Polling

Synchronous polling encourages students to engage in a variety of cognitive skills. Polling during online lectures also gives students a voice in an environment where they have a tendency to feel less heard, and provides instructors rapid and constructive information for making course decisions. Polling can surface student misconceptions, and help them to express concerns and needs to the remote instructor in a fast and easy way.

When possible, consider setting up the poll prior to a synchronous session, which can make the course go more smoothly. For more information on creating polls in Zoom, please see Adding Polls to a Zoom Course Meeting In Canvas or Blackboard. When using iClicker, of course, you can incorporate the questions directly into your slides.

Poll questions can also set up activities like breakout group discussion that focus on higher-level thinking about course content. See the table below for an example of preparatory poll questions that lead into higher level discussion prompts. [3]

Chat

If you are teaching a hybrid or fully remote course, using chat can greatly improve student engagement. Even with the best hardware support, remote students may find it very challenging to take part verbally in whole-class discussion or Q&A. Encouraging them to use chat, either to signal that they want to add something or even as their primary mode of contribution, can help them take a more active part in the course. You may find that even some in-person students prefer the chat channel for their own contributions.

If you do choose to use chat, consider assigning a second person (either a GSI or a rotating student) to watch over the chat during lecture or discussion and signal you when questions or discussion points come up there. This way you can be sure to incorporate and address them.

Small Group Work

One thing that is reasonably easy to do online is small group activities. Breakout rooms supply a quick way to let students work together without the distraction of the whole class talking at the same time. When creating activity prompts, just as with in-person students, the best responses are gained when the prompt is:

• Direct and specific
  
• Open-ended

This can make a good activity to follow polls with. Once students have engaged a bit with the day's topic, consider breaking them into small groups with a more in-depth prompt such as the ones noted above. 

In an emergency or disruption, students may need some extra time or support to engage more deeply, so also consider some pre-class activities such as brainstorming or Q&A. This might include:

• A discussion board prompting students to gather initial responses or ideas about the week's readings or materials, without trying to go deeper yet
• A Q&A board such as Harmonize or Piazza, in which students are encouraged to add their own answers, as well as questions
• Sending a Canvas announcements prior to the class meeting, with some questions for students to consider in the upcoming session

Community Online

Feeling like a part of a learning community has been proven to increase student achievement and engagement in remote courses. Community doesn’t often happen organically online the way it does when students are seated next to each other in-person, so it must be intentionally created. The Chronicle suggests: “Focusing on making connections, encouraging students to engage in collaborative work, and checking in regularly to hear how everything is going [are] the basic building blocks of community.” Below are specific suggestions for fostering the type of online community that improves student learning.

One way to foster that strong sense of community is by sharing some personal aspect of yourself and encouraging them to do the same, if and when they are comfortable doing so. Fostering an open and collegial environment that welcomes the individual is important in a remote classroom. What is shared can be something as simple as hobbies and pets, or favorite snacks; these small things go a long way in humanizing the people in the course to each other. A discussion board specifically set aside for such social interactions, with regular prompts to participate--for example, favorite movies one week and favorite seasonal foods another--can help with this.

One way to sustain such connections is to encourage students to form social groups based on what everyone shares--for example, students with the same taste in music might have their own Canvas Group, giving them a separate mini-site where they can share songs or hold meetings on their own schedule.

In remote classrooms it’s also important to create ways to be present to your students. Dropping in on breakout rooms and commenting on group documents such as a Google Doc are two low-demand ways to do this. When you are not visible in the classroom, it’s important to find alternative ways, like these, to establish your presence. Students will then be more likely to reach out to you with questions or concerns.

For those with experience in implementing polling in class, iClicker Cloud is an excellent way to gather feedback from students, with features that go well beyond what Zoom polls can do. iClicker Cloud enables remote instructors to make use of additional question types including short answer, numeric, and click-on-the-target questions. 

Chat Tools

To keep things simple and all in one window, Zoom chat is a good option. 

We recommend that you allow everyone to chat publicly with everyone (the default setting), so that the chat is more likely to evolve into discussion or students answering each other’s questions. 

Having someone keep an eye on chat is very useful when utilizing public chat. If you do not have a GSI, this can, for brief periods, be a student with instructions on what types of comments you would like brought to your attention. If this is not feasible, for example if that would make the student miss too much of the class content and activities, checking the chat at regular intervals (during each break, every ten minutes, etc.) is also effective.

Breakout Room Techniques

Effective breakout rooms require some preparation beforehand. It will go best if you provide students with clear directions and possibly templates for the activity or discussion, such as a Google Doc with the prompt already in it or worksheets. This serves the same function that you regularly might by projecting the prompt, in the classroom. And, even though it may take a bit of practice, we recommend you still “walk” from group to group, to check in on them as they work. See the videos below for a demonstration of good breakout room technique and an example of “walking the room” virtually.

Community Building Techniques

One framework for online student engagement suggests that students engage in learning via five dimensions, one of which is emotional [10]. Because students have a need to feel an emotional connection with their learning and their classmates, intentionally fostering those opportunities for emotional connections is an important part of building a successful online course. 

One strategy to encourage online community is to recognize individual contributions. Just as they do in-person, “[students] give their attention to those who pay attention to them.” [7] One way paying attention to students is to bring up something that a student wrote in a discussion board or Q&A, and respond or ask for further discussion of the point during a synchronous meeting. This will help to reinforce continuity of instruction and a cohesive sense that students’ contributions matter to the course. 

Another method of community-building is to create gathering spaces outside of the class sessions and the course site itself. Using a tool such as YellowDig or WordPress to let students post complaints, tips to each other, personal notes, images, links to websites, and audio or video clips that may not have anything to do with the class helps students connect with each other. Tools like these, that don’t need to be connected with the course site, reinforce the informal, social nature of the space.

Another reliable way of building connection in a course is to schedule regular check-ins with students individually throughout the semester. This may be a one-on-one Zoom check-in, phone call, or email. In large courses, this may be done by GSIs, for their sections, but make sure the primary instructor expresses interest and asks for feedback. Temperature-taking surveys, asking how students are doing, is one good tool for this.