Compiled by Rianne Subijanto (Communication Studies) with contributions from Els de Graauw (Political Science), Thomas Teufel (Philosophy), Harold Ramdass (English), Constantin Schreiber (English), Christine Donaldson, Marcus Dargan, Beth Seplow, Gail Quets, and Jana O’Keefe Bazzoni (Communication Studies). Edited by Constantin Schreiber.
Due to privacy regulations, students cannot be required to appear on videos. How do you encourage students’ engagement in a synchronous classroom when cameras are not in use? What strategies do you have? The tips below are gathered from my email exchanges with fellow faculty mentors from other departments as well as from Communication Studies department faculty members in a Communication Studies peer support session on September 18, 2020.
Note: these are strategies that have been used in an online classroom. Some might work for you; some might not. Many of us are experimenting, so if you adopt any of the following strategies, do so judiciously considering the unique conditions of your class.
Engagement Strategies (in no particular order):
- Send out a “digital access survey” at the beginning of the semester to get a sense of students’ situations and perspectives and how you can help them participate. Check in with those who have not participated and ask how you can help.
- You may have noticed that many of your students do not have cameras, optimum hardware, or low bandwidth/connectivity issues. You can forward information (see email communication from Associate Provost and Assistant Vice President Dennis Slavin) about tech (computer/tablet) loans for students this semester.
- Students might feel uncomfortable having people see their personal space, so let them know that they could choose a backdrop in Zoom (by going to settings), and you can use a backdrop yourself. It can also help to ask them to upload a profile picture, which then is shown instead of just their name on the screen (assuming they do not switch on their video)
- Always remind students that there are different ways of participating (see below: voice, chat, discussion groups, breakout rooms, other roles, homework assignments, etc.).
- Ask students questions throughout and allow them to speak or type responses.
- Give students time to respond to questions, even if it gets awkward.
- Ask students to respond with the “thumbs up” emoji for yes/no questions.
- When teaching first-year students in particular, modeling dialogue, inquiry, and interrogative reading, can be very helpful for students in the early weeks of the semester.
- Use the chat feature throughout–let them individually reflect on an issue, passage, problem, etc., and then send you a private chat summarizing what they’ve done/discovered.
- Using interactive platforms like Google Docs or the Zoom Whiteboard for short in-class activities that require students to write.
- Utilize breakout rooms (it’s clear fairly quickly if there are students who regularly join them very late or not at all) to have small group and individual conversations in which they can collaborate/compare/discuss their individual work/etc. You can add stipulations such as a designated note-taker/s for each group who must share the groups findings in the chat feature/via voice. Drop in to their breakout rooms as you would do with groups in a brick-and-mortar classroom.
- You may also want to create peer-learning/reading groups and maybe preassign them to breakout rooms in class.
- Ask students to keep typed journal notes of class discussions (which they can post to Blackboard) and have these count as part of their participation grade.
- Post an open-ended question (something to debate) and give students 15 minutes to discuss their answers in the chat room on Zoom. You can even have everyone, including yourself, turn off their videos so you all focus on the chat room. You could post follow-up questions if needed, but typically most, if not all, students—including the ones who don’t usually speak—participate.
- Discuss examples from students’ submissions and ask the students to explain their rationale.
- Break up the lecture and activities into smaller chunks. Make sure that every 15 minutes there is a new activity/segment.
- Administer (almost) weekly pre-quizzes (assigned at the end of the previous week and due on the day of the first lecture of the week) to measure student engagement with the class material (if not necessarily of their synchronous wakefulness). They are low stakes (1.5% each), but substantive multiple choice reading comprehension quizzes administered on Blackboard (10 questions randomly generated from a pool of 20+; the appropriate BB settings make them excessively costly, if not impossible, to cheat on). Autonomous before-class engagement with the material can greatly enhance in-class dynamics (and, so, presumably zoom wakefulness).
- Build in (into the synchronous class) mini-quizzes or polls to test student comprehension and attention, and have these quizzes/polls count toward their participation grade.
- Assign students more frequent homework assignments to complete on their own time (this is still participation!).
- Have students upload videos on Vocat (students usually feel more comfortable in pre-recorded videos) and discuss them on Zoom.
- Allow students to participate (via one or more of the different channels mentioned above) in decisions, such as which example of student writing to look at, which meme to discuss, etc.
Some Other Engagement Strategies from Summer Workshops:
Bill Pelz, “(My) Three Principles of Effective Online Pedagogy”
See “Day 2: Writing- and Speaking-to-learn to Generate Engagement” from the Remote Communication-Intensive Teaching workshop hosted by the Schwartz Communication Institute
Questions/Ideas for Reflecting on Student Participation (from Constantin):
- Is there any actual (student performance/output-based) evidence of students not paying sufficient (however you define that) attention, especially when compared to classes on campus? Or are these just your feelings? I myself get this feeling frequently now during online teaching and then I am often positively surprised at students’ input during in-class activities or performance on assignments. Pre-COVID, some of my best students were on their computers or phones regularly during class, and not just for school-related activities.
- What percentage of the time can we expect students to pay attention, especially given that we do not know their situation at home? What percentage of the time did we expect students to pay attention when we taught on campus?
- Should we create additional activities that have the main goal of checking for active participation or should we focus on engineering participation through an engaging learning atmosphere?
- Instead of adding more activities with the primary purpose of checking for comprehension (or rather attention) it might make more sense to wait, if possible in your course (again, you may not have several smaller and at least one major assignment due in the first third of the semester like a lot of writing instructors do), until the first major assignment. You can reflect on your students’ performance then. If they are not doing well/performing within an expected range, then it’s still possible to adjust your teaching.