Ever get the sense students are jumping straight into quizzes and assignments without first taking the time to read or watch your carefully designed content? This Byte-sized session explores an often-overlooked way to use modules to easily guide students along the learning path you want them to follow.
Student-instructor relationships matter in community college classes -- regardless of whether a course is taught on-campus or online. But when you teach online, you need to be more intentional about crafting your online presence to convey yourself as a real person who cares about your students' learning.
Data shared by the Community College Research Center shows there are some concerning gaps between the instructor-student relationships in face-to-face and online classes. Research shows that community college students feel their relationships with instructors in their face-to-face courses are more "personal," "immediate," "detailed," and "solid" when compared with their relationships with their online instructors. When learning online, students report feeling the need to teach themselves. One student in a large research study shared, "It just seems ... when you do it online, if you need help, your teacher is basically not there."
We know these student takeaways are not ok. We know instructor-student relationships are the foundation of meaningful, supportive community college learning experiences -- regardless of a course's modality. And to support faculty, @ONE is now offering a online professional development course, Humanizing Online Teaching and Learning, to introduce faculty to the relevant research about instructor presence, social presence, and culturally responsive teaching; experience a humanized online class through the lens of a student; experiment with creating micro-videos; see examples of how other faculty are applying humanizing practices in their online classes; and work through the nerves we all feel when speaking to a webcam (it really does get easier!).
Recently, I sat down with Tracy Schaelen, from Southwestern College, to explore her views about humanizing online teaching and learning. As always, Tracy provided invaluable insights about why the instructor-student relationship is so important for supporting the needs of our students, especially those from underserved populations. In the 17-minute video embedded below, Tracy also provides us with a tour of some of her own humanizing practices, which we hope will inspire you to check @ONE's course catalog and register for the next offering of Humanizing Online Teaching and Learning. Tracy will be one of the facilitators of this new course!
Announcements are an important tool in promoting regular and effective contact in an online course. But if students aren't reading your announcements, the time and effort you put into them is to no avail! In this edition of Byte-sized Canvas, we'll talk about one strategy to make sure your announcements are getting read.
In this 9-minute video, Dr. Jennifer Carlin-Goldberg from Santa Rosa Junior College shows how she uses Canvas Commons to import sample course shells with free OpenStax textbook content. Jennifer also gives us a tour of her hybrid Statistics class in Canvas and explains how she integrated OpenStax content with her own materials along with shared quizzes and YouTube videos designed to go with the OpenStax textbook.
OpenStax is a nonprofit based at Rice University that creates peer-reviewed, openly licensed textbooks available in free, digital formats to students and for a low cost in print. Since it launched in 2012, OpenStax has produced 45 textbooks in Math, Science, Social Sciences and Humanities that are free for faculty to use “as is” or to download and modify. Starting in December 2017, Canvas users can use Commons to import OpenStax content that the California Community Colleges Online Education Initiative (OEI) has embedded in Canvas course shells.