Our recent student survey indicated students are wanting more engagement and interactivity in their remote courses. One solution is to incorporate more active learning strategies into your courses. Active learning is about structuring courses to get ALL students to DO the hard work of learning. Activities do not have to be elaborate to be effective – even adding short structured opportunities for all students to recall, reflect, synthesize ideas, ask questions, or self-assess their learning can improve student learning. We share some examples below: Watch a recording of our remote active learning workshop.
Engage students early
Start class with a recall activity from the last class session, ask students what they already know about the topic you are going to introduce, or ask them to make a prediction about something you are about to discuss.
- Engaging students in an activity early in the class helps to set the tone and expectation for students to engage with the content.
- Having students recall or predict activates what they already know and allows you assess where they are in their learning.
Use the Chat Feature
While presenting in Zoom, we find real-time monitoring of the chat to be challenging. Instead, pause every 10 minutes to check for questions and give a specific prompt for students (e.g. summarize a key idea, what is the least clear point, etc.). Students can write responses in the chat either to the whole class or directly to you. Students and groups of students also can be assigned to monitor the chat and even pose and field questions on topical areas. Through Information Services’ Zoom assistant training, you can request that a student leader receive a short training on how to offer the class technical support in Zoom. (Select “Request Help,” then “Classroom Assistant.”)
Use Polls
Assess student understanding and leverage peer instruction with clicker-type poll questions. Remember the best practices:
- Give students time to think and vote without interaction.
- Create 2-6 person breakout groups for discussion and peer instruction.
- Have students re-vote and allow a student to share their reasoning about correct or incorrect responses.
Break-out rooms for interaction and discussion
Utilize breakout rooms for “think-pair-share” activities or for small group discussions. Try these strategies to improve the dialogue in break-out rooms:
- Give explicit time for individual thinking before discussion. You can make use of the time it takes you to set up break-out rooms to allow students time to think about the prompt.
- Unlike face-to-face classes, students can’t easily choose who they talk to in a class. Remember to allot a little more time for structured social interaction. We prompt students to introduce themselves (“who are you, where are you, and how are you?”) and give groups one minute per person to share and get to know each other at the start of the first breakout session.
- Once students are in breakout rooms it is easy to forget the prompt! Be sure to broadcast a reminder of the prompt to help keep the conversation going.
- Assign roles – especially a reporter – to make someone accountable for sharing the main points of the groups’ discussion.
- When the students return to the main room, ask the reporter to identify themselves using the chat feature so that you can easily call on them to report out. Otherwise, use the breakout room list to call on a group (e.g.: “could Austin, Sierra & Lee’s reporter share your group’s response”) to get the conversation going more quickly.
End class with a closing activity
Take advantage of the last minutes of class with a specific activity or prompt to help students reflect on what they learn and draw out the most important points. Have students write a minute paper, their muddiest point from the lesson, or a plan for studying or finding answers to the questions they have for example. See TEP’s full list of activities to support this kind of “metacognitive” learning.
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