“Humanizing” the Course Syllabus Outline
Are your students experiencing anxiety and stress? In a virtual and remote teaching environment, it is extremely challenging to find the causes of anxiety or the main stressors. A 2017 study on student success in online courses found that “online courses substantially change the nature of interactions between students, their peers, and their professors” (Bettigner, Fox, Loeb & Taylor, 2017, p. 2873) and affect student success in online courses.
Changes in patterns of interaction can affect students in different ways and can cause anxiety, stress, and lack of motivation. However, is there something you can do to alleviate stress related to interaction? In a recent article in FOCUS on compassion in student-teacher interaction, Raghav Sampangi, Senior Instructor with the Faculty of Computer Science, talks about supporting students in their learning and about exploring resources and opportunities to give students a rich cognitive and affective learning experience.
Whenever you plan for the next teaching term, whether it is blended, online, or face-to-face, it is likely that you will reflect on your previous experiences to revise your plans based on lessons learned. You may reconsider design and content, but also student success to try and cultivate a positive learning experience for students in the course.
There is support available at the Centre for Learning and Teaching for planning your course. Within your course design, you can consider how to ‘humanize your pre-course contact’ (Pacansky-Brock, 2020). In her June 2020 post about the liquid syllabus, Michelle Pacansky-Brock states:
Online courses require students to troubleshoot on their own and manage complex tasks. You can help by supporting them regularly, being clear about what’s ahead, chunking large projects and content into manageable pieces, and making every effort to establish trust and positive instructor-student relationship in those early weeks.
According to Pacansky-Brock, Smedshammer, and Vincent-Layton (forthcoming), socially marginalized students, international students, culturally diverse students, and students with accessibility needs are at a greater disadvantage than students who are prepared for higher education or are familiar with technology. Although this statement is true in general for online, blended, or face-to-face classes, it becomes even more relevant for remote learning situations. If you are interested in motivating your students in your online course and you are looking for ways to do it, here is how you can humanize the pre-course contact to help alleviate students’ anxiety and stress about a new course.
Target the affective domain of learning and practice Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT)
Speaking of more meaningful and effective teaching, Geneva Gay (2002) defines Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT) as “using the cultural characteristics, experiences, and perspectives of ethnically diverse students as conduits for teaching” (p.106) and in the presence of these personal frames of references, teaching becomes more relevant and effective. Prioritizing the affective domain of learning can support this design. Initially developed between late 1950s to late 70s, the idea of three domains of learning aims at giving students a holistic learning experience. The cognitive domain targets cognition and acquisition of knowledge. The affective domain focuses on developing emotions, attitudes, and behaviours towards the learning experience, making it more relevant for students, and the psychomotor domain of learning is related to developing the ability to organize and coordinate the learning experience and utilize motor skills. This blog post by the London School of Management Education briefly summarizes the three domains and their characteristics. Neuroscience of trust, according to Zaretta Hammond (2017), is a process of asking questions about delivery of content with affective domain of learning in mind. Her 10-minute-long podcast episode on CRT asks teachers not to underestimate or to overlook the “power of relationships.” Students who come from cultures of collectivism or exhibit collectivist learning preferences, tend to perform better in an environment of care and compassion and human interaction.
Make space within your curriculum so your students recognize that “you see them, appreciate them, and have a real bond and connection with them” (Hammond, 2017) You can use the second person pronoun ‘you’ to address students as you lay out the different sections of the course outline. For example, instead of ‘...the course will…’, you can say ‘you will have the opportunity to…’ This can also be achieved through activities, assessments, and by building flexibility both for your student and for yourself. For example, design activities that are relevant to students’ interests and skill building (choice of topic, theme, and working with a peer, etc.), and create assessments with more flexibility built in (gradually build challenge and complexity, add or offer multiple ways of representation). In order to build flexibility, instructors may need extra support in terms of development and grading of assessments. However, there are some options that can help build flexibility and gradually increase the level of challenge of assessments, items and questions.
Remove Barriers
A huge part of planning a course is to prepare a course outline, for which you may have policy guidelines and formats that you have developed for your students, and you, most likely, upload it to your Brightspace site. Many instructors find that most students do not always read the course outline carefully and thoroughly. This may create barriers in their success because they do not entirely understand your expectations. This is especially true for students who have not had any prior experience with a detailed course outline before.
Revise your course outline and identify any learning and presentation barriers that may hinder your students’ understanding of the expectations, deadlines, and policies of your course outline. For your courses, whether they are online, blended, or face-to-face, think about how you can create an equitable environment for your students. Research indicates that the pre-course period of registration to one week prior to the start of the course is a “high opportunity zone” (Pacansky-Brock, 2020). Here is a link to a YouTube video by Dr. Lucie Kocum, Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology in Saint Mary’s University’s Faculty of Science. In this video, she describes “the benefits of adding a table of contents to your syllabus to make it more accessible for students, and she shows how to do so in Word” (Kocum, 2020). According to Dr. Kocum, a table of contents can motivate students to pay attention to different sections in the course outline.
You can present your course outline interactively. Here is an example of an interactive course outline, called the ‘liquid syllabus’. A syllabus course outline such as this will help students understand academic expectations, assessments, and policies in a more interactive, transparent, and accessible way.
To-Do
I am hoping that this piece will encourage you to:
Review your course outlines in order to humanize the pre-course contact
Add interactivity to sections that you want your students to focus on
Create links to different sections in the course content for transparent alignment with learning outcomes and sections of the course outline.
References
Bettinger, E., Fox, L., Loeb, S., & Taylor, E. (2017). Virtual Classrooms: How Online College Courses Affect Student Success. American Economic Review, 107(9), 2855-2875.
Gay, G. (2002). Preparing for culturally responsive teaching. Journal of teacher education, 53(2), 106-116.
Hammond, Z. (2017, Nov.27). Start with responsive. https://crtandthebrain.com/start-with-responsive/
Online Quality Guidelines. https://www.dal.ca/dept/clt/e-learning/online-quality-guidelines.html
Kocum, L. (2020, December 28). How to make your syllabus more accessible? Add a Table of Contents [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3eENmRO2kY&feature=youtu.be
London School of Management Education. (2019, January 21). The three (3) domains of learning – Cognitive; Affective; and Psychomotor (CAPS) – It’s application in teaching and learning. https://lsme.ac.uk/blog/the-three-3-domains-of-learning
Pacansky-Brock, M. (2020). Home. https://brocansky.com/2020/06/humanizing-pre-course-contact-with-a-liquid-syllabus.html
Pacansky-Brock, M., Smedshammer, M., Vincent-Layton, K. (2019). Humanizing Online Teaching to Equitize Higher Education. Manuscript submitted for publication.
Sampangi, R.V. (2020, October 28). Teaching and the Compassion Continuum. https://focus.clt.dal.ca/blog/teaching-and-the-compassion-continuum