Effective Practices: Engagement

Create community in your course:

• Introduce yourself as the instructor. Your introduction might be video- or text-based, and might include information about your teaching experience, teaching philosophy, or research interests.
• Give students the opportunity to introduce themselves. Some instructors provide guiding questions or use their own introductions as a reference for students to follow.

Survey your students:

• What kind of personal technology students use regularly (desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphone)
• If students depend on campus labs or a library to access your course
• What kind of internet connection they use (on campus, Fios, mobile hotspot, public library, coffee shop)

Set clear expectations for communication in your course:

• Before / on the first day of class, tell students how you plan to use Blackboard, especially if you only plan to use this resource in an emergency.
• Clearly state the communication expectations for online discussions, email, and other forms of class interaction, such as group projects or presentations.
• State expected response times for email, Blackboard messages, and assignment feedback.
• Encourage students to sign up for e2campus alerts if they have not done so.
• Clarify your response time and communication preference during an emergency. Will you want students to use email, phone, or text? Will you respond within 24 hours?
• Notify students of contingency plans for academic continuity (e.g., information on syllabus & Blackboard).

Activities that engage students directly with course content support active learning. While these activities might include reading textbooks or articles, students also might engage with content through practice or self-check exercises, simulations, or other activities to apply their learning.

Some publisher integrations and Open Educational Resources provide interactive resources to support student engagement. Tools like CourseArc allow instructors to share course content along with interactive elements such as matching, drag-and-drop, and flashcard activities.

Supporting labs

When campus is closed, it can be challenging to teach a hands-on or practical component of your course. Some labs require specific equipment or collaboration is an important part of the lab experience. If your course depends on a lab, here are some options to consider:

• Move your lab online, either partially or entirely. If your lab depends on physical manipulation of equipment or practice, this won’t work so you may have to delay those components. However, there might be other parts of a lab experience that could work online. Video demonstrations, online simulations, data analysis, and pre/post lab work are all activities that can be translated to the online environment. Once access is restored to the campus, you can address the physical or practical parts of your labs. Your course might be a bit out of order, but if the closure is brief, this might be tolerable.
• Look into virtual labs. Several online resources might replicate the lab experience — for example, looking at the night sky, virtual dissection of animals, lab demonstrations and simulations. Virtual labs will vary widely according to discipline, but you can find many resources on YouTube, Your textbook publisher might also have resources for you to use, or you can explore Open Education Resources. PhET Simulations provides interactive, research-based science and mathematics simulations while ChemCollective offers different chemistry labs, scenario based activities, and simulations.
• When a lab requires students to collect and analyze data, you can use video or web conferencing to show how data can be collected. Then provide raw data sets for students to analyze. While this approach is not as comprehensive as students collecting data themselves, it may help keep them engaged with some of the lab experience while the campus is closed.
• Explore virtual desktop: Do your students need to access specialized software in a lab on campus? Check with DoIT to see if your software can be added to the virtual desktop so students can log in and access the tools.
• Consider increased interaction. Some labs involve direct student interaction, tutoring, question and answers, etc. How can you incorporate engagement tools to replicate this experience? Collaborate and Webex are both tools you can use to meet with students.

Use Graphical Representations

• Concept Mapping – A concept map is a way of illustrating the connections that exist between terms or concepts covered in course material; students construct concept maps by connecting individual terms by lines which indicate the relationship between each set of connected terms. Most of the terms in a concept map have multiple connections. Developing a concept map requires the students to identify and organize information and to establish meaningful relationships between the pieces of information.
• Visual Lists – Here students are asked to make a list–on paper or on a whiteboardd; by working in groups, students typically can generate more comprehensive lists than they might if working alone. This method is particularly effective when students are asked to compare views or to list pros and cons of a position.

Lecture & Presentation Strategies

Other strategies that can promote learner – content interaction during lectures and presentations include:

The Pause Procedure— Pause for two minutes every 12 to 18 minutes, encouraging students to discuss and rework notes in pairs. This approach encourages students to consider their understanding of the lecture material, including its organization. It also provides an opportunity for questioning and clarification and has been shown to significantly increase learning when compared to lectures without the pauses.

Retrieval practice—Pause for two or three minutes every 15 minutes, having students write everything they can remember from  preceding class segment. Encourage questions. This approach prompts students to retrieve information from memory, which improves long term memory, ability to learn subsequent material, and ability to translate information to new domains.

Demonstrations—Ask students to predict the result of a demonstration, briefly discussing with a peer. After demonstration, ask them to discuss the observed result and how it may have differed from their prediction; follow up with instructor explanation. This approach asks students to test their understanding of a system by predicting an outcome. If their prediction is incorrect, it helps them see the misconception and thus prompts them to restructure their mental model.

Minute papers—Ask students a question that requires them to reflect on their learning or to engage in critical thinking. Have them write for one minute. Ask students to share responses to stimulate discussion or collect all responses to inform future class sessions. Like the think-pair-share approach, this approach encourages students to articulate and examine newly formed connections.

Students interaction with other peers can be promoted using a variety of instructional technology tools such as the following examples:

• Blackboard Discussions can support learner engagement. Assign specific prompts to guide student responses and require students to respond to peers for further engagement.
• Blackboard Group assignments support small-group work.
• Google offers a number of tools (Docs, Slides, etc.) to support student collaboration, allowing students to work collaboratively on documents in real-time or asynchronously.
• VoiceThread Assignments allow students to watch a VoiceThread presentation, add comments to a VoiceThread, or create their own VoiceThread presentation. VoiceThread will accept microphone, web cam, cell phone, or file upload of a media file. The Student Gallery view gives students the opportunity to view VoiceThread presentations created by their peers.
• Collaborate and Webex meetings support breakout groups so you can structure large course discussions and small group conversations.

Activities such as group discussions, group projects, group problem-solving assignments, or peer review can support student engagement. The following strategies have been effectively used in face-to-face and online classes.

• Cooperative Learning – For more complex projects, where many heads are better than one or two, you may want to have students work in groups of three or more. As the term “cooperative learning” suggests, students working in groups will help each other to learn. Generally, it is better to form heterogeneous groups particularly when the groups will be working together over time or on complex projects; however, some of these techniques work well with spontaneously formed groups. Cooperative groups encourage discussion of problem solving techniques.
• Jigsaw Method – In the jigsaw method, each member of a group is asked to complete some discrete part of an assignment; when every member has completed his assigned task, the pieces can be joined together to form a finished project. When each student has completed his own research, the group then reforms to complete a comprehensive report. In a chemistry course each student group could research a different form of power generation (nuclear, fossil fuel, hydroelectric, etc.). Then the groups are reformed so that each group has an expert in one form of power generation. They then tackle the difficult problem of how much emphasis should be placed on each method.
• Peer Review – Students are asked to complete an individual homework assignment or short paper. On the day the assignment is due, students submit one copy to the instructor to be graded and one copy to their partner. These may be assigned that day, or students may be assigned partners to work with throughout the term. Each student then takes their partner’s work and depending on the nature of the assignment gives critical feedback, standardizes or assesses the arguments, corrects mistakes in problem-solving or grammar, and so forth. This is a particularly effective way to improve student writing.

Receiving assignment or project feedback, student-instructor discussion in a synchronous class meeting or via an asynchronous discussion in Blackboard or VoiceThread also support student engagement.

Review the following resources for more information about instructor engagement:

• Regular and Substantive Interaction
• Best Practices for Teaching & Managing Your Online Course