Online Education Trends Archives

#67: 10 Tips for Personalizing and Engaging Welcome Messages

by Bethanie Hansen | Best practices, Higher Education, Online Education Trends, Podcast, Students, Teaching Online

This content first appeared on APUEdge.com

To learn effectively online, students need to know how to get started in class. In this episode, Dr. Bethanie Hansen shares 10 tips to help online instructors create effective welcome messages to introduce students to the course and to you as their instructor. Learn what details should be included and ways different types of students need to hear from their instructor in order to be engaged and stay committed.

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Dr. Bethanie Hansen: This podcast is for educators, academics and parents who know that online teaching can be challenging, but it can also be rewarding, engaging, and fun. Welcome to the Online Teaching Lounge. I’m your host, Dr. Bethanie Hansen. And I’ll be your guide for online teaching tips, topics and strategies. Walk with me into the Online Teaching Lounge.

You can avoid many of the problems your students experience in online learning and help them start your class well by sending out a welcome message before the online class begins. This kind of communication is an essential way to invite your students to get started, to anticipate how they will spend their time, and to get to know you. All of this builds momentum for the first week of your online class and it’s a strategy you cannot live without if you hope to keep all of your students engaged from the first day onward.

Because online education depends on your students showing up and getting engaged with you in the class, you already know how important it is to get students to log in and just get started. To help you out in this area, today I’m going to share with you 10 tips you can use before your next online course begins, to launch students into a successful first week through your welcome message. That’s right, these are strategies you can implement easily. And they will help you get students in the door, or more literally, logged in and looking around in your online classroom. And that’s where it all begins!

TIP #1: Reach Out to Your Students a Few Days Before the Class Begins, to Pave the Way for a Great Experience

Before the semester begins, send an outreach message to your students as an e-mail. This first tip is about timing, and about how to get connections with your students. Find out when the course enrollment is finalized, and then send your welcome message around that time. For example, if most students are registered by Wednesday before the course begins, you might send your message Thursday or Friday. Waiting until the first day of class is a missed opportunity to generate enthusiasm and provide that early guidance to draw students into the online classroom.

Tip #2: Personalize the Greeting on Your Message

As much as possible, personalize the message for each student by using their names. If you need to copy and paste the body of your welcome message into 25 or 30 separate e-mails so that you can specifically add your students’ names at the top, it’s worth the time it takes to do it. Students get a lot of formulaic communications from the university or from commercial marketing campaigns, and they don’t need generic greetings to welcome them into your class. Use their first names, and you’ll build relationships from the very first message. What you include in the rest of the message can be standard material, or your institution’s recommendations, or you can use some of the tips I’m sharing here. Either way, a thoughtful and personalized approach will get the best results early.

Tip #3: Be Clear about the Basics

Welcome your students to the class. Tell them which class you’re writing about, in case they are taking more than one course, and who you are. In this opening paragraph, provide some hope and encouragement right way by telling them you are ready to work with them, and that your message is going to help them get ready for class to begin. The basic details in your opening paragraph should let students know what the rest of your message is going to include and why they should keep reading.

Here is a sample of what this opening paragraph might sound like:

“Dear Samantha, Welcome to College 100, Introduction to college learning! My name is Dr. Bethanie Hansen, and I’m your instructor for this course, which begins on Monday this coming week. I’m excited to meet you and share my passion for college learning and a solid foundation with you. And, in this message, I’d like to give you some early guidance to help you succeed in the course.”

Tip #4: Help Students Know What They Will Learn from You

While many of your students come into their education because they want something specific such as career advancement or personal growth, they all need to know what value they will get from their time with you. The course description gave them some idea of the value proposition of the course itself—what they can expect to learn in the class. But your message is the value proposition of what you bring as their instructor, along with encouragement and steps to get started in the class. It’s both an invitation and an advertisement selling students on the journey ahead of them. And their partnership with you.

In your welcome message, introduce yourself briefly. Tell students what you bring to the subject matter. If you have any specific real-world experience that relates to the class, let them know. If you love engaging in debates through the discussion space in your course, tell them. If you want them to learn to love the subject or how to connect it to their lives and their jobs, let them know about that.

Your brief statements about yourself as the instructor can help them trust you from the very beginning and this might even make the difference between students pushing through a rigorous personal schedule or dropping the course when things get tough. Write them as if you’re writing a letter to someone you care about—not as you would like these things to appear on your professional resume. Your students won’t really care about the title of your dissertation or the many articles you might have written. But they will want to know about the fact that you have used your expertise in this area to intern at the White House or conduct a Military Band or write an ad campaign for a major corporation in the real world.

Remember, this message you send and especially the introduction about yourself is students’ first impression of you and of your class. It can set the tone for a positive experience and portray you as an approachable human being that will guide them well. It can begin building relationships immediately. And beyond these basic but important aspects, it can reassure them that you’re the right person to guide them in this journey.

Tip #5: Share Important Dates, Links, and Access Support

After greeting your students, welcoming them into the class, and introducing yourself, set aside a paragraph to remind them about key dates and details they need to get involved. For example, you can share the start and end dates of the class, provide the link to access the online classroom, and let them know how to contact classroom support if they have technology or access issues. If there are any specific technologies students will use in the course like Rosetta Stone, or an e-book resource, include these links as well. Having a short list will be a useful resource for students in the future, and especially on the first day of class.

Tip #6: Provide Your Philosophy and Set the Expectations

All students want to know what they can expect in the class. For example, if there are discussions every week, either live or asynchronous, let them know about these and how they will generally engage with others. If there are a few specific larger assignments, tell them. You might also prefer to provide a link to the syllabus or a mini version of the syllabus that outlines these basic elements.

Even if your course is asynchronous and students can decide when they would like to log in or engage, you will still need to give them some idea of the time they need to set aside to read and learn the material each week, and how much interaction they should expect to engage in throughout the course. This paragraph is also a great place to remind students that if they feel overwhelmed or fall behind, they should contact you to see how to move ahead before they decide to drop your class. You can provide support and guidance in these kinds of situations and keep your students in class when they need your support. And this will build your reputation as an instructor students want to learn from.

Tip #7: Consider what First-Time Online Students Need in Your Welcome Message

When your students are getting started in their online class, some will be taking an online class for the very first time. These students are anxious or nervous. Some are wondering if they are “cut out” for online learning at all, or if they should quit now and get their money back before it’s too late! Your welcome message for these students is reassuring.

It gives them a glimpse into a hopeful future and some degree of confidence to get started. Your tone in the message might even connect with them enough to help them feel like you’re going to be there to guide them so that they can release some of that fear and that anxiety. And these students will need you to point them in the right direction for how they can connect with classroom tech support and other departments to get connected and online successfully during that first week.

For this group of students, use a friendly and encouraging tone, and let them know how to get connected that first week of class.

Tip #8: Consider what Busy, Working Students Need in Your Welcome Message

Other students you will have are taking multiple classes at once while working full-time jobs and raising children, and they will juggle many expectations, demands, and schedules. Busy students with many obligations and classes need the basic details. These students want to know some of the basics about the course and about you so they can manage everything they have going on and successfully finish the course without losing track of the important things.

They want the basics—like when does the course start and end? What they must do to learn the material? And where all of the graded parts of the class going to come up? And of course, these students will need to know how to reach you if they have missed something during the class and need to make an adjustment.

For this group of students, include your contact details, the basic details about the class, and the best ways to plan for the needed time each week.

Tip #9: Consider what Experienced Online Learners are Looking for in Your Welcome Message

And then there are students who are experienced at taking online courses. They want to know what your specific expectations and routines will be so they can get started, and they just want to be sure that you are going to treat them fairly and be responsive when they contact you.

They are likely going to compare the way you manage things to a few other online instructors they have had in the past with whom they were successful, and they’ll compare you to those others that were not strong teachers. And they will look for good communication from you, and clear guidance. And they will want to know: What is your late policy? And how long will it take you to respond if they send you an e-mail?

Early in the class, some of these students will intuitively know whether they can complete your course and work with you, or whether they would prefer to drop this class and find another teacher.

For these experienced online students, your welcome message gives them an idea of who you are, how you’re going to approach your time with them, and whether you are someone they want to learn from. They want you to see them as human beings and be assured that you’ll be approaching them as a fellow human, not a machine. Be clear and consistent. And avoid repeating warnings about past students’ failures or inundating them with overly specific instructor expectations or preferences.

Tip #10: Ask Students for a Brief Reply to Be Sure That You’re Set Up for Effective 2-Way Communication

As you close your welcome message and give students a final word of encouragement for their upcoming class, ask them to reply to your message. Your request can be brief and simple, but it serves two important purposes. The first one is that you really do need to know if they got your message and if they read it. When they respond to it, you’ve got that box checked. But second, it gives your students an early win before the class has even started. All students want to pass the class and getting connected with their instructor before the class starts is the first step to opening that door.

