I believe letting my personality shine through the way I teach “humanizes” the online learning experience. One of the ways I have tried to do this is through my office hour sessions. I have developed some ways to inject a little more of my personality and enthusiasm for vertebrate life through additional activities the students can engage with at their discretion, including: Supplementary lectures exploring certain topics in the course in more detail, such as phylogenetic reconstruction methods Software tutorials such as Mendeley citation manager and using Google Scholar to locate and browse  primary sources Livestreaming my research activities, such as preparing vertebrate natural history specimens, and talking  with students about how they could perform similar activities at home with their dissection specimens Perhaps most importantly, guided pre-exam study sessions and post-exam review sessions.      None of these activities are required of course – my ...

Early in the fall of 1992, in my first grad school course at Oklahoma State University I first heard of Stephen Krashen . His famous Theory of Second Language Acquisition posits that “acquisition requires meaningful interaction in the target language - natural communication - in which speakers are concerned not with the form of their utterances but with the messages they are conveying and understanding” (Krashen, 1992). In essence, meaningful communication is what produces any learning, not just English language learning. That fall, discussions rambled about Krashen’s notion of comprehensible input, expressed as i + 1. Simply put, this formula states that learners should always receive input (i) that is just one (1) level of difficulty above their current understanding. In theory, you cannot quantify i or 1, but we know something like i + 20 is suboptimal. In the classroom, you can open the lines of communication so students can feel safe expressing gaps in knowledge and communication...