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.
Would you like to watch a video that covers the topics in this article? See DELTA’s video on Engagement in Online Courses (21 min 03 sec).
Introduction
What is “student engagement?”
Engagement include how students feel about the course, what do they do inside and outside of class, and how they think about course material. The components of engagement correspond to three dimensions discussed in this article:
Emotional engagement
To be able to learn, a student must feel positive about the course, their prospects for success, and the support they receive. They must feel motivated and valued.
Behavioral engagement
A student must take some action and interact with course materials, with you, and with each other to learn. This action is their behavioral engagement. They must attend class, pay attention, participate, and perform.
Cognitive engagement
Ideal cognitive engagement is undertaking deep, rather than surface, learning. It cannot be seen directly, but the results of it are making connections, thinking critically, and digging deeply into tough problems or challenges.
If we want to increase and promote engagement, we can can consider how we might promote students’ 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?
Teaching strategies that encourage engagement
Humanize your course
Michelle Pacansky-Brock, a lead researcher in and proponent of humanizing online learning, writes on her website, “In 2003, when I started teaching online, my classes felt disconnected to me. I didn’t know who my students were and I knew they didn’t know me as a real person either. I knew that my personality and the ways I motivated my students in the face-to-face classroom had to become part of my online classes in order for them to be experiences I was proud of.”
Detailed strategies for humanizing your online course are provided in the DELTA Teaching Resources article Humanizing Your Online Course.
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.
Fully orient your students to your course
If your course is fully asynchronous, consider adding a robust “Start Here” section in Moodle. In this section, share your course structure and expectations about student participation and engagement, and explain how participation will help them be successful in your class.
Consider your 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.
Use a clear, consistent course design.
Create a consistent Moodle Layout. Find some great tips in the Best Practices for Designing Your Moodle Course DELTA Teaching Resources page
Choose one day of the week for assignments to be due. Students will more easily get into a rhythm and avoid missing deadlines.
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.
Use clear, transparent grading criteria
Provide clear descriptions of what you’re looking for prior to students getting started on an assignment. Knowing what you’re looking for reduces student stress and also makes it far more likely you’ll receive the type of work that you are expecting.
Further reading:
- Rubric Best Practices, Examples, and Templates DELTA Teaching Resources page
- Sample Simplified Discussion Forum Rubrics from DELTA Teaching Resource
Provide regular, substantive feedback on learning
Nothing is better than regular and substantive feedback to show 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.
Moodle Assignment, Moodle forums or Moodle Quizzes and Google Assignments all offer fairly easy ways to provide individual feedback through rubrics, comments and even automated feedback in the case of quizzes.
Use Moodle Announcements to offer collective feedback.
Show your own engagement by joining in or moderating Moodle forum discussions or Yellowdig discussions as appropriate. Remember – it’s important to be present there, but think “less is more.” If you’re too active in these spaces, student conversation can be stifled as their attention turns to you as an authority figure.
Further reading in these DELTA Teaching Resources articles:
Get students engaged with course content
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.
Recruit interest
Share the “Why.” Students will be more interested in engaging if the content or growth in transferable skills has value and relevance to them. So tell them why you chose the content and how will it help them achieve the learning objectives. Share why those learning objectives important and relevant.
Offer choices. A sense of personal agency and autonomy is motivating. Can you let your students choose between different articles to read, media for accessing content, how they can show their work, or assignment topics?
Ensure course content is representative. Do students see themselves, or people like them, represented in your course content? Check to ensure that your content does not confirm stereotypes of who does this work that leave some students out.
Bring in real-world examples and applications. Real-world examples and applications help with seeing relevance and also can help you frame content as a story, which is an engaging way to present content.
Further reading:
- Boost Motivation with Universal Design for Learning
- Consider completing the WolfSNAPS session on Reaching All Learners
Lower potential barriers to content
Lower accessibility barriers. Creating accessible digital materials benefits everyone, and is important even if you didn’t receive a letter from the DRO about providing accommodations. You don’t have to be an accessibility expert to improve the accessibility of your course materials. First steps are listed below; find more in DELTA’s Digital Accessibility Guide.
- Ensure all your videos accurately closed captioned.
- Check your PDF’s for accessibility
- Check any PowerPoint, Word, or other Microsoft-based content with Microsoft’s built-in accessibility checker.
- Check and Slides, Documents or Sheets in Google with Grackle.
- Use the Brickfield Accessibility Toolkit to check your Moodle-based content.
Chunk content into digestible pieces to reduce fatigue when going through content and help students understand the structure of the material.
- Use headings, bulleted lists, numbered lists, and white space to chunk content in text-based resources.
- Make one-topic videos of 10 minutes maximum length. 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.
- If lecturing, every 10-12 minutes incorporate an activity.
- Using the NC State Book or the Lesson activity in Moodle to chunk your content.
- Use tools like H5P, PlayPosit, and gamification to make your content more interactive.
- For more ideas, consider completing the and and reading the article .
Further learning:
- DELTA Teaching resources articles
- LinkedIn Learning video on offering content in multiple formats
- WolfSNAPS session on Engaging Students With Online Learning Activities
- WolfSNAPS session on Providing Powerful Online Learning Materials
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.
Further reading:
- Elevate Your Content with Universal Design for Learning
- Optimize Student Performance with Universal Design for Learning
Foster community
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.