In Closing

While sending a welcome message before the first day of class used to be a nice idea, or a positive option to go above and beyond to get your students excited for the first day, now it’s essential in every course you teach. Our students have many needs and expectations. Early and clear communication can meet these needs and let them know what to expect.

Beyond that, online education is regularly offered at so many institutions. If your students do not start well in your class, they can either drop it and wait or choose another instructor. Or they might leave the school completely and take their classes someplace else to get a better experience that they need.

Take the time to personalize your approach and give students a good idea of what to expect, so they’ll see the value in learning with you and remaining committed throughout the course. This will help them know that they have come to the right place for their education, and that YOU are the right person to help them learn the content in the ways that no one else can. And of course, it will help them get in the door of the online classroom, so they are ready to engage with you and to learn.

Thank you for being with me today for the Online teaching Lounge Podcast. Online teaching is a wonderful way to go, and it is an area in which we can all keep growing and developing new approaches for. Join me each week for additional tips, strategies, and ideas to help you with best practices in online education, ways to connect with your students most effectively, ways to use video and technology in your teaching, and how to have a healthy balanced life as an online educator.

And please share this podcast with other educators you know, so we can spread the word about various strategies and tips that help us all.

And if you’re looking for formal education options to dig a little deeper, consider joining us for a course in online teaching at American Public University. We offer several courses that can be taken for continuing education goals, or to complete a certificate or degree. You deserve to be confident in your online teaching, and we can help you get there.

As you work to develop your welcome messages to send students before your next online class begins, I think you will find that the time you spend will come back to you by opening up the communication channels with your online students. Best wishes this coming week as you develop new welcome messages for all of your upcoming classes.

This is Dr. Bethanie Hansen, your host for the Online Teaching Lounge podcast. To share comments and requests for future episodes, please visit bethaniehansen.com/request. Best wishes this coming week in your online teaching journey.

#65: Strategies to Make Discussion Boards More Engaging [Podcast]

by Bethanie Hansen | Best practices, Higher Education, Online Education Trends, Podcast, Teaching Online

This content initially appeared at APUEdge.Com

Discussion boards are a required part of many online courses, but they can sometimes get flat and boring. In this episode, APU’s Dr. Bethanie Hansen talks about how to have an engaging dialogue with students. Learn five strategies to improve discussion boards as well as how to apply the Guided ANCHORS approach to managing discussion forums.

Listen to the Episode:

Subscribe to Online Teaching Lounge
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Read the Transcript:

Dr. Bethanie Hansen: This podcast is for educators, academics and parents who know that online teaching can be challenging, but it can also be rewarding, engaging, and fun. Welcome to the Online Teaching Lounge. I’m your host, Dr. Bethanie Hansen, and I’ll be your guide for online teaching tips, topics and strategies. Walk with me into the Online Teaching Lounge.

Welcome to the Online Teaching Lounge today. I am Bethanie Hansen, and I’m very excited to share with you some management strategies for your discussion boards. After all, faculty engage in discussions with their students pretty regularly in online education.

If you are using asynchronous discussions, that means throughout the week, people post their responses and return periodically to reply to people. This discussion area can get really interesting and really engaging, or it can be flat and very boring: one post, two replies, and you’re out of there.

To make this more interesting, I have for you today, several strategies that will help you to make your discussions more rich and engaging, and to have a variety of approaches that you use as the faculty member teaching that class.

I remember a long time ago when I started teaching online, I think the course I’m thinking of was in 2010. I didn’t really know exactly what to do in the discussion. Perhaps you’ve been there. Initially, you think you’re there to give a little bit of feedback about whether students are getting it right or not. Of course, feedback is helpful and feedback is very necessary from the instructor, especially in the subject matter.

But the kind of engagement I’m talking about today is what you do to actually have a dialogue about the subjects you’re discussing. What can you do to avoid just high-fiving your students or saying “good job,” or “good post,” but to have something more of substance to say?

I like to share with my online faculty when I’m coaching them or working with them or giving them tips, I really encourage them to share something with their students that could come uniquely from that instructor. What is the expertise, personality, insight, or background that you uniquely have, and your students can profit by? What is it you’d like them to walk away from your course learning that they really can only get from being with you?

In a face-to-face live class, of course, they have our presence. They can see us, know us, hear us and talk back and forth with us in real time. But online, that just is not the case. As we’re conversing online, we have to find creative ways to bring out those things that make us unique and give us that benefit our students need.

Strategies to Improve Online Discussion Forums

We’re going to talk about several different strategies on how you, as the instructor, can engage in your discussion forums with students. Overall, these strategies can help you when you try a variety of approaches. I hope you’ll enjoy these strategies today, and we’re going to dive right in.

Use a Beginner’s Mind Approach

The very first strategy is to use a beginner’s mind. The beginner’s mind is a concept that comes from the field of sociology. It is also known in Zen Buddhism. And the beginner’s mind is the totally and completely innocent approach to the subject matter.

You come wanting to learn from the other person’s perspective. You’re genuinely curious in the present moment, focused on what’s being talked about and experienced right now. Regardless of what you might already know about what your students are writing, when you read a post from a student, and you go to reply to that if you’re using a beginner’s mind, you can have deep and powerful questions.

You can ask for more information about what they have to say. You can ask them what they mean by a certain phrase or by something they’ve said, even just the word they chose to use. You can get really curious and create interesting questions you would not otherwise consider.

When you come with a beginner’s mind, all assumptions and judgments are gone. You would not assume that you already know exactly what the student’s talking about. This’ll allow you to read their posts in a new light. You can look at it, and instead of assuming that you think, you know what they’re saying, you can investigate, ask more questions and find out what they’re really saying, what it really means to them to think of things in the way they’ve presented it.

That beginner’s mind can be one approach to responding to your students in the discussion forum. Of course, with that, most students will not be used to you using this approach in your replies. So be aware that you also want to consider the tone of your questions and give a little bit of insight about how you’re phrasing it when you send that question to your students.

Share Your Unique Expertise

The second perspective you can adopt in engaging in the discussion forums creatively as the faculty member would be to share your unique expertise. You have spent thousands of hours preparing yourself in the subject matter to be able to teach it. You probably have some life experience or professional experience in the field as well.

I’ll give you an example of that. My field is music, and I began music as an eight year old kid. As an almost 50-something year old adult, I have a lot of expertise in music. I’ve led bands, I’ve composed music, I’ve performed on my instrument all over the world. There’s just a lot I can bring to that discussion.

When we’re talking about maybe Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto, I can actually bring my expertise into that discussion, and I can mention that I performed Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto in a senior recital when I was getting my bachelor’s degree.

I can share some thoughts about how that music is structured that would be unique to my experience as a performer on that piece, and I can also ask questions that would be a lot more insightful than if I chose some other topic or some other approach to that.

Bringing my expertise into that discussion is going to also give the student more depth, where I’m not demanding they have that level of expertise, I’m just sharing, “based on what I’ve done, here’s a thought for you.”

Weave in Current Events into Discussion Forums

A third area that we can bring into our discussion board facilitation or a leadership as faculty members is current events. We can bring in anything from last night’s news, something we saw on the internet that we find to be well-researched and informative, something that’s happening in our local area, anything that’s going on in the world that seems related.

Now, for example, if you’re a communication instructor, this could be particularly relevant. Or maybe let’s say you’re teaching a world language like Spanish or Portuguese, and maybe there’s something happening in Mexico or Brazil. You could bring that into the discussion in real time, share a link to where they can find out more about what’s going on, and we can then ask some questions about their insights, how it relates to the course content.

It makes the learning real world. It brings in yours perspective and expertise, but at the same time, it brings in the current events. Anytime we connect to current events, we’re helping students to think through reality, application of the content they’re learning about, and the real world that’s connected to that academic world. We don’t want things to be two separate worlds, and bringing those current events into the discussion can be a really beautiful way for you to engage.

One caution about bringing in current events is to help your students remember that we’re discussing these at the academic, yet applied level. Even though they might have a lot of passionate opinions, they should be sure to back them up with evidence from the course, the theories about the content and other things they’re learning alongside their discussion or their opinion.

Use Well-Researched Posts

A fourth way you can be engaged in that discussion as the faculty member is to be involved with prepared and well-researched posts. There are some things you might find that you’re constantly discussing from one course section to the next.

Every single time I teach music appreciation online, I’m going to be talking about Mozart. There are well-researched and evidence-based facts out there about the life of Mozart. We all know that Mozart was a prodigy as a child. He was paraded around by his father. He performed for a lot of dignitaries and noble people, and he composed music at like age six or seven.

There are some facts about Mozart that I could have in some well-crafted posts, and several times throughout the course, when we’re talking about these ideas, I might use that content. Now, I can use that content the next time I’m teaching the course and the next time as well.

If I choose to use that content when I’m responding to an individual student in the discussion, then I first need to write a few sentences to acknowledge what the student said and build up to what I’m about to share. Then I can integrate that well-researched content I’ve already created, and I can just add it to the discussion again and again and again. This is a really great way to share some of the more important points that you really want to make sure come up in every single course.

