoming entry point than my previous course card. I believe this image of 4 students gathered around a computer sets the tone that our class community is a place of learning and growth together. Students can build their network of classmates to reach out to now and in the future with GIS and Geospatial technologies questions. I believe this group of students is a reflection of my current student make up.
In my improved home page, I have updated the content and the layout a bit as I was inspired by colleagues in this course.
To make my page more inviting, I have included a welcome video for the course. This captioned video gives them a brief introduction to what to expect this semester. I also created three new buttons in Canva so students know where to click to start the course, as well as where they can find additional resources and my contact info.
This page will be updated weekly to reflect the most current module, in the course map at the bottom of the page.
A new change I made is removing the wildfire imagery from my course banner. I also changed the link to the office hours scheduling tool to "Schedule a on-on-one" instead of "Schedule a meeting." I hope this is more approachable for students!
I have used welcome surveys in the past. I appreciate the opportunity to refresh!
This survey I open the Friday before class starts. This is an important tool for me to make sure I identify students that may need a little extra support at the beginning of the class.
I ask one question that is specific to my course to understand their technology needs:
This course requires that you have access to a computer on which you can install specialized geospatial programs. Unfortunately, this course cannot be taken on a smartphone or tablet.
I do not want this to be a barrier to your success!
You can rent a laptop from Mesa (http://bit.ly/MesaLaptopCheckout)!
You can use the computers in the STEM Center or the LRC computer lab
Please let me know a little bit more about how you plan on accessing a computer for this course.
The other question I find important is:
"Is there anything else you would like to share at this point?"
Both of these questions help me identify high-touch students for the first few weeks of class. I can easily find students I need to follow up with about technology, which can be a major stumbling block. In the second question, students often express their apprehension about an online class, or returning to class, or anything else that may impact their learning.
At the end of each semester, I use a Wisdom Wall assignment where students can reflect on their time in the class and share advice they'd give to future students.
Through this course, I was empowered to convert this assignment to a Flip assignment. This is an optional opportunity for students to discuss their experience. This allows students to reflect on their growth over the course of the semester, and feel some pride in their ability to get through the challenging parts of this course.
It is my intention to post this in the Welcome module for my course. I hope it models a growth mindset while providing important advice for success. I believe the video and voice messages will be a more powerful way to communicate this than just text alone.
I get a lot of questions asking for clarity about some of the more technical aspects of this course. I chose to create a bumper video explaining the sticky concept of the Electromagnetic Spectrum for my course .
This video will be used on the Canvas page that describes the electromagnetic spectrum. It is intended to provide a brief overview of the topic without getting bogged down in too many technical terms. I've also designed it to better reflect what is important for students to glean from the textbook, Canvas pages, and lab assignment.
Learning Objective: Create and analyze color composite images from multispectral images.
This lecture starts by explaining what the students already learned about remote sensing so far so they can see how the previous topic build on each other to get to the point where we can interpret remotely sensed images. I demonstrate in the same tool the students use in their lab assignment how to use multispectral images to create, display, and interpret color composite images. I define these terms in the video.
I believe it is important to demonstrate the application because students get lost in some of the technical aspects and jargon. What is actually important is their ability to understand how these tools can be used to help them investigate vegetation health, urban growth, wildfire severity, and water resources. In this video, I am providing two things: first, an overview of how to create and interpret color composites, and second, a first look at the software they will be using in the module. It is my goal they learn a little bit about image interpretation while feeling more confident on the software before they start the lab.
This site is by Rachel Russell 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.
