by Rebecca Borowski, Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics, WWU Getting bored with Discussion boards? Consider having students post to a wiki! A wiki is a website that can be edited by multiple users. Rather than discussion boards, where students reply...
Building Accountability During Breakout Rooms
by Rebecca Borowski, Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics, WWU Have you ever popped into a breakout room to check on your students, only to find cameras off, everyone muted, apparently using the time for their own purposes, rather than engaging with each...
Building Trust in an Online Environment
Contributed to the TLCo-op by Alina Holmes, Graduate Research Assistant of the Center for Instructional Innovation and Assessment, 2020. One of the many reasons that people decide to go into teaching is because they like working with learners who are often young...
Google Docs as a Tool for Class Discussions
Google Docs is a great tool to allow multiple students to work on the same shared document. Students can share their thoughts through text, photo collages, word clouds, and drawings in individual breakout rooms and come then come together as a class on a single...
Google Slides as a Tool for Classroom Discussion
Google Slides is a great tool for promoting students to work together in breakout rooms on a document that is easy to access after coming together as a complete class. For more information on this strategy see Utilizing Breakout Rooms and Online Tools for Student...
Innovative Teaching Showcase 2022: Difficult Conversations
The theme of the 2022-23 Innovative Teaching Showcase is “Difficult Conversations.” Explore this resource for great ideas for utilizing difficult conversations in the practice of teaching. When I do introduce [a difficult topic], my students love it because [it]...
OneNote as a Tool for Student Engagement
OneNote is a great tool for encouraging students to work together in breakout rooms on a single document that is easy to access after coming together as a class. For more information on this strategy see Utilizing Breakout Rooms and Online Tools for Student...
Online Discussion Strategies
Contributed to the TLCo-op by Alina Holmes, Graduate Research Assistant of the Center for Instructional Innovation and Assessment, 2020. Discussion looks very different online than it may look in your traditional classroom setting. However, that doesn't mean that the...
Utilizing Breakout Rooms and Online Tools for Student Engagement
Reconstructing a successful class that was meant to be in-person to fit the new online format can be challenging and intimidating. Someone who has tackled this task and found great success, according to his students, is Dr. Charles Patterson, Professor of Spanish at...
WesternOnline: Student Engagement
WesternOnline is a resource created by WWU's Outreach and Continuing Education to help build online courses effectively. Learn more about strategies and methods that can help you increase student engagement in online courses--and with any course modality using online...