Humanizing Online STEM Academy
From Year 2
Cohort 10 · February 12 – March 24, 2024
Program overview
The Humanizing Online STEM Academy is a six-week professional development program for faculty who teach STEM online. It was developed with support from the California Education Learning Lab and is built on eight humanizing elements and culturally responsive "warm demander" pedagogy.
Through the academy, faculty members, including those from Ventura College, learn to integrate personal presence, empathy, and flexibility into their online courses.
My participation
During the academy I built the pieces a student meets before they meet the chemistry:
- A liquid syllabus — a phone-readable page that gives the course's essentials in plain language, sent before the term starts rather than handed out on the first day.
- A "Getting to Know You" survey, asked in the first week, so I learn what a student needs from the course before they have a reason to tell me.
- A welcome page and an instructor introduction that says who I am outside chemistry (painting and photography, video work, five bass guitars), because a student who knows something about the person teaching them asks questions sooner.
- A wisdom wall, where one term's students leave advice for the next, so the encouragement a beginner hears comes from someone who was recently in the same seat.
- A course card and homepage built to look like the syllabus, so the course reads as one thing.
- Short videos: a bumper video introducing the mole, and a microlecture walking through mole-to-mole conversions, so the concept arrives before the calculation does.
The pieces are collected in a showcase site I built at the end of the academy, alongside a written reflection on where I was, where I am, and where I am going. The liquid syllabus is there too.
Current use
The orientation module of my current courses still opens with the welcome page, the introduction, and the survey, and the instructor page has been rewritten each term since. The version running now was updated in May 2026 and still leads with art, media, and music before it gets to office hours.