Now, in contrast to responding to one student, I could instead have some initial posts from me as the instructor to just highlight certain points and certain takeaways. That’s another way to use a well-researched prepared post every time you teach that class.

Use a Coach-Like Approach

Then a fifth idea that I have for you is called the coach-like approach. Now you may or may not know, but I have a coaching background as well as my educator background. As a coach, I’m often asking people a lot of questions that are open-ended, and I’ll follow those up with more questions. It’s a lot like the Socratic method, only when I’m coaching, we’re focused on the person and their development, and we’re not necessarily focused on the topic itself alone.

In the classroom, we could of course apply that. We can ask questions that are, open-ended, often starting out with the word “what” or “why” or “how,” and we can also follow those up with more application. We can ask how the student might use the learning in their life or in their professional field. We can ask what is most interesting to them and what will they take away from this discussion.

A lot of the coach-like approach is really asking questions to help the student make those connections, or in other words, connect the dots between their learning and the reality. Also, bringing out the social and personal development, where this information can be applied and where it can be applied in their career field.

A coach-like approach can also be helpful when you’re giving some instructions to assignments, and you’re sharing some announcement about that. You can ask questions about how they might approach it, what they might want to consider, and you can also provide resources and tips. Whether you do that in the discussion or separately in the announcements area, I highly recommend a coach-like approach, and I find that it helps students to think more fully about how they want to approach it, rather than just asking them to conform to what others are expecting.

Guided ANCHORS can Improve Discussion Boards

Now, outside of the five ways that I have shared that you might be interested in engaging, I have also another resource for you that I’d like to talk about, and that is called “Guided ANCHORS, Better Discussion Boards With Guided ANCHORS,” and it’s by Bruce A. Johnson. I have an infographic linked in the podcast notes here, and also a resource you can check out.

Guided ANCHORS stands for acknowledge, nurturing, critical, highlight, organized, research and springboard. Each one of these is an approach that you can take to your discussion replies to students when you’re talking with them throughout the week in your forum discussions.

Acknowledgement

The first one, acknowledge, is the first step in developing the anchors. It is a student’s post there, and you’re going to acknowledge it in some way. You might thank them for their attempt to answer the discussion question. You might paraphrase or summarize what they’ve said, and basically give them a little high five, like, “Nice job, Tom. I appreciated your post on XYZ item. It sounds like you’re saying some great things about XYZ item, and I can see your point.” So that’s a basic acknowledgement.

Anytime you can bring out their perspective, feed it back to them and just give them that high five, students feel like you’ve seen what they wrote and they feel validated in many ways. Acknowledgement is a very basic level thing we can do for our students. It just gives a little bit of your social presence.

Nurturing

Nurturing, the next step, involves the student’s development in a supportive way. You’re responding and not just calling them out on what they have written, but also building them a little bit. You might ask questions to help them further develop as a subject matter learner. You might also bring out how they’re growing in the subject.

The nurturing approach is a really solid way to help continue growing your students, especially throughout a discussion where they have to dig deeper and take things to a higher level than they have in previous weeks.

The nurturing approach, just as a mindset, will prompt for you asking questions in certain ways that are focused on nurturing the learner, nurturing the student into a professional who can also think these things out in the field, should they need to apply them.

Critical

The third thing is critical. Now, you might respond in a manner that prompts critical thinking for your students. This we also like to call a cognitive presence. If we’re talking about the Community of Inquiry model, critical thinking about the subject could involve taking those course materials and guiding students through the process of analyzing the subject.

We can question some of the assumptions behind what we’re studying. We can also synthesize some of the ideas. How could we tie them together? We can ask, how does it connect to the previous week’s learning? And anything we can do to critically analyze things is going to help students take that to the next level and really remember it in the future. Critical prompts can just really help your students as they develop as academic experts and also practitioners out in the field where they can apply whatever it is they’re learning.

Highlight

Another step in the Guided ANCHORS would be the highlight approach. The next step is to highlight the important points in the course materials and bring them into your replies to your students in the forum discussion.

This could include any part of the reading that you feel hasn’t been brought in enough and that students are struggling with. You can break it down. You can explain it. You could put a little video of yourself talking about it. This is especially helpful in wrap-up posts that you might put at the end of the forum discussion week, tying all the main ideas together.

You can also use the highlight approach midweek, or even at the beginning of the week, when you want to bring in something unique or difficult to understand, or that you want to make sure they take away. Highlighting is a powerful way to add teaching presence to the course.

Organized

The fifth way of engaging in discussions from our Guided ANCHORS tool is organized. This fifth step is to take a totally organized approach to the development of your responses as the faculty member. Your participation posts should not just be reactive responses to whatever your students are writing. If you’re only doing that, that’s really just at a surface level of your engagement.

You really want to have some things that are organized and planned ahead. You might have some of those pre-crafted posts that you have developed over time that build on what students present and that you’re going to add into the discussion. This could take the form of what I’ve mentioned previously, which would be the prepared and well-researched posts.

Think about how you might take an organized approach to your overall forum engagement, whether it’s adding something early in the week, adding something late in the week. Then having a little more reactive, in-the-moment dialogue midweek.

Research

Next we have the research. I can’t say this enough, but it’s really valuable for you to have a few pieces of content. You really want to share with students in a dialogue that are researched and well-prepared. There are a few reasons for this. Of course, some students skim the lessons and they skim the reading, or sometimes even skip over it.

Then they’ll go into that discussion area and think that they can glean the entire week’s learning just by reading everybody’s posts. We know that’s not true. They do need to get the content, but if that’s a student that you’re seeing, then putting some well-researched, prepared content that you’re sharing is going to make up the difference in many cases.

Your researched post would be supplemental sources. They would be summaries of main points that you’re sharing. They will be anything that you’ve prepared really well, and you can put your citations at the bottom to model how that could be done.

Then you’re going to be sharing those to further guide your students somewhat in your teaching presence, and you’re also promoting the cognitive presence, that greater depth of understanding they’re going to need in the subject.

Springboard

Then lastly, the springboard, the last step is to create a springboard post that’s going to prompt further discussion by concluding with a little bit of a follow up. That could be a follow-up question, a challenge to take it deeper, a video to watch. Something that’s going to simply acknowledge what students have written, what they’re already thinking about, but challenge them to take it a little bit deeper.

This is your professional expertise coming through again, and it just might create an even more stimulating discussion when you’re challenging and spring boarding onto something else.

Engaging Discussions Can Further Engage Students

I hope you’ll think about these Guided ANCHORS that Bruce Johnson has written about. Also, the five tips that I gave you in the beginning that are my strategies for engaging in the discussions. Through all of these various approaches, you’re going to find that discussions become a lot more fun, varied in what’s happening, and of course, you’re going to see a lot more depth in the replies you get from your students from week to week, as the course progresses.

Now, I encourage you to look at APU Edge, and that is a source where we have a few other podcast episodes on how to create good discussion forum posts, how to vary the actual prompts there, and also those are posted on my website, BethanieHansen.com.

These are great ways to make sure that the questions you’re asking initially to prompt the forum engagement from students are well-written and designed carefully to stimulate discussion and also create interesting, creative engagement.

But today’s podcast really has been more about you and your role of facilitating dialogue and leading in that discussion. There are so many ways you can engage with your students to bring your expertise and knowledge into the course, without really just giving them all the answers.

I hope that you will try them, explore them, and see what they bring you in your teaching, and especially in the overall satisfaction you get from your teaching. I wish you all the best this coming week in your online teaching journey, and thank you again for joining us to dive in to discussion forums.

This is Dr. Bethanie Hansen, your host for the Online Teaching Lounge Podcast. To share comments and requests for future episodes, please visit BethanieHansen.com/request. Best wishes this coming week in your online teaching journey.

#62: Connecting with Students Through Zoom

by Bethanie Hansen | Best practices, Higher Education, Online Education Trends, Podcast, Students, Teaching Online, Technology Tools, Video

This content first appeared at APUEdge.com.

Engaging with students and building a sense of community in an online class can be very difficult. In this episode, APU professor Dr. Bethanie Hansen discusses the benefits of hosting a Zoom meeting with students. Learn the numerous options for setting up a Zoom meeting that gives students an opportunity to interact and work together. Also learn tips to help teachers prepare to host a meeting, how to use breakout rooms and other technology tools to increase student engagement, and more.

Subscribe to Online Teaching Lounge
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Read the Transcript:

Dr. Bethanie Hansen: This podcast is for educators, academics and parents who know that online teaching can be challenging, but it can also be rewarding, engaging, and fun. Welcome to the Online Teaching Lounge. I’m your host, Dr. Bethanie Hansen, and I’ll be your guide for online teaching tips, topics and strategies. Walk with me into the Online Teaching Lounge.

