Synchronous, Live Online Classes: 12 Steps to Engage Students | Acadly
As COVID-19 makes remote teaching essential, engage students in webinar-style live online classes with a second-screen approach
Update
Acadly now has Zoom integration! Watch the demo here.
Only 3% of all US higher-ed professors have ever taught a live online class
It is 2020 and remote meeting tech has graduated to 3D holograms, but take away the familiarity of the classroom and as educators, we’re in largely uncharted territory.
As per Inside Higher Ed and Gallup’s 2019 Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology, only 3% of all US professors have taught synchronous online classes.
Add to this the suspension of face-to-face classes in light of the COVID-19 epidemic, and the issues become even more pronounced. In this week’s blog post, we’re going to try and answer some essential questions about teaching synchronous online classes (webinar-like live online classes).
How can students be encouraged to ask questions?
How can distraction-prone students be incentivized to pay attention for an extended duration when they can just switch tabs to something else?
How can teachers get reliable feedback?
About Us
Acadly is a Student Response System and attendance automation platform that’s free for higher-ed professors and students. It helps professors share activities like polls, quizzes, word clouds, discussions, and more. It is also a class Q&A platform and allows students to virtually “check-in” to your classes.
12 steps to engage students during remote lectures
1. Choose a video conferencing platform
Your university might already have an institutional subscription to a webinar/ online meeting platform, but if you do have a choice in the matter, these are some of the questions to ask:
- Capacity: How many meeting participants can join? Can all of them broadcast their video feed as well?
- Screen-sharing: Does screen-sharing work in parallel with the camera video? Is it possible to control which windows are broadcast to the class?
- Whiteboard mode: Does the platform come with a whiteboard mode?
- Audience control: Can you mute/unmute the audience? Make someone else a presenter temporarily?
- Recording: Can you record your sessions and upload the video for absentees?
Zoom, WebEx, and GoToMeeting are all must-see platforms. Here’s Gartner’s ‘Magic Quadrant’ evaluation of all the players in this space. Platforms like YouTube Live and Facebook Live can be free options if the paid alternatives don’t work for you.
2. Use a “Second Screen” Setup
Student Response Systems aka polling apps aka ‘clicker’ apps have been an integral part of in-person or face-to-face teaching for years. In synchronous teaching, they become even more useful when you adopt a “second screen” setup.
Screen 1: Use a web-conferencing platform to deliver your content, as the equivalent for a blackboard or overhead slides.
Screen 2: Use a Student Response System to share polls, quizzes, discussions, and more. Students can respond to activities using their phones or via their browsers.
Case study on how Acadly was used in a second screen setup
3. Use the second screen for your discussions — especially if it’s an archivable, feature-rich medium
While every video conferencing platform allows for presenter-participant discussions, the issue is that this conversation becomes unavailable once the session ends.
That’s a big reason to use a parallel platform for both discussions and activities. Even after the session ends, your discussion history does not simply vanish. Your students can go back to it to refer, reflect, and carry the discussion forward. Similarly, you can go back to it to tackle any unanswered queries.
15 ideas for in-class discussions
4. Pose an Essential Question, and pause to allow students to answer
An all-time pedagogical classic is the “Essential Question” — the answer to which is the core of the entire lesson. In online classes, it assumes greater importance since it helps to involve students from the get-go. If you have an “Agenda” slide in your presentation, it’s quite simple to convert it into a question.
As an example, if the agenda slide of your Game Theory lecture reads:
A. Definition and types of games
B. Dominant strategies for games
… the corresponding essential questions could be:
A. What is a game?
B. Are there some universally valid strategies for certain games?
C. What are your recommendations for winning at Tic-Tac-Toe and Rock-Paper-Scissors?
Pause to get initial impressions from students before you jump into the instruction, and go back to the class’ initial responses every now and then.
Infographic on Essential Questions
5. Establish ground rules for everyone: Cameras on, mics off
It helps tremendously if the class can see each other during a lecture. The closer you can get to a classroom-like environment, the more effective your meetings are likely to be. Establish this preference when you speak with students at the beginning of the online session and encourage them to keep their cameras on, as a way to build a greater sense of community.
6. Take time to explain the Q&A policy. Use backchannels (online Q&A) as the first resort for queries.
Students are likely to have questions, and that’s obviously a great sign of engagement. Using the SRS as a repository for all Q&A is a neat way to help students answer each other’s questions, raise queries anonymously, and for professors to answer queries after the session whenever required.
This is different from focussing on instructor-initiated discussions because backchannels need active encouragement and endorsement from the professor. Unless you give them importance, it is unlikely that the feature will ever really take-off.
Infographic on Backchannels
7. Don’t wait, generate feedback rapidly using quizzes and polls
Share polls and quizzes! They are fun, rapid, and worth every second that students spend on them.
Infographic on ways to use polls in the classroom
8. Track virtual attendance via “check-ins” or affirmative actions
Keeping track of students who attend your sessions is a really great way to make them feel seen and heard. It’s not always about docking points for absenteeism, but also about telling someone “hey, I noticed you weren’t there. Are you okay? I’m here to help if I can”.
If your video conferencing platform does not store information about who attended your online class, affirmative action such as responding to a quiz, or a simple “check-in” could go a long way in keeping track of who’s really joining you for your sessions. Once a week, maybe you can check in with those who missed a session or two.
9. Organize activities for pre-class engagement
The organization of your content is crucial. If content and activities are dumped in a folder without an easy-to-follow linear scheme, it can be a big turn-off for students who need to log in week after week and remember what they have already seen and what’s new.
Plug: As an example, the course timeline on Acadly is arranged chronologically to help students navigate the course as an ongoing process and not a collection of folders.
10. Keep the engagement alive between sessions
We call this the flipped-class mindset. If all your teaching is online/remote, it is helpful to consider ways of keeping the communication channels open between sessions as well. Planning and sharing pre-class activities, using messaging, and virtual office hours are some easy ways to do so.
It can be exhausting to be connected 24x7 but that’s where using mobile-friendly platforms helps. Push notifications are likely to keep both you and your students connected continually without making it a big burden.
Here are some ideas for a flipped class mindset
11. Collaborate with TAs (remotely) for extra credits
Some of your students are bound to set an example for the rest with how they engage and behave during your sessions, and recognizing them can help incentivize the pattern among others too. Use your TAs to help you identify and reward students for anything that stands out.
For example, you may reward students for:
- Asking a great question
- Helping out a peer on the backchannel
- Participating actively in the in-class activities
12. Use tools that can communicate with your LMS
No matter how great the tools you use, or how unfavourable your impression of the LMS is, it is at the core of the students’ learning experience and they would refer to it for grades, syllabus, and announcements. Make sure that the platforms you use are able to send data back to the LMS via open standards like CSV files or via LMS plugins.
Note: Acadly’s free version supports CSV exports and the paid version supports LMS integration for automated syncing with the gradebook.
Most importantly, a gaffe here and a faux-pas there does not hurt :)
Happy teaching and all the very best! To sign up for a free Acadly account, start here.
