Engagement in Synchronous and Asynchronous Environments
Students must engage in their courses in order to learn. But what, exactly, do we mean by “student engagement?” And what teaching practices and strategies help our students engage in an online class?
This article will discuss three dimensions of engagement (emotional, behavioral and cognitive) and teaching practices that encourage engagement including humanizing your course, communicating clearly and consistently, removing barriers to content and fostering community.
- Introduction
- Four teaching practices that encourage engagement
- Register for an upcoming workshop
Introduction
What is meant by “student engagement?”
How does an engaged students feel about the course? What do they do inside and outside of class? How does an engaged student think about course material? These questions correspond to three types of student engagement:
Emotional engagement
- To be able to learn, students must feel positive about the course, their prospects for success, and the support they receive. They must feel motivated and valued.
- If a student feels frustrated, threatened, unsafe or disrespected, they are unlikely to engage at all.
Behavioral engagement
- You’ve provided instructional materials, delivered content, and created assignments. The student must take some action and interact with these materials, with you, and with each other to learn.
- This activity is their behavioral engagement. They must attend class, pay attention, participate, and perform.
Cognitive engagement
- A willingness to undertake deep, rather than surface, learning.
- Cannot be seen directly, but the results of it are making connections, thinking critically, and digging deeply into tough problems or challenges.
To fully engage students, we must attend to their emotional engagement and inspire their behavioral engagement in order to support them in reaching the ultimate goal: cognitive engagement. How can we help them feel motivated and supported, keep their attention, and provide opportunities and guidance to think deeply and critically?
Four teaching practices that encourage engagement
Read through the description of the practices below and evaluate each for it’s value and appropriateness for your course.
Humanize your course
Are your relationships with students warm and friendly? Do they know something about you as a person? Are you aware of what students are going through outside of your course? Do you have interactions with students outside of scheduled class meetings?
If you answered “No” to the questions above, you might consider some ways to humanize your course to increase student engagement. Humanizing your online course will help students engage emotionally, which will help them succeed.
High-impact practices that humanize your course through building trust, presence, awareness and empathy can help with student emotional engagement. See the Humanizing Your Online Course DELTA Teaching Resources Page to dive into this topic.
Communicate clearly and consistently
Are your students constantly asking about due dates, where to find things in your course, and so on? Are they confused about what’s expected of them? Are they surprised when they get grades back on assignments or assessments? Do they find your course well-organized or confusing?
Communicating with clarity and consistency will help your students engage as they will feel less frustrated, know what to do when, and understand what type of learning you hope they will achieve.
Strategy 1: Take time to fully orient your students to your course
- Use a welcome letter and a “Start Here” section in Moodle to orient your students to your course structure and expectations. Be sure to share expectations about student participation and engagement, and explain how participation will help them be successful in your class.
- Create an effective syllabus
- DELTA’s Syllabus Template is organized with best practices for communicating course information in mind.
- You might include a syllabus quiz or scavenger hunt to encourage students to read it and highlight the most important points.
- See the Helping Students Get Started in an Online Class DELTA Teaching Resources page for full details.
Strategy 2: Design your course for clarity and consistency
- Create a consistent Moodle Layout.
- Read the Quick Start Course Shell User Guide
- Review the Best Practices for Designing Your Moodle Course DELTA Teaching Resources page
- Use Moodle Announcement to post weekly messages with reminders, updates, etc.
- You might create a “What’s Due this Week” video or announcement each week.
- See the support document on Moodle Announcements for information.
Strategy 3: Clearly define your grading criteria
- Provide clear descriptions of what you’re looking for prior to students getting started on an assignment.
- Review the Rubric Best Practices, Examples, and Templates DELTA Teaching Resources page
- See the Sample Simplified Discussion Forum Rubrics from DELTA Teaching Resource
Strategy 4: Provide regular, substantive feedback on learning
Regular and substantive feedback communicates to your students you are present and care about their learning. Importantly, it provides a way to help them track their learning progress, and can help you adjust your teaching when you see student are struggling.
- Provide individual feedback through Moodle assignments, forums or quizzes or Google Assignments.
- See the Moodle support documentation for Moodle Assignment, Moodle forums or Moodle Quizzes.
- Review the DELTA Teaching Resources page on Google Assignments
- Offer collective feedback in weekly announcements.