Welcome to the Online Teaching Lounge. Today, we’re going to talk about how you can connect with your students through using Zoom for video conferences. Now, there are a lot of different ways to be engaged in your online teaching. You might consider having asynchronous classes where people just participate on their own and interact separately. Perhaps you have live classes where they are conducted online already. Or maybe you’re in some kind of hybrid situation where students will go to the online class for part of their work and meet with you face-to-face in the live physical classroom.

Regardless of your format, Zoom conferences for your students can really create relationships and introduce different types of engagement than anything else you might use. So I’m going to teach you today how to basically use Zoom in a few new ways, and I’m going to also help you overcome any hesitation you have to using Zoom by giving you tips and strategies to help you in this area.

This is a great solution for connecting with students who might be less achieving, less vocal, less present. And help them get engaged in small groups and smaller conversations so that they are getting a lot more out of the experience and connecting more with you and with each other. Let’s get started.

Integrating Zoom into Online Classes

How do you start a Zoom meeting, or how do you get one going? First, there are some learning management systems where Zoom is already integrated and it’s available for you to use. If you have Zoom integrated into Brightspace, into Canvas, into some other learning management system, then you’re already set with a way to set Zoom up so that you can talk to your students.

If you don’t have access to Zoom, you can set up a free account online for up to 40 minutes for a small group or a longer duration if you’re going to just have one-on-one calls. I recommend using your educator email address because there just might be some kind of special recognition that Zoom will give you to provide an educational discount or an education account of some kind. So if you don’t already have access, definitely check out those options that might be available.

Review and Update Zoom Settings

Looking at your Zoom meeting, you can see particular settings in the Zoom settings menu if you go in through a browser. For example, you can have all of your participants need to log in with their institutional email if you’re using an account that does that.

You can have a waiting room set up so you can let participants in one at a time. You can also give people permission to mute and unmute themselves, use video, and also you can choose whether they can save the chat or not save the chat. There are so many settings that are worth your time to investigate so that you can set up your meetings in a way that really suits you best and preserves students’ privacy as well. And of course, you can record those meetings and you can share those with students who cannot attend a live session.

Use Doodle or Survey to Find a Good Meeting Time

Once you’ve set Zoom up, the best way to move forward is to provide the invitation to students ahead of time. I recommend giving this information to your students at least one week ahead, so they can put it on their calendar and look forward to the meeting time.

You might even choose an app called Doodle, that you can mark with various times that are possible for you and send it out as a poll well in advance of your Zoom call. If you do this, students can let you know of all the many times they might be available to make that Zoom call and you can choose the scheduling that will work best for all of your students or most of them, at least. So a Doodle poll can set you up for success before you ever schedule that meeting.

Send Out Repeated Meeting Reminders

Once you’ve done that, I also so recommend putting announcements in your course home page, sending announcements out in emails and messages one week before the call, a day before the call, and a couple of hours before the call. And lastly, 10 minutes before the call is about to begin.

Students get a lot of emails and a lot of messages. And if they’re taking more than one class, they also read a lot of announcements. They’re going to need reminders repeatedly to know when your live call is scheduled in Zoom and to be able to access it and join you there.

Establish a Backup Plan for Internet Connectivity

Once it’s time for the call, you can succeed in meeting your students where they’re at by being early and having your technology set up with a backup plan if your internet should fail. For example, if you have a Wi-Fi internet at home and you’re working from home, it’s good to also have a hotspot on your cell phone so that if your internet blanks out, you don’t lose your connection to the Zoom meeting. I usually have two or even three backup plans because I really don’t want to lose any of my Zoom meetings, and I have many of them that happen throughout the day and throughout the week. So think about what your backup plan will be for internet.

Assign a Student Who Can Take Notes, Continue Meeting

Secondly, you can have someone work with you. It can even be a high-achieving student who can take notes during the meeting in the chat, or who can be listed as a cohost so that if something should happen to your access, someone will still be there that can make sure the meeting continues and that the progress can be made.

Decide on Your Background

When you’re setting up for the call, check the background in the room that you’re going to be in. If you have the latest version of Zoom, you can set the background to be blurry, so it actually doesn’t matter what’s in the background, or you can choose a virtual background if you have a good solid space. Otherwise, it’s going to pixelate through that virtual background and you’re going to see part of your background and part of the virtual background. I recommend the fuzzy background because it just focuses on you being there and being very clear and it blurs everything else.

Of course, there are some fun settings in Zoom where you can also adopt caricatures and makeup and mustaches and hats and different things. And if you’re having a fun meeting or a celebration, you might consider using those with your teammates or with your class members as well.

Test Your Audio Quality

Within the platform, you can choose whether you use an external mic on your computer or a headset or some other setup. I recommend using a headset and not using the external speakers and microphone on your computer because there can often be an echo produced when you do that.

So test your system out ahead of time and make sure that your sound quality is good and your video quality is good as well. If you find that these things are not good, troubleshoot them before you meet with your students live.

Prepare a Lesson Plan for the Meeting

The more you prepare in advance of conducting a live class meeting in Zoom, the more you’re going to find success there and have a positive experience. I do recommend approaching this as if you’re teaching a live face-to-face class. In that situation, you might prepare a detailed lesson plan. You might tell students up front what to expect and what you’re going to cover during the period of the meeting.

And you might also discuss what topics you’re going to do and any activities needed. For example, if you’re planning to use breakout rooms during your virtual meeting, you want to tell students ahead of time so they have access to a microphone and can be on video.

Establish Expectations with Students

It’s also a great idea to send those expectations out to your students well in advance of the meeting. For example, you might have a dress code if you don’t want students to show up in pajamas, or you want them to be dressed like they would be attending school, and you can also suggest what kinds of places they might be, where they’re on video.

For example, if they’re going to the local McDonald’s to get the internet to be in class, there might be a lot of background noise and they might need some kind of headphones or noise-canceling tools.

Think about Level of Student Engagement

You might also think about whether or not students have to engage in the text area. Plan this ahead of time. Zoom has excellent polling features. And if you want some basic interactivity, you can either use the chat box, you can call on students directly to make verbal comments live, or you can put a poll up there and have everybody participate that way.

There are also some external things you could have students access during the Zoom call, like Mentimeter and Poll Everywhere. And there are several others as well, where they could engage in polling, they can make word clouds. They can basically each contribute their own ideas in real time and feel like they’re actually engaging in what’s being discussed rather than being a passive consumer.

So think about these things ahead of time and plan out what your approach will be as well as a brief lesson plan. Tell your students ahead of time, check your background and what you’re wearing and make sure it looks clean, clear, professional, and confident. And then host your meeting.

Tips on Hosting Strategies

When you’re hosting your meeting and having that live call, sit up tall, roll your shoulders back a little bit to give yourself an extra boost of confidence, and help yourself to connect better with your students. Even though you’re on screen and you’re not really looking directly at each one of them, you want to look towards the camera so that you feel like you’re making eye contact with them and being present.

And whatever your plan is for engaging them during the live call, definitely include lots of ways to engage. As I mentioned before, these could be typing in the text box, these could be polling features or external programs. And you could also put them in breakout rooms.

Prepare Breakout Rooms in Advance

If you use breakout rooms, I highly recommend putting the questions out in advance because once they leave the main room, they can no longer see any slides you were sharing or the questions you might have. You can also broadcast a message to all of the rooms if you put people in groups, so that they can still see what they need to see and be able to talk about it while they’re in that breakout room.

And definitely tell students if they’re going to do a breakout, how long it will be, and ask them to appoint a timekeeper in each group. Even though Zoom might time the breakout rooms for you, you want someone in that group to keep everyone aware of how little time they have left as that time is winding down. Nobody likes being jerked out of a breakout room abruptly in the middle of a comment.

Assessing Student Engagement and Community

Now, you can look around the video screen and see where students are, and sometimes you can even see their demeanor and whether they’re tracking along with the meeting or the presentation. You can also see if they’re just a name with no camera enabled, and you can engage with people anyway and call on their names or have them type in the chat.

Sometimes students are caring for little ones at home, and they’re not really able to chat on video, but they would be able to type in the chat and are still there with you, even though they don’t want to be on screen. I personally believe you should respect that because not everyone is comfortable being on screen, but also we can’t really gauge that they’re all fully present just by seeing them. We can also gauge that presence through the chat and other features that we might use.

Either way, you’re going to create a sense of community by using Zoom in your online class, so students feel more connected to you and more connected to each other. And they can also get this whole sense of community that they’re part of a big program in a university or a school that you’re teaching for.

Zoom has the potential to really take conversations deeper, especially if you use those breakouts and other tools, and help your students to feel like they’re a lot more engaged and invested. I personally have used Zoom a lot in teaching and coaching and in leading faculty meetings.

And also I have used it with one-on-one calls. Even though sometimes it can seem a little bit much for a one-on-one call, I have really enjoyed being able to see people face to face and engage with them, and they have appreciated being able to see me while they’re talking to me as well. And many have said that.

