Hi. I'm Michelle Pacansky-Brock, Lead PI for Scaling Humanized Online Teaching in STEM funded
by the California Education Learning Lab. Follow me and I'll tell you more about our project.
Long before the pandemic, online courses have increased access to higher education to students
who have been traditionally left out. Research suggests that Black, Hispanic and low-income
students who take some of their courses online are more likely to complete a bachelor's degree.
This is because online courses remove the barriers of place and time allowing students
to take care of what's important to them while also making progress towards a degree.
Increasing online STEM courses provides potential to diversify the STEM workforce,
which is shown to increase innovative solutions to problems. Experts predict online course offerings
will continue to grow in response to student demand and risks of face-to-face gatherings.
But increasing access alone is not a pathway to equity. In fact we know that equity gaps have
been found to be worse in undergraduate online courses that aren't intentionally designed and
taught with institutional support. When it comes to equitable teaching practices, the research is
clear: instructor to student relationships are the connective tissue between students, engagement,
and learning -- face-to-face and online. To make these shifts, faculty need support through
incentivized meaningful professional development and support from instructional designers. These
are elements of a college or university's equity infrastructure. This project builds on a previous
learning lab Innovations grant, which resulted in the development of a model of humanized online
teaching, a professional development program -- the Humanizing Online STEM Academy -- foundational
research, and an openly shared humanizing online stem toolkit to advance the adoption of humanized
online teaching across the state and beyond. This project will scale the evidence-based Humanizing
Online STEM Academy and examine the impact of humanized online teaching on equity gaps
in undergraduate STEM courses. Closing equity gaps is not as simple as flipping a switch.
It's a complex problem that requires changes in our systems and our structures. The design of
this project makes incremental changes towards achieving systemic change at the personal,
professional, and institutional levels. After completing the Humanizing Online STEM Academy,
our research shows an increase in STEM faculty's confidence in online teaching. They're also more
aware of the impact their teaching has on students' success and are more willing to
support the individual needs of students. And faculty are applying these mindset shifts in their
professional roles. After the Academy, faculty are implementing equitable online teaching practices
like the Liquid Syllabus which serves as a warm reach out to students before a course begins;
a humanized home page to welcome students in week one; a getting to know you survey that
provides faculty with insight into their students emotional condition and the real world situations;
and bumper videos, two to three minute clips set to music that clarify sticky concepts in a visual
way. And the unique design of the project supports scaling as a process of growth.
Partner institutions are first prepared with the foundation for humanizing and
then begin to invest in the academy as equity infrastructure. In the previous Innovations grant,
institutions benefited from grant funded stipends for those who completed the academy.
In the scaling Grant these institutions join in as Grow partners by committing to fund
their own academy stipends. Grow partners are investing in professional development as equity
infrastructure. Also, new institutions are coming on board as Seed partners.
Seed partners will introduce humanizing within their institutional context, recruit faculty for
the Academy, and receive grant funded academy stipends. The scaling grant will increase the
number of institutions participating from the CCC and CSU systems from 8 to 15. The number of STEM
faculty who will graduate from the Academy will increase from 79 to 240 an increase of 200 percent
and the approximate number of students who will benefit from the Academy will increase
from over ten thousand to over thirty thousand, a number that's tough to quantify because when
faculty learn how to humanize their online classes they apply these practices to all their classes
including their face-to-face classes. Finally, the two-year scaling project will build on our
previous research by looking at the impact of the Academy on student performance with a particular
emphasis on students from minoritized groups. Learn more and stay connected at HumanizeOL.org.