Activities to Increase Student Engagement in Online Synchronous Courses

Lectures that include an explicit agenda, key learning outcomes and takeaways, and checkpoints throughout will:

• Set clear expectations
• Maintain student attention
• Improve retention

Implement this Activity

1. Begin with an agenda slide.
2. Reinforce spoken lecture with visuals.
3. Build in checkpoints throughout the lecture that ask a “knowledge check” question corresponding to one of the learning outcomes
4. Provide “wait time” and then call on a couple people or ask all students to type their answer in the chat window

Additional Tips:

• To make recorded lectures easier to navigate, upload Zoom recordings to Panopto and create a table of contents from the agenda. This allows students to search, skip around, and review different topics from the lesson with greater ease.

Multiple choice or short-answer surveys to get student opinions and check for understanding will:

• Ensure all students are engaged
• Provide immediate feedback about student understanding
• Provide opportunities to break up lectures

Implement this Activity

1. Create poll questions in advance of the lesson
2. Test polling tools out before using in class

Additional Tips:

• Zoom Polls
  • Pros: allows students to answer within Zoom interface
  • Cons: limited ability to preserve results after session, can’t create poll while in Zoom room

• Poll Everywhere
  • Pros: Lots of features and question types
  • Cons: More practice required to launch poll and view results

• Canvas Quizzes
  • Pros: Many question types, can be graded for correctness or completion

• Canvas Survey
  • Pros: Easy to keep answers and share with students within Canvas, can be used as “participation” points by awarding points just for completion (rather than for correct answers), built-in analytics

Mini-discussions in groups of 2 or 3 will:

• Provide students with enough time to think alone and then discuss with a partner before sharing with the whole class
• Get everyone involved and engaged
• Build community
• Allow you to call on students who might not normally volunteer to share their thoughts

Implement this Activity

1. Pose an open-ended question
2. Give students a few minutes to think on their own (using a timer can be helpful)
3. Put students into breakout rooms for 5-10 minutes to discuss
4. Bring back the whole class, select a few students to share out

Additional Tips:

• Zoom Breakout Rooms are probably the best way to implement in real time. You can choose groups, randomly/automatically assign groups, or allow your students to pick their own breakout rooms.  

Encouraging students to complete a task or other hands-on deliverable in groups of 3-5 will:

• Help students learn more by actually doing the activity
• Facilitate peer instruction
• Allow the instructor to check in on groups and provide support

Implement this Activity

1. Clearly define the task – provide written instructions
2. Specify the requirements for the deliverable
3. Specify the time constraints and set a timer to ensure you stick to these
4. Check to ensure that students are on task

Additional Tips:

• Zoom Breakout Rooms allow you to use random or pre-defined groups. If you need some help managing groups, you can get students to volunteer as leaders and host their own Zoom meetings to work on projects.
• Group collaboration in Canvas allow students to edit a document as a group in real time.

Allowing students to complete lab activities and coding tasks during the class session will:

• Give students the chance to practice new skills independently while being able to ask questions in real time
• Make it possible for them to share screen and show where they’re having problems

Implement this Activity

1. Create problems ahead of time
2. Explain the task to students, share files as needed, and set a time limit
3. The whole class stays in the Zoom room together, and students ask questions as needed
4. Share out. It is helpful for students to “drive” by sharing their screen and show how they completed the task

Additional Tips:

• Enable the share screen feature in Zoom so students can show their work.

Peer-instruction (rather than instructor-led learning) invites students to teach one another the content of the lesson and will:

• Allow students with wide ranges of skills have opportunities to share their knowledge and experience with classmates
• Create opportunities for students to mentor their peers and build community
• Give students practice explaining content and leading group discussions
• Prepare students for future jobs and leadership roles

Implement this Activity

1. First find out the experiences each student has (through surveys, or class meetings before any peer instruction occurs)
2. Match students with more experience with students with less experience
3. Group meetings can take place using Zoom Breakout Rooms

Inviting students to share their work (often at the end of mini-projects or end of course/program final projects) will:

• Provide students with an opportunity to share their work with each other
• Prepare students to present their work in future jobs
• Create opportunities for students to receive feedback on their presentation skills

Implement this Activity

For informal presentations, like at the end of mini-projects:

1. Invite teams to walk the class through their work process and share their findings
2. Students and the instructor can then ask questions

For more formal settings, like final presentations:

1. The instructor should prepare specific questions for the students to address within the presentation
2. The instructor can then help students prepare their presentation by offering feedback on presentation structure, audience interests, etc.
3. During the presentations, one group member can share their screen, while the rest of the group can take turns speaking

Additional Tips:

• Invite industry experts to come to the Zoom room and give feedback to the presenters.
• An alternative to live presentations is having students record presentations and post them to a Canvas discussion board. Peers can then comment and ask questions via the discussion board. Instructor models best practices for presentation comments and questions.

[Can be done both during or outside of Zoom sessions]

Assigning a real-world case study for students to analyze, guided by specific questions will:

• Allow students to practice analytical and problem solving skills
• Provide an opportunity for students to build skills applicable to their specific fields

Implement this Activity

1. Finds one or more case studies you’d like students to analyze
2. Prepare guiding questions that you’d like students to answer as part of their analysis

Additional Tips:

If done during the asynchronous portion of class, students can complete the analysis individually and then submit their analyses as a written report, presentation during the live class portion, or post to the class discussion board.

[Can be done both during or outside of Zoom sessions]

Using discussion boards, like the ones on the Canvas LMS, will:

• Create spaces for students to engage asynchronously in conversations with each other and the instructor
• Facilitate student engagement and community over time and distance
• Give instructors a place to share ideas and resources with the full class

Implement this Activity

1. The instructor can create discussion boards ahead of time in Canvas, which usually include questions that guide students’ responses
2. Students can then respond to the prompts, but can also respond to other students and create threaded discussions
3. Discussions with specific prompts rather than being totally open-ended are generally more successful

Additional Tips:

• During the live sessions students can post their responses to group work.
• During real-time labs, students can use the discussion board as a knowledge bank and share their solutions or ideas with other students.
• During the asynchronous portion of class, students can use the board to post their responses to assignments, such as responses to case study analyses.
• Discussion boards can be done in conjunction with groups in Canvas. This is especially helpful in creating community in large classes. Encourage students to use these small groups as study groups.

For every ten minutes or so of lecture, provide a two minute break for students to process and absorb, reflect, ask questions, or share out. The exact measure of ten and two is flexible, the point is to break up the timing.

When introducing a new topic, a video, a guest speaker, or a reading, give students a list of questions to think about while they go through the lecture or materials. This will help them focus on the key, most important points, and retain the information better.

Ask students, individually, to take some time to think about a real world application of a concept that you have introduced. Give them a couple of minutes to complete this. Call on some students individually to share. Encourage students to write their answer out on paper or on a word document.

Have a question or two ready as soon as students enter the meeting session. Use this to have students re-engage and connect with knowledge from their readings, or from a prior session. Use Zoom Polls for this.