As you try Zoom in your online teaching, I encourage you to stretch in several of these ways to try the different things you can integrate and see how creative you might be, and definitely inform students ahead of time, and practice. You want to be confident and not have technical glitches while you’re carrying it out. As you do these things, you’re going to get a lot more engagement from your students, and they’re going to get trust for you and reach out to you whenever they have problems in the course. And that’s a good thing.

Best wishes to you in creating your Zoom meetings and connecting better with your students, and solving the problem of that distance we all have in online education. And best wishes in all of your teaching this coming week as well.

This is Dr. Bethanie Hansen, your host for the Online Teaching Lounge Podcast. To share comments and requests for future episodes, please visit bethaniehansen.com/request. Best wishes this coming week in your online teaching journey.

#60: Building Social Presence in the Online Classroom

by Bethanie Hansen | Best practices, Higher Education, Online Education Trends, Podcast, Teaching Online

This content initially appeared on APUEdge.com.

Online teachers must work to build social presence in their online classes to enhance community and connections with students. In this episode, Dr. Bethanie Hansen provides tips and strategies about how to achieve social presence including instructor involvement, knowledge sharing, interaction intensity, and more. Learn why social presence is important, how to determine if your efforts are working, and how to think of new ways to create community within the classroom.

Listen to the Episode:

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Read the Transcript:

Dr. Bethanie Hansen: This podcast is for educators, academics and parents, who know that online teaching can be challenging but it can also be rewarding, engaging, and fun. Welcome to the Online Teaching Lounge. I’m your host, Dr. Bethanie Hansen and I’ll be your guide for online teaching tips, topics and strategies. Walk with me into the Online Teaching Lounge.

Welcome to the Online Teaching Lounge. I’m your host, Dr. Bethanie Hansen and we’re talking today about social presence in your online teaching.

As you know, in this podcast, we have four different areas of focus. The first one is best practices when you’re teaching online. Second, we focus on students and areas where we can connect with them or help them. Third, we talk a lot about media, multimedia and technology you might integrate and why you might try it. And lastly, we focus on your life and your balance while you’re working online.

The area of social presence has everything to do with best practices. It is a best practice to have teaching, social and cognitive presence. This comes from the COI, Community of Inquiry framework, but also social presence has to do with connecting with your students. So we’re bridging two different areas today and we’re even dipping a little bit into the media category, because to give good social presence, a lot of times you need images or videos, so we’ll talk a little bit about that too. But the main elements we’re going to cover today are: What is social presence? Why does it matter? How can you create it? And how do you know if it’s working? Let’s dive in.

Let’s begin with instructor presence as social presence. What does that even mean? Social presence has a model out there that many have researched and put together and it has five parts. And the five different areas of your social presence, when you’re teaching online, include:

affective association
community cohesion
instructor involvement
interaction intensity and
knowledge and experience

In essence, we can summarize social presence as the degree to which you uniquely show up in the course that you’re teaching.

Students begin to trust you when you are authentic and present, and they get to know you a little bit. Your social presence is how they get to know you. It’s the idea of who is teaching that class, and what you bring that is uniquely your traits and knowledge and experience.

Second, why does it matter? In online education students don’t have a lot to use for a connection to the institution. As an instructor, you’re the face of that organization, and they really connect through you to the larger organization itself. But beyond that, they build trust in the classroom to open up and engage in the risk-taking behaviors that are engaged in learning.

It does take risk, it takes discipline and commitment to follow through in studying something and doing the assignments and engaging in the discussion. So students are there taking a risk and they need to know who’s behind the other side of the screen. They need to know you.

They cannot risk enough to really fully engage when the instructor is completely absent or invisible. If you’re only facilitating and you never share your own thoughts or insights, and you don’t really have your persona in the classroom, it’s difficult for students to know how much they can put out there, how much they can really challenge the ideas they’re learning and how much they should devote to the course at hand.

So, social presence matters immensely. It has a significant impact on students’ engagement and it also impacts the way they respond and show up when they’re completing the work and when they’re discussing things in the classroom overall.

Building Connections

When we talk about social presence in online learning, there are some other words that come to mind, and these words have been included in a lot of literature on this subject. For example, we might consider the word connection. Connection has to do with social presence. We’re facilitating relationships with our students and helping them relate to each other and really the goal of social presence is connection for everyone.

Evoking Emotion

We also have a lot of emotion involved. We typically look at this when we see a lack of social presence and we notice something like perhaps if the instructor’s social presence is not very strong or students don’t have a very strong social presence, it’s difficult to feel happy about the class. Even a challenging class can be more enjoyable when social presence is high and there’s a sense of real community within that classroom.

Intimacy is another one. We get to know each other. I have some online instructors in my department who actually write letters of recommendation for their students because they’re intimate with their students, in the sense that they get to know who they really are. They build true relationships and they have this camaraderie and this rapport that we do call intimacy.

Generate Immediacy

Another one is immediacy. Immediacy has to do with responsiveness and how aware we are of what’s actually going on in the course. Immediacy is responsiveness when someone reaches out and asks us a question or communicates. We can see things happening in a discussion and we can also pop in there and share comments along the way, because we have a sense of immediacy.

Building Social Interaction

And lastly, of course, social interaction. There are various ways people engage online and social interaction could just be exchanges of discussion comments. It can be live, synchronous commentary where we’re talking to each other, or it could also be sending messages or sending emails. There are a lot of different ways for social interaction to happen, but the main principle is that it’s interactive. There’s a back and forth, a give and take, just like there is in any relationship.

Social presence includes all of these ideas, and when it’s absent, we know it because then some of the same things also pop up. For example, when social presence is low in online experiences, we have negative emotions often associated with that absence or that lack. Often there’s a defensiveness that prevents relationship building and an intimacy that I mentioned before.

And, of course, there’s a gap, or a lag, in responding to comments, questions, inquiries, things of that nature, so immediacy is threatened. And often it will be kind of like people are talking alone, so we’ll all post our comments, but they’re not necessarily responding well to each other. So instead of social interaction, we just have these independent commentaries happening throughout a course and especially in a discussion area.

Even businesses today care greatly about their social presence. There’s this desire to have an identity out there in the world and communicate consistently. Just like businesses do that, online faculty and online instructors need to be cognizant of social presence. We need to be very aware of what one’s social presence is in a particular course, and in an overall online educator career.

So let’s begin with how you’re going to achieve social presence. We know it’s important. It has an impact. It affects things that we do. So how do we achieve this?

The first area of the social presence model that we’re going to talk about is called affective association. So if we have affective association, there are a lot of ways that people will associate us with our name, our identity, and all the things that we’re doing in the course.

Some of those things can be achieved by connecting purposely, like as in with an introduction profile. You might have your teacher persona on the front page of the course. There might be an image of you, perhaps some comments about what you’ve been doing or what your interests are. You might also have an introductory image or video of yourself and also some kind of welcome announcement or a welcome letter that you’re going to send.

There are quite a few things you can do to help students associate your name with your presence and who you really are. This can also be added to announcements and reminders in the course and you can include video clips throughout the course, introducing each week’s content, perhaps participating in the discussion, or an enunciating some details about the content itself, whatever they are to be learning.

Building Community Cohesion in an Online Classroom

The second area of social presence that we can focus on achieving is the community cohesion part. This would be the way that you bring everyone in and help them to feel like they’re part of that community in your classroom. This might be the way you greet your students. You can use a lot of phrases like, “We are working on this.” And you can also include in your feedback, some ideas about what we as a class are working on and learning on and some things that you can refer to in discussion areas as well.

You can mention other students’ posts. You can have a summary comment where you tie together all of the things that others have written and you maybe highlight a few by name, but also tie up the ideas that we as a group mostly have discussed and put your spin on it as well; your insights about what they should walk away from at the end of the week.

Instructor Involvement

Third, we have instructor involvement. And instructor involvement in social presence is the way you know your students, the way you personalize things. How you might share the stage with them. Maybe you also have them hosting a debate or kind of facilitating the forum discussion with each other.

Also, share some reflection of your own. What are you noticing about their learning? How are they growing? What are you really surprised about and pleased with and where would you like to encourage them? What are your insights as a lifelong learner?

And give some personalization as well to the way you talk to your students. Call them by name and sign your name at the bottom of announcements and posts. This instructor involvement brings you and your identity and your name into the class and it helps students to see you throughout all of the things that are going on there.

Interaction Intensity in Social Presence

Then we have interaction intensity, in the social presence model. This is the way in which you build those relationships and what quality they are, and how safe they feel. You connect with your learners through the comments and the intensity is how frequently and how substantially you do this.

If you do anything special on your end to create some additional places where students can connect and discuss things with each other, maybe even you share resources from the field or highlights from your own expertise to help them conquer the academic material, you’re bringing in this whole sense of who you are as the instructor. That interaction intensity can add a lot to the safety of their learning experience, and also their willingness to take more risks as they’re participating.

