Engagement is key to all teaching modalities, but it’s harder to implement in an online course. The Community of Inquiry Framework contends that there are three aspects of online learning that must converge: teaching presence (instructor presence and course design), social presence (peer-to-peer, peer-to-instructor, peer-to-content), and cognitive presence (learning stimulated through social interaction). High teaching and social presence led to higher cognitive presence for students and combatted isolation. Below, find concrete ideas to increase engagement in your online course.
Directed Learning: cognitive load theory tells us that students’ attention drops off after 9-11 minutes, so thinking carefully about how we’re delivering content is paramount to engagement.
- With longer readings, provide students with a list of guiding questions to refer to as they read.
- Scaffolding is your friend! Make written assignments granular so that students can break a larger assignment up into manageable chunks.
- Provide rationales for assignments and readings to encourage students to engage with the material.
- Chunk pre-recorded videos into 9-minute or shorter segments. Follow up pre-recorded lectures with quizzes, or embed kaltura quizzes within videos to break up the lecture portion.
- You can then respond to students individually or, to save time, record a brief video in which you comment on the trends you see in the quiz questions.
- Here’s an example quiz created by Meriah Crawford. H5p.org is an external tool you can embed in your course.
Instructor presence: “instructor’s design choices, discourse facilitation, and direct instruction impacts students’ positive and negative perceptions of the quality of the online learning milieu (social presence) and their ratings of their ability to construct meaningful knowledge in this environment (cognitive presence).”
- Instructors should be present in the online environment, as researchers have found that this leads to a higher cognitive presence for students in an online course: participate in discussion boards by summarizing ideas, redirecting conversation, and providing overviews of the information.
- An easy way to do this, rather than responding to each student’s post, is to create a short video summarizing some key ideas that came up in the discussion post and reaffirming main takeaways.
- Instructors should be “real.” We all have a teacherly presence in the classroom, and that should translate into the online environment as well. Let students know who you are.
- Instructors should communicate regularly with students. Utilizing email and LMS announcements, develop a regular schedule of communication. And reach out to students directly via email when you sense they’re falling behind.
- Instructors should provide regular formative and summative feedback to students. Use text, audio, and visual feedback.
Classroom Community: students need to have interaction with each other within the online learning environment.
- Require students to respond to each other’s discussion posts, but create response guidelines to prevent responses like “I agree completely.”
- Develop collaborative activities in the online environment using tools like Google docs.
- Create course buddies, pairs or trios of students who regularly check in with each other throughout the semester.
- Utilize technology like Slack to foster communication between students.
- Create groups of 3-4 students within the LMS.
- Have student-led discussion posts to facilitate communication between students.
Imitating “Helping Courses”: Students in “helping” courses (i.e. education and health) reported more engagement. Aim to approximate these types of courses with assessments and activities:
- Ethical engagement
- Problem-based learning
- Student-led discussions
- Peer review via google docs
Student Participation:
- Work with students to develop a rubric for online course participation. Some ideas:
- Discussion board participation
- Logging in to the LMS at least once a day
- Checking and responding to email at least once a day
- Regular check-ins with course buddies and instructor
- Attendance in virtual office hours
- Have students self-assess their own participation at the end of each unit. This puts the responsibility on them to actually participate and saves time for you.
- Encourage participation by using a repetitive structure. Utilize the module feature on your LMS so that each week or unit is set up in the same way, with due dates the same each week. This will prevent confusion and foster participation.
- Provide students with real-world analogues to increase engagement and participation.
- Use “authentic assessments”: have students create things they’d create outside of the class boundaries, like websites, op-eds, brochures, etc.
