Humanizing Your Online Course

The 10 Principles of Online Teaching we outlined earlier in this section detail our way of creating a learning community consisting of engaged faculty and students. To that end, we spend a lot of time thinking and imagining what good online learning looks like for the modern student. For our students, in particular, the relationships they are building with you and their peers are a critical component to their persistence and ultimate program completion to the career path they have chosen. Humanizing an online course can be a rigorous practice, but one that we find is equally rewarding to you and to your students. Above all, we encourage you to bring your whole self into your online class and to support our students in doing the same. What do we mean by this? We mean, let your students know you are human, just like them. Even though a few of these things have been mentioned already, it bears repeating... here are some examples of practices we have found to be particularly helpful in creating virtual relationships with students: 

1. Record an unscripted video and share something about your week as you talk about how theirs might be shaped for success. [Guide for Creating Videos]
2. Enthusiastically respond to their carefully curated discussion posts with encouraging, validating, and inquiry-raising replies.
3. Encourage students to review the assignment rubrics and use them during your grading—also supply them with substantive, positive, and actionable feedback for improvement over time in the course. 
4. Consider hosting an optional Zoom session on content your students might be struggling with from the previous week. Here is a helpful guide to synchronous Zoom sessions: https://d2l.nl.edu/d2l/le/content/87657/viewContent/2969133/View [Online Synchronous Instruction]
5. Create a weekly announcement with video, audio, graphics, and text that challenges high-performing students with new content and reinforces content for those still working towards mastery. Remind them of those deadlines, even though you already put them in the syllabus and in D2L—it never hurts for them to see it again! 
6. Grade fairly and within the 7-day turnaround time. Objective grading is the key to ongoing improvement for our students. 

Moreover, we want to model the behavior in ourselves that we expect of our students. Our faculty are kind, supportive, and objective in how they guide students through their learning. We do not expect our students to never make a mistake, and we know that “life happens." We cultivate a safe learning environment by not making assumptions about why students may do one thing versus another. If a student does not turn in a paper, we assume they had good intentions and ask them how we can help them turn it in according to the late penalties you have published in the syllabus. We reinforce assignment directions, but do not assume students did not read them—maybe they simply did not understand them. And, when a student has a bad day, we give them a little grace and stay in our own lane. Be sure to grade student work within 7 calendar days of its due date. We encourage you to enter a “0” for missing work at that time and send an email to students who have missed turning in an assignment to check in on them. Refer to the D2L Faculty Resources page for entering grades here: https://www.nl.edu/lms/facultyresources/d2ltutorials/

Interested in knowing more about humanizing Online?  Here is a helpful infographic from one of the leading experts in humanizing an online class, Michelle Pacansky-Brock.

Here are some models we have found to be particularly helpful in lending our learning culture to you: Instead of this... Try this...

For more information about humanizing an online course, review NLU's Humanizing Online: A Practical Guide to Humanizing Your Online Course. In it, you will find ways to adjust your approach to help establish relationships with students, improve the means and methods of communication you use, and create engagement.

For example, an instructor's personality is very important, especially in an online course, and can influence student achievement, retention or completion, and satisfaction with courses. Whether or not you make a conscious effort to project your personality into your online courses, students draw inferences about you through whatever information about you is available to them.

• Share biographical information with students, including what you enjoy about the subject and about teaching students about the subject (our course templates should each have an Instructor Information page where this information would go). Storytelling is a great way to connect with students! Consider inserting a video or picture of yourself, too. 
• Not comfortable sharing your picture or want to have some fun? Create a cartoon character emoticon that you can personalize to look like a whimsical version of you (using Bitmoji) and insert the avatar as an image into your instructional materials or into D2L. 
• Use a personalized virtual background in synchronous meetings (e.g., in Zoom) that represents some aspect of your personality. Travel over to Zoom's help page on virtual backgrounds for information on how to do this.
• Vary your communication method, such as text, graphics, and video (using such tools as Loom or Video Note).

Humanized online teaching is essential to providing an equitable learning experience for all students since it removes the psychological barriers that have marginalized some students' experiences in college and can be exacerbated when they are asked to learn at a distance.