An additional idea you might do there is have a question and answer area in the course. This is always a great idea, because question and answer areas are where they can come with their informal questions, not necessarily the ones to be discussed in the forum discussion itself.

Share Your Knowledge and Experience

Now, lastly, in the social presence model, we have the knowledge and experience that you bring in your social presence. Now we do have teaching presence and cognitive presence in your space, where you’re showing up. This kind of knowledge and experience is weaved into who you are. You share some ideas about your own experience and expertise and your life experience as a professional. You might ask some questions that help other people share their social presence in the classroom.

Think about what students already know and ask them how they can contribute that to the class we’re now studying. Ask them what they want to know, and discuss it with them and tailor some of your approach around what they really want to get out of the class.

And then in the end of the experience, have a lot of reflection, where you share your reflection and encourage them to share their insights as well. And engage fully in that conversation, as the academic community draws to a close at the end of the class.

And always be authentic in sharing your knowledge and experience. Never make up stories or make up details or use other instructors’ posts and just make them your own, if it’s talking about personalized knowledge and experience. You have something unique to offer and it’s your responsibility and privilege to bring that into the classroom and into your identity as the online instructor.

As you do these things and bring in your social presence fully to the online space, you can create this presence through the way you converse, the attitude at which you bring yourself into the classroom, and through a lot of different tools and devices.

Of course, you might choose to put images of yourself here and there throughout the classroom. You can also think about using video to create true social presence. And then definitely bring in those things you will learn about your students, so it’s a back and forth, give and take exchange.

Lastly, how will you know, if it’s working? How will you know if those efforts you’re making to create true social presence in your online class are working out for students as well? One of the things you can do is review your practices and self-evaluate.

On a primary level, that’s of course effective in determining whether or not you met your goals of proactively getting in there and creating a lot of social presence in your course and in your teaching.

But secondly, your students will help you to know this. You can get feedback throughout the course by noticing how they respond to you, how they engage, how much they’re willing to share, how much authenticity do you sense in the work they’re completing and the communications they have with you? Does it feel like a conversation or are students kind of talking to the wind?

Everyone deserves to have you in that class. That’s why you’re there. You can make a significant impact in your teaching and in online education, generally, as you focus on building your social presence across the board.

One word of caution, as you dive in with additional strategies to increase social presence, and that is to consider the fine line between overly personal sharing and professional sharing.

There is such a thing as sharing too much when you’re building your social presence as an online instructor. Remember keep things, academic, professional, and authentic to you. You can always share personal things that have to do with the content and do seem professionally appropriate.

Review those things on occasion to make sure you’re keeping them in line with what you feel is authentic and appropriate to share with your students. As you do this, you’re going to create a beautiful culture where people are seen, and heard, and engage fully in the academic discussions that unfold.

Thank you for thinking about social presence with me today. For additional links and tips, please check out the transcript in the notes from this podcast. Best wishes in your online teaching this week.

Additional Links and Tips:

This is Dr. Bethanie Hansen, your host for the Online Teaching Lounge Podcast. To share comments and requests for future episodes, please visit Bethaniehansen.com/request. Best wishes this coming week and your online teaching journey.

#47: Tips for Adding Audio, Video, and Multimedia to the Online Classroom

by Dr. Bethanie Hansen | Best practices, Higher Education, Online Education Trends, Podcast, Teaching Online, Technology Tools, Video

Are you looking for ways to enhance class content in your classes, but concerned about the time and effort it might take to create and manage those assets? In this episode, Dr. Bethanie Hansen recommends several technology tools to help you add valuable audio, video, and multimedia components. Most importantly, she provides guidance on developing a strategic approach to creating these new assets, including making sure it’s accessible and useful to students, has a positive impact on your teaching, and isn’t overwhelming for you to create and manage.

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Read the Transcript:

Dr. Bethanie Hansen: This podcast is for educators, academics, and parents who know that online teaching can be challenging, but it can also be rewarding, engaging, and fun. Welcome to the Online Teaching Lounge. I’m your host, Dr. Bethanie Hansen, and I’ll be your guide for online teaching tips, topics, and strategies. Walk with me into the Online Teaching Lounge.

Welcome to the Online Teaching Lounge, the show that helps you teach online with confidence and impact while living a healthy, balanced life. I’m Dr. Bethanie Hansen, your host for the Online Teaching Lounge. My background is in K-12 education and also in higher education, and both live, face-to-face classes and online.

Something I really enjoy about online teaching is being able to integrate different varieties of multimedia into courses to make them more engaging. For example, we can use audio, video, interactive media, and animations. There are more programs and apps to consider than it might be possible to use effectively and more are created every year. It’s easy to struggle with the overload we can all face when we look at this huge variety.

If you’re sometimes tempted by what I call bright and shiny object syndrome when teaching online, this is the temptation to try out new and fresh apps or interfaces, you’re not alone. Finding a new tool can bring fun and interest in your own work as an educator. However, this same set of possibilities we find in the latest and greatest media apps or platforms can quickly cause us to spend a lot of time upfront learning and not enough time actually developing the course or teaching the class.

My focus now is on teaching excellence at an entirely online university. And I believe media and related tools can help us reach our students in new and better ways. At the same time, I suggest using a strategic approach to innovating that allows you to regularly try and use new methods while also reducing the tendency to get overwhelmed by bright and shiny object syndrome. This way, you don’t spend too much time learning and exploring possibilities and not enough time actually using them.

In today’s podcast, we’ll explore several engaging media options and ways that you can approach them strategically so that you and your students are most likely to benefit. After all, through this podcast, I help online educators become more effective in their work while also living healthy and balanced lives by using intentional approaches so that they can love what they do and impact their students positively.

We will first take a look at several audio, video, and multimedia apps or programs you might try. Then we’ll talk about a strategy to intentionally explore and use these special pieces of technology in your teaching. And lastly, we will also reflect on reflecting. How will you decide if it’s working and if your plan is what you’d like it to be? I hope you’ll enjoy these strategies this week. And so we’ll just get started.

Audio Tools to Create Engaging Classroom Content

Beginning with audio, there are four particular audio interfaces I’d like to share with you today.

AudioBoom

The first one is called audioboom.com. Now, there are many different hosting services for creating podcasts and creating hosted audio. This is just one of the many. AudioBoom is a web-based service that lets users create and share podcasts. They’re available at audioboom.com and through the service, you could create a podcast audio recording or entire networks of audio shows. This content can easily be shared with a player that embeds onto a webpage or into a learning management system.

This service can easily be used in your online education if you’d like to create little episodes of things you’re talking about in your teaching. It can also be used for students to create their own episodes as they’re putting together some kind of project or assignment to report back on their learning.

SpeakPipe

A second app is SpeakPipe. Now, SpeakPipe is a very interesting thing and it’s available at speakpipe.com/voice-recorder. When you get to this page, you’ll notice it’s a free online voice recorder. It could be used as a widget, it can be used on your mobile device through an app, or browser extension add-on, or right through the website. And of course, you can use this for audio, as I’m sharing with you now.

You can receive voice messages from your students directly using this recording tool, as it’s embedded easily in the classroom. You can also use it to receive voicemail through the webpage link. It has that free online voice recorder that I mentioned, and you can share sound files of up to five minutes in length instantly through links as well as through the embedded feature.

Now, if you go to the speakpipe.com voice recorder page, you’ll notice that it really is that simple. It just has a green button right in the middle of the page that says “Start Recording.” So you can record your audio, listen to it, and then send it. It works on iPhone, iPad, iPod, and Android devices. You can send it through Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus. You can also embed it and share links through the web. It’s incredibly versatile and very easy to use.

Talk&Comment

A third audio service is called Talk&Comment. Talk&Comment also has a browser extension so you can add it to Google Chrome, you can use it as a widget, you can use it on the mobile device app and so forth. You can also access it at talkandcomment.com through the web, so the direct web page there.

Talk&Comment lets you create voice notes inside any service on the web, including Google Classroom, Google Docs, Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, YouTube, Reddit, Slack, and a lot of other things too.

When you add this to your Chrome browser, it literally allows you to create notes that you’re going to record with your voice anywhere. And you can send those in all of these different ways that I mentioned. You simply record your voice from the widget in your browser and paste the generated voice link anywhere you want.

It’s a really interesting way to share voice notes and also capture your thoughts. It’s pretty much as easy as sitting face-to-face with your students and having a conversation with them where you’re sharing your ideas. Because people talk faster than they write, you can evaluate your students’ work with voice grading using half the time if you try this tool.

It’s not only useful in presenting content, but also in grading students’ work and helping them create interesting projects. I highly recommend taking a look at Talk&Comment for its versatility and also ease of use.

