Strategies to Increase Engagement in Virtual Classrooms
When courses are transitioning between in-person and online formats, it can be difficult to build engagement among your students and maintain it from day to day. Adapting your course material to the new medium and leveraging new technology can help cultivate your students' attention, allowing you to shift your focus back to teaching. Here’s how!
Keep Content Available
Just as students reference notes, being able to refer back to lectures can be exceedingly helpful. Recording lectures you present online is even easier than recording lectures in person. Simply hit ‘record’ on your computer or other device instead of setting up a camera, tripod, microphone, etc. Once your lecture is recorded and made available to students, it serves as an ongoing resource and provides the added benefit of allowing your students to re-engage in course content more frequently outside of class.
Provide Comfortable Ways to Share Ideas
As educators, you likely don’t mind sharing your thoughts on a particular subject, but students may prefer to do it within the safety of numbers. If you struggle with getting students to respond to direct questions verbally during live lectures, polling is a fantastic way to see what they are thinking while catering to extroverts and introverts alike. With polling, students won’t feel singled out by their answer, and you as the educator can get quantitative information about what your students are absorbing.
Gauge Content Understanding
With external factors such as illness impacting students’ access to materials, WiFi, office hours, and more, you’re challenged with teaching the group without leaving individuals behind. Set aside time during each lecture to gauge how well students are understanding the material. Understanding which concepts require further explanation can help you move through the material without worrying about being redundant or leaving students behind. Periodic checks on student understanding and minimizing passive listening is essential to facilitating student success.
If the idea of implementing these three strategies feels overwhelming, utilize technology to do it more effectively and quickly than you could on your own. Kendall Hunt Publishing Company offers a Classroom Engagement Tool that provides lecture recording, live polling/quizzing, comprehension checkpoints, and so much more.
If you have more questions or would like to speak about how the Classroom Engagement Tool can work for your courses, contact us!
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