Estimated Read Time 3min 20seconds
Faculty at the University of Michigan – Dearborn and Flint as well as Henry Ford College had a great opportunity to hear from Michelle Pacansky-Brock earlier in the month when the Hub organized to have her speak for a faculty enrichment session around humanizing online learning.
I, unfortunately, did not get a chance to attend; I had to be out that day to take care of some personal matters but I wanted to take this opportunity to highlight the great asynchronous resources that we now have as artifacts from this talk.
In the video from the session, which I will embed below, Michelle is introduced by Provost Alcock as the Faculty Mentor for the entire California Community College system of 116 colleges and 2.1 million students. Provost Alcock also notes that this issue of “humanizing” online courses – really reaching students as a person and not as a screen or a robot – is one of the chief pedagogical issues that she encounters when talking with faculty.
In defining what “humanizing” means Michelle starts things off with a really interesting technique that translates so nicely to the asynchronous video experience. She asks us to think about a time that we did not belong but she then assures us that she is not going to ask us (well, not going to ask the live participants) to share this out – she has no plans to put everyone in breakout rooms or ask everyone to put their experience in the chat. It is just a way to get you thinking about what humanizing is not and it translates so nicely to a recorded experience and becomes a deeply personal experience even though you are only watching a recording. Michelle then shares a personal story of her own about feeling a sense of not belonging and how it transformed into something more humanized later while unpacking ideas of “fitting in” but I’m going to recommend that you watch the video because a description here won’t do it justice. It is Michelle’s story to tell.
Michelle goes on to talk about the toll of feeling like you don’t belong and reminds us for many of our students this is just another stressor along with food insecurity, marginalization, or worrying about making rent. She talks about the effects this can have on the brain and on learning. She recommends the book Bandwidth Recovery to learn more about this.
A really important moment for me came when Michelle started talking about a 2016 study from Jaggers and Xu which looks at the factors of course design in online courses that impacted student performance. It was important to me for a few reasons; one, was because she called out the difference between course design and teaching (something I recently attempted to reflect on myself), and because in the study the only factor that was significantly correlated with student performance was the quality of instructor to student interactions.
There is so much good stuff going on in this talk and my blog post here won’t do it justice. Almost all of it is backed by research that would take much much longer than the one hour video to read and unpack. From the Warm Demander to Validation Theory, Michelle not only unpacks these concepts but weaves them together to drive home that the most important part of the online teaching and learning process is not simple content delivery or organization (though that stuff is important too) but the human connections.
Michelle made a personalized webpage specifically for this talk where she embedded her slides (which are full of useful links) and a personal message. An important resource I would be remiss to not call out specifically is her How and Why to Humanize Your Online Class infographic which includes the 8 Elements of Humanization which she steps through in the talk.
I highly recommend the recording of Michelle’s talk and the associated resources to anyone who was unable to make it to the live delivery and even for those who did, as a review.
Autumm Caines is an Instructional Designer in the Hub for Teaching and Learning Resources and you can find out more about her on her author page.
Read time estimations via https://niram.org/read/