Vocaroo

A fourth and final audio tool that I’d like to share with you today is called Vocaroo. It’s a free online voice recorder provided as a widget and available at vocaroo.com. Through this app, you can make audio recordings directly on the page, and you can also share the recorded content with web links or embed codes. And you can download the sound file as an MP3, OGG, FLAC, or WAV file. You can also delete the sound recording from Vocaroo’s hosting site when needed.

There’s nothing personally identifiable that is recorded with your information, so you’re going to create these sound files that really don’t tie to you, yourself, your students. So there’s a little bit of anonymity with that that protects you to some degree. But also, it’s easy to use and free. Who doesn’t like free, right? So embedding the widget makes it fun. And also, sharing little voice recordings people really seem to enjoy.

So I recommend trying it with students, especially in things like world language classes or where they’re going to need to do some kind of recorded speaking. They can make narrations or other recordings for things like projects. They can submit assignments using Vocaroo. They could record their voice using Vocaroo and post it in a discussion forum. So instructors and students alike can both use Vocaroo very easily.

And one idea you might have is to generate a short podcast to have students try this as a project. So it’s a really great tool. Basically, you’re going to go to vocaroo.com and simply use their easy online recorder. It’s just got a big red button with a microphone in the middle, and then it gives you some options when you’re all finished recording. Easy to use. And again, it’s free.

Adding Video Content to the Classroom

Now, just as audio content can be simple to create and share and also really bring your presence and your students’ knowledge to the forefront, video content can even more enhance your presence, and also what students are bringing to the situation.

If you’d like to add video elements, there are so many tools out there now, and a lot of learning management systems provide integration that’s very automatic and simple to use. For example, you might have something like Kaltura embedded in your learning management system, or even just the built-in video system that the learning management comes with.

Whatever it is, I don’t need to give you a whole lot of video capturing tools because so many already exist within whatever you might be using. I would like to highlight two here today. Simple videos can be created using Screencast-O-Matic, and you can also try Screencastify.

Screencast-O-Matic

Screencast-O-Matic is a free subscription-based site that enables you to make screen recordings, and you can find it at screencast-o-matic.com. This tool is really easy to make video guides, like if you want to explain assignment details or walk students through areas of your online classroom, or maybe you want to illustrate and explain a concept with some visuals.

This site could easily be used to record over short clips of sound quality. Like if you’re a music appreciation instructor, maybe you want to play a musical performance video clip and talk over it and give some direction to your students, allowing some narration to occur and maybe explaining elements of the music as it’s happening.

It gives you screen, camera, and screen-sharing possibilities, and finished products can easily be saved as video files. You can upload them to the Screencast-O-Matic website or to YouTube. And there are just a lot of options there with which you can store your content.

Screencastify

The second option is Screencastify, and just like Screencast-O-Matic, Screencastify is a free web-based video recording tool. This tool is advertised as an add-on screen recorder for Chrome browsers because it just puts an icon into the browser to allow you easy access.

Screencastify offers both free and subscription-based and premium-level products. And I highly recommend checking out both of these options and deciding which one simply works best for you, which interface you prefer, and what you’d like to use.

Tips for Making Great Video Content

Now, I’d like to say just a little bit more here about video content because I’m only mentioning a couple of interfaces. So here are a few tips about adding video. Video can, of course, enhance your course. It can also create some challenges because you’re going to spend a little bit more time. You’re not just editing audio, you’re also looking at how it’s coming across at the same time.

However, it can be really a huge asset for welcoming your students, introducing yourself, lecturing about your content, narrating the content, explaining ideas, and otherwise guiding your students. So it takes some time, but it adds way more personalization than audio alone can do.

Consider asking your students to create videos as part of a forum discussion or an assignment. This can also help with originality checking, if you’re wondering who’s really creating that assignment. If it’s a video assignment, you’ll start to see the same person each time and not have a concern so much about that originality of who’s really submitting the work.

Having a lot of methods to capture your video can be helpful. And again, we’re trying to reduce the overwhelm so start with one and then explore others in the future.

You don’t need a lot of equipment to record video. You can make even more complex videos with captions, transitions, and other elements with purchased software. A lot of things like Camtasia will bring that feature suite to help you add a lot of bells and whistles to your video presentations. And of course, you can spend a lot of time really making them better and better and more engaging.

And sound quality is dramatically improved when you use a headset microphone and not just the microphone on your computer. You can clean up the audio noise, bring the speaking voice in more directly. You can balance the sound with maybe background music or something else, if you really want to get crazy about your videos.

You can use a smartphone to capture the video and upload the video to another app or a program, or just upload the different files into your LMS. You could also branch out and get a separate digital video camera or digital video recorder that’s more high quality than what comes on a smartphone or a computer. But I don’t recommend investing really heavily until you’ve explored the software and the possibilities for why and when you might personally choose to use the video in your class or in your teaching. If you do decide to invest in high-quality video tools, microphones, and lighting, those things can improve the quality of your instructor-created videos. So think about the content, the background, the lighting, the appearance, and the length.

Content should be concise. You might want to chunk up ideas into separate videos so students can look at them one at a time and see the topics broken down, or segment your topics into the smallest component so you have these shorter videos.

And also, think about how you might produce the captions or the written component for students who need that alternative approach. We always want to supply those things in the classroom so students don’t have to ask us if they need some kind of accommodation to see what you’re saying. Be sure to always include it so it’s accessible automatically for everyone.

Interactive and Multimedia Tools for the Classroom

Now, in terms of interactive or multimedia types of tools, I’m going to speak only about two of these today. Again, I’m a real big fan of not overwhelming you. I want to give you some options to help you get started without giving you far too much.

Prezi

The first one I want to talk about is Prezi. Prezi is a web-based program. You can access it online. It also had, in the past, a classic version that was downloadable so you could create it on your desktop. But also, you can use it in the mobile app as well, so it’s very versatile. You can create dynamic presentations through Prezi. You can either get the free or paid membership and you can create multimedia presentations that move, that zoom in and out. You can embed videos, PowerPoint slides, and other things in a Prezi to make it even more interesting and engaging. It’s a more interactive alternative to PowerPoint. Basically, you can share it through links or downloaded files.

Prezis can easily be used for students to create presentations as well, such as how to put facts and information together and how to present what they have learned. It can be also used effectively by groups of students to produce some group projects. All of the members can contribute to one final presentation. There is a whole bunch of information out there with tutorials, learning materials, and support for using Prezis.

Powtoon

The second option I’d like to share today is Powtoon for education. Powtoon is a website that provides templates, graphics, motion, and other features to build short and engaging videos. And you can check it out at powtoon.com/edu-home. These cartoon-like images are included, but you can also use photographs and videos of your own if you’d like to.

It’s an alternative to traditional instructor-made videos, and really, it’s an engaging way to convey information that’s fun too. One common use of Powtoon in online education is to present an introduction to the instructor. You might also consider using it to put together short lesson presentations, or even to enable your students to create projects.

Strategy for Using New Tools and Technology

Now, let’s talk a little bit about how you might intentionally explore and utilize your new technology, whether it’s audio, video, or media related. The first part is to decide your why. Why would you use these tools or why do you want to explore particular tools?

Why Do You Want to Use New Tools?

Well, the first reason I can think of that is probably the best one is that it’s going to promote student engagement and student learning. When you provide any kind of recorded content like a podcast or a video in your lessons, this can also minimize learning anxiety and increase motivation for all of your students.

If you were to think about your own reason for being an educator and what you’re trying to accomplish through your online teaching, think about particular tools that are going to enhance that mission that you’re on. What really are you trying to do with your students?

Some things you might think about when you’re trying to decide why you might integrate something are what you’re going to do with it. For example, are you trying to help students use the app or tool to collaborate? Are you helping bring the content to light for them? Are you giving them interactive ways to engage with the content and further their learning? As you think about those things, you’ll better be able to decide when and why you would be using it.

When is a Good Time to Add New Technology?

The second half of the when question is, when is it really a good time for you to integrate this kind of content in a course or in your teaching?

It’s my personal stance that each piece of media content, whether it’s audio, video, or interactive, included in your online course should serve a purpose and not just be a bright shiny object; and you want to thoughtfully integrate this.

As you bring course materials and topics to life through these interactive means, audio, video, media, bringing it to life and helping students really see it more clearly is a justifiable purpose. You can also help them gain meaning from tools and content in the way that you use the content. How the students are expected to work with it while viewing or engaging with the content, and the way they’re going to recap or review the whole experience. Maybe they’re going to reflect on their learning or the experience of creating using these tools.

8 Tips to Consider When Using New Tools

Think about the following eight tips as you create your media content or explore different tools.

