Description

This course is intended for Minnesota State faculty who are either teaching or planning to teach an online or hybrid course and are interested applying evidence-based strategies for humanizing the learning experience through effective facilitation and course design. The course is online and asynchronous. Although there are no scheduled class meetings, participants may engage in virtual meetings with other students and course instructors as needed and at their convenience. The course is designed to take no more than 10 hours of work per week to complete.

This is a facilitated, collaborative learning experience that models many of the humanizing strategies that instructors might choose to include in their own courses. Participants will learn experientially by engaging with an instructor and colleagues from across the system in activities that showcase humanizing practices in action.

Faculty will develop their professional knowledge by reviewing the current theory and research in the area of humanizing online learning and engaging in independent reading in their own disciplines, contributing what they discover to a shared knowledge base. They will then reflect on their own teaching style and practices and select evidence-based, humanizing instructional strategies for implementation or refinement in their own online courses. They will evaluate and select specific techniques and tools for supporting those strategies and learn how to apply them.

By the end of the course, faculty will be able to make informed decisions regarding humanizing instructional strategies, they will have a fully articulated plan for implementing and refining two or three humanizing strategies in their own courses, and they will have the opportunity to join a growing learning community through which they can continue to learn and share the results of their humanizing strategies with colleagues from across the system.

Course Learning Objectives

1. Define “humanizing” as it relates to online teaching and learning and explain why it’s important.
2. Discuss research findings that connect humanizing facilitation and course design strategies with online student success.
3. Review the literature review on the impact of humanizing strategies specific to your own discipline/course and contribute your findings to a shared knowledge base.
4. Experience and evaluate at least three tools and techniques, including one that’s new to you, for implementing evidence-based humanizing strategies.
5. Develop a fully articulated implementation plan for introducing or enhancing two to three evidence-based humanizing strategies in your online courses that best fit your teaching style, including selecting the tools and techniques you will use to implement your chosen strategies, developing an assessment method, and possibly sharing your findings with the course’s learning community.

Materials Required

Prior to beginning this course, you should complete the following activities.

• • Select a course that you’d like to which you’d like to apply these concepts
  • Contact Tech Support to set up a D2L Brightspace “Sample/Sandbox” Course if you do not have one

Suggested Audience

Faculty (Full-time and part-time), Instructional Designers and Technologists, and Faculty Developers/Trainers

Reflect on your Professional Development

As you progress through this course, please consider how you can use the assignments as a way to highlight your work on your Professional Development Plan. Consider sharing your work with your leadership team.

Estimated Time Commitment

Most participants are able to complete this course by committing 5-7 hours per week.

RSVP Required

Because we need time to enroll participants into the corresponding D2L Brightspace Course site, we will close RSVPs one week prior to the start of this course.

Accessing the Course Site:  Using the RSVP below allows us to send you reminders about this course and share important information following the course including how to access the corresponding D2L Brightspace course site.

Check Your Junk Mail:  After submitting your RSVP, an email confirmation is sent to the email address you provided. Please check your junk/spam folder if this confirmation was not delivered to your inbox.

Reminders Coming:   We use the email address you provided to send you reminder emails as the event date gets closer, but we suggest you add this event to your calendar.

Data Use:  Your contact information is not shared with any third-parties, but we plan to use your contact information to send you information about upcoming events on this Events Calendar for which you may be interested.

Accommodations: If you require accommodations (live captioning, etc.) to participate in this event, please send an email to the person at the bottom of this page.

Course Location

This asynchronous course is hosted and facilitated using shared D2L Brightspace instance of Minnesota State called, MnSite.

Questions? Contact Scott Wojtanowski