For my online courses this fall, I will be providing students with asynchronous work (as I usually did in face-to-face instruction), like textbook reading, viewing video lecture content, and completing exercises (e.g. homework). To provide flexibility for my students, I'll make attendance at our scheduled class times optional. Because I normally have taught my classes in a blended learning ("flipped") style, I usually design in-class time to provide additional opportunities for small group work, discussion, question-and-answer, and other forms of practice. So, I suppose I don't particularly mind if students decide not to attend class, as long as they are keeping up with their asynchronous work and are succeeding, as measured by the quality of the assessments they submit. Although in the past I've usually offered a small incentive for attending class, like one point per day based on a formative assessment (a low-stakes quiz at the start of class), I'll likely do away with that practice for my virtual course.
Zoom polls
For those students who attend synchronous Zoom class meetings, one approach that can help students stay mentally engaged is to deploy the occasional Zoom poll. Zoom facilitates single-choice or multiple-choice questions, and instructors can use this feature to keep their finger on the pulse of the class. Are students actually sitting at their computers? Are they paying attention?
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| A simple Zoom Poll |
External reading: Zoom instructions for polling
To Poll, the meeting host creates a Poll in the Zoom web portal after creating a meeting. The meeting can then be edited by adding one or more Polls. This happens at the bottom of the meeting details webpage. After launching the meeting, the poll(s) can be opened by the instructor using the Polling button at the bottom of the Zoom window. The instructor sees responses populate in real time (as in the screen shot above). At the end of the poll, the instructor has the option to show the results window to all participants. If desired, after the meeting ends, the poll results can also be downloaded as a Report through the Zoom web portal.
According to Zoom, the instructor can also create a poll during a meeting, but I've never (yet) done this because it takes a little while to create a poll, and I don't want my participants waiting around in real time while I create a poll for them to use. So, this process does take some forethought about what poll questions you're likely to encounter during a meeting. Fortunately, if you host your class meetings in your Personal Meeting Room in Zoom, then you can create a number of different "generic" polls in your Personal Meeting Room. All of those polls will then be available every time you open that Room: for any class, any time. Examples of such polls that are generic and perhaps useful would be:
- "Would you like to spend five more minutes discussing the concept I just presented? Yes/No"
- "Do you think it would help if I explained the concept I just presented in another way? Yes/No"
You can also achieve the same goals by having students use the response symbols available (if you've enabled them) in the Participants window: Yes, No, Go Slower, Go Faster, thumbs up, thumbs down…
Anonymous backchannel discussion
For in-person and for virtual classes, I really like the idea of giving students a way to ask questions anonymously. In my experience, this has helped students who aren't comfortable talking in class better engage and participate. This is, perhaps, particularly important for non-native English speakers and for introverts and others who might not want to ask a "stupid question" (even though we know that if one student has a question, many others will benefit from the answer).
I don't use Zoom chat for this, because although it might be less threatening to some (it is typed, not spoken), it is not anonymous.
Twitter is the way I often approach this. Twitter is not necessarily anonymous: it depends on the username ("handle") a student chooses and how the student writes their account profile. I provide students my Twitter handle in the course syllabus, and I encourage them to tweet questions about class anytime. I particularly encourage this during class, and I'll regularly pause during class to check my Twitter feed for any inquiries that have been submitted. Then I address those questions before moving on.
There are pros and cons to this approach. If your students really get into it, then your Twitter feed might get clogged with class-related banter your other followers might not care much about. On the other hand, sometimes Q&A conversations that start on Twitter turn into really great discussions that engage others from outside of your class.
Asynchronous videos
Even though the title of the post indicates that today is about synchronous activities, if you make attendance of synchronous class optional, then you might want some asynchronous engagement opportunities as well. For classes that will be partly asynchronous, it is particularly nice to see student faces and hear their voices. This can help them engage with the instructor and each other. So, I like to ask students to create and post brief video recordings. For me, I deploy such assignments in a discussion board on the class learning management system (LMS) website. I like this because our LMS allows the creation of video content from within the discussion board, so it is efficient for students to record and post their videos.
An example assignment that I use is to ask each student to briefly explain a topic, or to ask a question they have in mind, or to defend their stance on an issue. Then, I ask each student to view two of their peers' videos and provide written discussion board feedback.
This coming week, I'll be providing more ideas about synchronous and asynchronous engagement as I detail the use of Zoom, discussion boards, and shared Google Docs/Sheets/Slides.
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