If you’re thinking about the practices from this past year of online learning that you’d like to take with you into your in-person and hybrid classrooms, a new article from Educause offers some great ideas. Improved Student Engagement in Higher Education’s New Normal outlines five teaching enhancements that can increase and sustain student engagement across multiple modes of instruction.
Their suggestions include:
- Collaborative technologies for sense-making, including the use of collaborative documents and slides, shared notes, digital whiteboards, discussion boards, and social annotation tools. The activities of these tools fosters connections between students and the content and students and their classmates, and by making student thinking visible, offers instructors opportunities for feedback and guidance in the moment.
- Student experts for learning and technology support, a practice that recognizes students’ expertise in the digital space, and involves them as leaders. This could range from asking a student leader to facilitate the Zoom chat in a synchronous online session or asking for student input on video editing tools.
- Back channels for informal communication, like Zoom’s chat feature, Microsoft Teams, or Slack, that allow for lower-stakes participation, immediate feedback, and a record of student questions and responses, all of which can foster learning and build community when used in the context of inclusive and respectful communication norms.
- Digital breakout rooms for collaborative learning, which can be used in online sessions, or in a socially-distanced classroom, to allow small groups of students to work together in a structured way, supported by any of the collaborative technologies referenced above.
- Supplemental recording for expanded learning space, which involves recording the class session, whether it happened online or in person, and then sharing it with students, either for students who couldn’t attend, or for “repeat engagement with course content.”