- Join in or moderate Moodle forum discussions as appropriate
- See item 2 in this article to guide discussions.
- Review the Providing Effective Feedback DELTA Teaching Resources page
- Review the Real Time Assessments and Check-ins DELTA Teaching Resources page
Remove barriers to engagement with content
Do your students struggle to be interested in your course content, or think it’s not relevant to them? Do they have trouble getting through the readings, lectures, or videos? Do they have trouble grasping the concepts in your course?
If you answered “Yes” to any of these questions, it’s worth considering if there are barriers to engagement due to how content is presented in the course. Helping students feel interested in the content boosts motivation, and their engagement with and comprehension of each piece is important for them to succeed in your course.
Strategy 1: Recruit interest in the course content
- Share the “Why.” Why did you choose the content? How will it help your students achieve the learning objectives? And why are those learning objectives important? What is the relevance to them? Students will be more interested in engaging if the content or growth in transferable skills has value and relevance to them.
- Offer choices. When we feel we have some agency and autonomy it’s motivating. This might be through choices of media through which they access content, choices about assignment topics, etc.
- Be inclusive in your teaching. Do students see themselves, or people like them, represented in your course content? Or does your content advance stereotypes of who does this work that leaves some students out? Can you work to provide more diverse examples?
- Bring in real-world examples and applications. Real-world examples and applications can certainly help with understanding the “why,” but also serves to help you frame content as a story, which is an engaging way to present content.
- For more information:
- Boost Motivation with Universal Design for Learning
- Consider completing the WolfSNAPS session on Reaching All Learners
Strategy 2: Lower potential barriers to content
- Lower accessibility barriers. Many students with disabilities have not been diagnosed, or do not seek accommodation from the Disability Resources Office (DRO). Creating accessible digital materials benefits everyone, and is important even if you didn’t receive a letter from the DRO about providing accommodations. One powerful way you can lower accessibility barriers is by ensuring that each piece of content can be accessed through more than one modality/sense, for example both visually and auditorily. If you currently exclusively offer readings, see if you can find videos or podcasts on the same topics. If you offer videos, be sure you have provided a transcript and captioning. For help and further exploration, see
- Chunk your content to reduce fatigue when going through content and help students understand the structure of the material.
- Chunk text-based information by using headings, bulleted lists, numbered lists, and white space to make for easier reading and understanding of content structure.
- Try to limit any one video to one topic and about 10 minutes. Research says that 10 minutes is about all we can expect students to watch of a video in one sitting…especially if it’s a really content-rich video.
- In online synchronous classes and in-person classes, incorporate an activity that involves something other than listening to a lecture every 10-12 minutes. Read about Active Learning from Top Hat, Real Time Assessments and Check-ins, Leveraging Zoom Tools to Facilitate Engagement from DELTA Teaching Resources.
- In asynchronous classes consider using the NC State Book or the Lesson activity Moodle to chunk your content. Use tools like H5P, PlayPosit, and gamification to make your content more interactive.
- For more ideas, consider completing the WolfSNAPS sessions on Engaging Students With Online Learning Activities and Providing Powerful Online Learning Materials and reading the article Supporting Neurodiverse Students Through Course Design.
Strategy 4: Provide necessary scaffolding
When we are experts in something, we can take for granted the whole framework of concepts, ideas, and relationships of our discipline that we have built in our brains over years and years. Our students are just beginning to build their disciplinary frameworks, and information in their heads looks more like randomly scattered data points that might not have obvious connections for them…yet.
- Provide vocabulary support, and links to background information. You might explore the Moodle Glossary as a tool for doing this.
- Explicitly highlight patterns, critical features, big ideas, and relationships
- Maximize transfer and generalization.
- Read more about scaffolding in Elevate Your Content with Universal Design for Learning and Optimize Student Performance with Universal Design for Learning
Foster community
Do your students support each other in your class? Do they carry on productive discussions? Do they collaborate well together? Do you feel a sense of a learning community in your course?
A strong classroom community helps with emotional engagement when students develop a sense of belonging and feel supported by their peers. A learning community can help with keeping students on task when they feel a sense of accountability, and can help students deepen their learning through hearing different perspectives.
See the Creating Student Learning Communities Online DELTA Teaching Resources Page to dive into this topic.