“Humanizing Online Education: During COVID-19 and Beyond"
Are you looking to build community and foster meaningful instructor-student and student-student interactions in the online environment? Students are more invested in a class when they know that their instructor cares about their learning success, and this relationship is even more important for underserved students. Conveying your human presence, empathy, and awareness in a class that utilizes the online environment requires intention and a toolkit of effective practices.
Humanized learning increases the relevance of content and improves students' motivation to log-in online on a regular basis. When students relate to an instructor as something more than a subject matter expert and begin to conceive of themselves as part of a larger community, they are more likely to be motivated, be satisfied with their learning, and succeed in achieving the course objectives.
Humanizing is particularly important for the design and delivery of online courses/programs, but in the COVID-19 era, humanizing teaching/learning has become imperative in all formats of instruction.