This past week I was in Boston, Massachusetts attending my summer team meeting. While the theme of the meeting was “incorporating DEIB practices into our daily work”, I walked away with a slightly different message.
This meeting was the first time that I have met any of my coworkers in person. Although I have been working with this team for over a year now, I have only ever met any of my team members over Zoom. While I have started to form relationships with many of them, there was most definitely some aspect of those connections that was missing. What I now realize is that the element that was missing was the “humanizing” element. As I return from my time in person with my team, I can’t help but feel empathy for those who may never fill this gap in their connections, especially students in online courses. Having been an in person, hybrid, and virtual student, I know the effects of each modality and the importance of humanizing tools for instruction to fill in gaps that come with the online and hybrid modalities. The good news is that there are guides to make humanizing instructional tools easier. Pacansky-Brock’s (2020) eight humanizing elements lay out eight different tools that you can include in your online course to ensure that your students are more than just “names on screens”. One tool that I plan to implement in my workplace instructional tools is bumper videos. These videos are short checkpoints within course content that clarify sticking points and differentiate learning. How I am going to implement this tool: My company uses tools called “Job Aids”. These job aids are documents that live in a SharePoint site, which guide you through processes. This is a broad definition, because they are used for a broad range of tasks. For almost any process I may need to learn, I am able to find a Job Aid in our company SharePoint site. This makes for a convenient learning experience, allowing me to reference instructions whenever and however often I need to. While these documents are great for this purpose, they lack humanization. By implementing bumper videos, not only are you adding a human element to the tools, but also incorporating differentiation, check points, and providing multiple modalities for multiple learning needs. These bumper videos can be placed throughout the document, screen sharing an example of a difficult aspect of the process, or included at the end of the document outlining the entire process and focusing on any common sticking points. To view how I added bumper videos to a Job Aid, click here. How you can implement this tool: In a K-12 online classroom, these bumper videos can be placed in the middle of a module. If there is a key term you want students to remember you can create a short 15-20 second video of yourself demonstrating that term, connecting that term to your life or their lives, or spelling and defining the term using your own voice. By simply placing a voice with words, human connection can be emphasized and connect students to content. In an online learning environment outside of the K-12 world, bumper videos can be used in the same way. Can you make a connection between current content and past or future content? Can you place a video in the middle of your module encouraging students to silently reflect for 2 minutes on the content learned previously? For more assistance of humanizing your online courses and / or how to create your own bumper videos, check out the content below: Michelle Pacansky-Brock’s “Bumper Videos and Microlectures” George Mason University: “Humanizing Your Online Course: Using Brief “Imperfect” Videos” California Community Colleges “How and why to humanize your online course” References: Pacansky-Brock, M. (2020). How to humanize your online class, version 2.0 [Infographic]. https://brocansky.com/humanizing/infographic2
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Welcome!Sit back, relax, and enjoy (or don't, up to you)! Archives
August 2023
Categories |