Session Description:
How can faculty be a warm demander online? We’ll show you. This session explores a statewide, intersegmental grant project that is scaling a model of humanized online teaching across the California Community College and California State University systems. Humanizing is an instructional model for asynchronous online courses that incorporates validating instructor-student relationships and psychologically inclusive course design to create inclusive online learning experiences. The project’s research links humanizing with high rates of belonging online, particularly among students from racially minoritized groups. Participants will be introduced to a six-week online academy that levels up the digital fluency of faculty by having them create a liquid syllabus and seven other humanized elements that function as kindness cues of social inclusion. In the end, STEM faculty report feeling more aware of the influence of their online teaching behaviors on student performance and more intentional in their efforts to portray themselves as approachable online.
Research Highlights
As part of the grant project, qualitative data was collected from STEM faculty who completed the Academy in 2021, as well as from students in their humanized online courses. The data has illuminated many important findings about the impact of the Humanizing Online STEM Academy on faculty and the impact of humanized online teaching on students in undergraduate online STEM courses.
After completing the Academy, faculty report the following changes:
- More confidence teaching online,
- Improved perceptions of the role instructors play in improving student achievement and on closing equity gaps,
- Heightened awareness of differences among students’ individual experiences,
- More flexibility and intentional efforts to be approachable online, and
- More interactions with students online
Humanized online teaching is linked with the following measures in students:
- High rates of belonging, with higher measures reported among Black, Hispanic, Native American, and Pacific Islander students,
- Black, Latino, Native American, and Pacific Islander students report higher increases in belonging from week one to the end of the course, from week two to the end of the course.
- The sense that an instructor cares about their learning,
- More interactions with professors, and
- More interactions with peers
The project team has prepared a research brief to disseminate the preliminary findings to the general public. We plan to publish several articles about the study and will post updates on this website as they become available.
An additional study is being conducted that will examine the impact of the Academy on faculty perceptions and behaviors, as well as student record data. This page will be updated as those findings become available.
Resources
Research Brief (PDF)
Infographic of the Humanizing Model (PDF)
Published Article – In Search of Belonging Online