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YUCAIPA, CA— The faculty at Crafton Hills College (CHC) are pulling out all the stops to make distance learning fun, fresh and effective.
While college-wide distance learning will continue through the upcoming spring semester, prospective students are invited to enroll in classes with instructors who are both understanding of difficult circumstances and engaging communicators in their field of expertise.
Brandi Bailes, mathematics professor, admits that statistics can be a dry subject, but humor, she has found, is a helpful remedy.
“I’ve always been a ham in the classroom, but COVID has made me need that more as a teacher,” Bailes said. “People have a lot of math anxiety, so humor always helps with that. In a traditional classroom setting, there’s more natural camaraderie, so now it’s either I am humorous, light-hearted and funny, or this class is not going to be successful.”
With student achievement at the forefront of her mind, Bailes crawls under her desk each week as she logs onto Zoom. Her students watch expectantly as a small grey elephant appears on the screen to teach them the next lesson in Statistics. Using her child’s puppets – Eli the Elephant, Lion, Cow and Cat – Bailes presents effective lectures enhanced with funny anecdotes.
“It keeps students engaged on one hand just because it’s different, but also it helps to not ignore the fact that my students have family around,” Bailes explained. “It puts a lot of pressure on the students who are at home with kids to have to pretend like they are like other students in a distraction-free environment. I like to draw the kids in rather than ignore them and allow them to enjoy the puppet show while their parent is learning.”
Bailes acknowledges the reality of her students’ learning environment and adjusts her expectations accordingly. “We use Snapchat filters in class a lot,” she said. “The students really like using them because it’s more comfortable for them to not have to put their face forward while still having their camera on. Allowing them to hide their appearance as a duck or whatever allows them to still engage without feeling self-conscious.”
Gwendolyn DiPonio, English professor, has taught online for more than ten years and has made adjustments to accommodate students who simply prefer face-to-face classes. Recently she dressed up as Professor McGonagall, fictional Hogwarts professor from the Harry Potter series, to spice up an English lesson on the correct format for research papers.
“My videos have a twofold purpose, both to ease the tension students must feel about electronic communication and to entertain them a bit,” she said. “My dressing up as characters or adding humor to required academic content adds an element of fun we might have if we were in a room together.”
CHC faculty members’ creativity is not limited to character acting though. Alexander O’Brien, instructor of multimedia and computer information systems, was inspired to find a way to make slides more accessible in Canvas, the College’s online learning platform. In an attempt to include an interactive feature, O’Brien found that there was no easy way to accomplish that without HTML coding.
Knowing that other faculty members may be looking for a similar solution, he found that he could make a Google Slides presentation, publish it to the web, and place the provided coding from Google Slides into Canvas for a simple, looping set of images.
“It wasn’t the fully interactive element I was originally hoping for,” O’Brien said. “But it still provided a new way to look at the content.”
The end result allowed students the ability to see images before photo editing, and then blended into the altered image, which helps to distinguish the content from regular, static images. While it was a small change to the online course, O’Brien said it’s vital to make every aspect of distance learning accessible and engaging for students.
“Our students are struggling to perform their best in this new world,” O’Brien said. “It is up to us as teachers to be sure we continue to be vigilant and innovative in our approach to education.”
“For those students new to this online world, I hope our creativity shows them that taking online classes doesn’t have to be as frightening as they might think,” added DiPonio. “Hopefully professors will discover that teaching them doesn’t have to be frightening either!”
Classes for the spring semester will begin in January, and will continue to be remote through the semester. Prospective students are invited to submit an application at craftonhills.edu/prospective-students as registration will begin in November.
