Top Tips for Online Student Engagement

by | Sep 13, 2021 | Active Learning, Building Community, Collaboration, Course Design, Course Modality, Engagement, Flexible Modality Toolkit, Hybrid/Blended, Online, Peer Learning, Remote Teaching, Socrative, Tech Tools, Technologies for All Teaching Modalities

by Meg Weber, Director of Community Engagement and Executive Education, Head Instructor, Entrepreneurship and Innovation Program, WWU

As faculty members, so often we can feel like our connection with students is less than it was in the past. We recall bustling days of packed classrooms, busy hallways, and faculty high-fives, and we yearn for this interaction. And yet, the online environment offers new opportunities for different forms of engagement. Here are some top tips for making the experience richer for yourself and your students. 

  1. Engage your students in learning leadership roles every day. Have an especially engaged student? GREAT, ask them to do a 3-minute opener at the beginning of class or run a particular portion of the session.
  2. Encourage participation and name and norm it. Whether that means cameras on, chat thread participation, etc., decide what works for your community and amplify connection.
  3. Call on students, and ask them to call on each other (pass it forward).
  4. Bring the classroom to the community with guest speakers!
  5. Use feedback tools like Socrative to track student progress and insights. 
    • Ask what you’re open to acting on. Then, where possible, do so and tell them that you are acting on their feedback.  
  6. Use breakout rooms and task the teams! When sending students off to breakout rooms, give students clear directions and trackable prompts with report-back strategies. 
  7. Vary the velocity of interaction.
    • Quick breakout rooms to connect
    • Longer breakout rooms for deeper interaction and group work
    • Polls
    • Using the chat thread
  8. Have students help close out the days: key takeaways, a word they want to carry forward, something in the chat thread.

While engagement is different for us in an online format, we can make it rich and engaging for ourselves and our students by celebrating and amplifying what is going well and growing in our understanding of what to improve.

See also:

Image Attribution: engagement by Kamin Ginkaew from the Noun Project (CC-BY)