The first step is to choose the resources wisely for both the content you’re going to include and the quality it’s going to put out there.
And second, how can you comply with copyright restrictions and properly attribute the sources you might use in this type of content?
Third, how will you introduce your students to topics and key points to be presented before they use or engage in the content? Or is the content itself the way to introduce students to the topic and key points?
Fourth, if it’s a video clip, I suggest keeping it between seven and 15 minutes long total to maintain focus. And if possible, break it down to even smaller pieces.
Fifth, give your students engagement tasks to complete while they’re viewing the video, listening to the audio, or engaging with the interactive element, like answering specific questions about the points, things to note, and so forth.
Sixth, promote some kind of reflection or thoughtful integration after they’ve viewed, listened to, or engaged with the content. It might be answering questions or going to the discussion forum to talk about it.
Seventh, verify that the things you’re going to use, whether it’s audio, video, or a multimedia interactive, you want to verify that these things are accessible and free from technical issues. Basically, students of all types and of all platforms need to be able to reliably see, hear, or engage with it in a variety of systems and formats.
And lastly, number eight, if you’re using external video content in any of these things that you didn’t create as an instructor, be sure to use it to extend the lecture or add to what’s happening, rather replacing your instructor role.

All of the multimedia tools and strategies that you use, they can be instructor-created or they can be student-created, or someone outside of you can develop them. If students are going to use these tools to create their own assignments and projects, you want to also give them a tip sheet, how-to guides, and really helpful examples so they’re not lost in trying new media themselves, and they can actually enjoy the process and engage with things appropriately.

Reflect on Your Plan to Use New Tools

Now, the last piece in this entire process would be at regular intervals to reflect on your plan. As you reflect upon your plan and how you’re trying new tools or using them in your online teaching or in your course design, you might consider asking yourself, is your plan working? Have you devoted enough time each day/week/month, or year to exploring potential options? Or are you spending too much time and exploring too many options? Are you able to use what you’d like to try without getting overwhelmed? And how would you like to adjust your approach to ensure that you can continue to try these new things for the benefit of yourself and your students without that overwhelm of just getting stuck in the learning curve without actually using the tools the best way possible?

As we close out the podcast this week, I encourage you to consider the various interactive elements you might try in your online teaching, including audio, video, multimedia, and artistic assets that you create. As you decide how you might use various methods and strategies, always, more importantly, consider why you might use them. And then create an intentional plan to regularly explore and learn about these ideas and a strategic approach to selecting and using them.

Working through your plan to keep yourself growing and learning while reducing the possibility of getting overwhelmed will help you to always be learning and actually use the tools. Then at regular intervals, as you look back on your learning and your implementation of these kinds of tools and approaches, you can feel like you’ve actually brought new things to the classroom and new things to your teaching over time.

Is your time and strategy manageable? Do the tools you’re using have a positive impact on your teaching? And do they help students learn? And what might you change in your approach over time? As you think about these things, think about the best possible way to implement it in small, strategic approaches to keep it manageable.

Thank you for joining me today for the Online Teaching Lounge podcast. We took a look at how we might approach the wide variety of media and interactive elements that can be incorporated into online teaching using this intentional strategic approach that also includes continuous learning by reflecting back on your own process so the approach works best for you.

I hope you will think about the possibilities and consider one new thing you might try this week in this area to keep your teaching fresh and help your students become more engaged as well. Best wishes to you in your online teaching this coming week.

Note: Materials consulted for this episode come from Teaching Music Appreciation Online, published by Oxford University Press.

#41: Tips for Teaching Live, Synchronous Online Classes

by Dr. Bethanie Hansen | Energy, Higher Education, Online Education Trends, Podcast, Students, Teaching Online, Video

This content originally appeared at APUEdge.Com

Teaching live, synchronous online classes can be stressful and challenging, especially for teachers who are not used to this form of online teaching. In this episode, Dr. Bethanie Hansen provides tips for engaging students and creating opportunities for students to interact with the instructor and other students. Learn about polling software, screen sharing, video sharing, and other technologies that can help make synchronous classes fun and engaging. Also learn why it’s important for teachers to adopt a flexible mindset as they prepare to teach live online synchronous classes.

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Read the Transcript:

Dr. Bethanie Hansen: This podcast is for educators, academics and parents who know that online teaching can be challenging, but it can also be rewarding, engaging, and fun. Welcome to the Online Teaching Lounge. I’m your host, Dr. Bethanie Hansen, and I’ll be your guide for online teaching tips, topics and strategies. Walk with me into the Online Teaching Lounge.

In today’s podcast, I’m going to share with you some ideas about how to engage your online students during the class in live, synchronous online teaching so that you can hook their interest and help them stay motivated to learn throughout your time together.

I’m not really talking about formal assessments or discussion boards specifically, but I am talking about how you might get them to interact during the lesson itself. Many of you out there are teaching online, but you’re doing it live, where you and your students are all at the computer at the same time in real time.

This is what we call synchronous online teaching. At the same time, there are some of you out there teaching classes where you have put all the lesson content, all of the lectures and other things into an online platform for students to consume or interact with on their own schedules, whether you’re there at the same time or not. The second type is what we call asynchronous online teaching.

Engage Students in Synchronous, Live Online Classes

Today we’re looking at ways to engage your students in live real time, as you are with them in synchronous live online teaching. Why does this matter? Your students will be one step further disconnected from you online than they would be in a face-to-face situation and you cannot walk around through the group to help them stay alert and focused on what’s going on.

If they get up out of the chair and walk away from the computer for a minute, they can easily get distracted by something else going on and lose sight of being in class altogether. And when that happens, you might lose them completely.

For these reasons, part of your role when teaching live synchronous online classes is to be more engaging, and part of your role is to get your students to act. Whether it’s by moving around in their chair, clicking on their smartphone in response to something you ask, writing things down, or speaking to each other in live breakout rooms.

Whatever level you’re at, whether it’s elementary school, high school or college courses, teaching live in the online world takes a little more energy. You might have already guessed this from what I’ve described to this point. You need to be more animated and, at some points, even entertaining. You will need to look at the camera so your students think that you’re looking at them.

And of course, you might want to record yourself in front of the camera, as if you’re teaching, just as a test to see how you project your voice on camera, how you convey energy and how you project your enthusiasm.

In the things that you say, you will also need to tell students what they will learn, why they will need to learn it, and what they should expect and be able to do with the information once they have learned it. Your students are less likely to patiently sit and absorb information just because they’re in the class, especially if they are younger learners.

In today’s podcast, we’re going to cover two specific areas of your live synchronous online teaching. First, we’ll look at your preparation and mindset, and this is really split into two avenues. The preparation means that you need to clearly know what you’re teaching in each lesson, fully plan it, and know exactly how you will teach it and engage your students.

And the other avenue of this preparation is looking at your mindset about how you’re teaching and how well it’s going. This aspect is something you need to focus on before the class is happening because it can really affect the way you think about the entire experience. It also affects the way you plan and prepare for the lesson. And lastly, it impacts how forgiving and flexible you’re going to need to be with yourself and with your online students.

And second, we’re going to look at some ways where you can get interaction from your students when you’re in that live synchronous online class setting to help them move, talk, and engage. These interaction strategies are going to be super helpful to keep your students’ attention focused, but changing pace throughout the lesson can also help your students mentally rehearse and more fully learn the content as well as learning to apply it.

So before we jump in, here are some ideas about the focus of live synchronous classes and totally online asynchronous classes. If you have a choice about whether your online class is going to meet live just as you would in a face-to-face class, or whether it meets asynchronously where students can log in at their leisure, when convenient, and participate on their own schedules, here is a good way to decide between those two options.

The number one factor is what you as the instructor are planning to do. If you are not going to interact back and forth with your students like in a question/answer type of interchange, and if you’re not planning to lead various interactive activities during the time together, if you’re only planning to lecture to deliver the course content, then you don’t need for this to be a live class. You can stand by yourself in front of a video camera and record yourself lecturing to an empty room, then put that video out there for your students to watch at their own schedule. Don’t make them come and sit in front of their computers only to be passive observers of your lecturing.

If they need to attend at a set time, then use that time to the best of your ability to get them interacting with you. Get them to ask questions, interact with each other, and do something that helps bring them into the learning mode to really engage and get something out of that time with you.

Preparing to Teach a Synchronous, Live Class

So let’s begin. First, we look at the preparation phase. You’re going to create a lesson plan for each lesson, and it needs to be detailed. Decide what students should know and be able to do by the end of this lesson. And decide how you want them to be able to demonstrate their learning at the end as well.

This will likely lead up to your design for assessments and knowledge checks or smaller formative activities leading up to something bigger coming up. Of course, today, I’m addressing only the way we deliver synchronous online lessons and not the actual assessment activities specifically.

If you’re teaching online, you must prepare the content ahead of time, even if you’re teaching live at a specific time. It’s not pretty to improvise in front of a camera feed with your students all sitting there. And it’s also very easy for your students to disengage, turn off their cameras, and find something else more interesting to do.

If they start doing this, they might even stop attending your class. To help them learn the best you can, you will need to be interesting, and engage them with you and with each other. Of course, the class doesn’t have to be live if you choose some other method.

You don’t need to see this experience as if you’re sitting on a stage delivering your lecture or monologue in real time as if you’re in a live classroom. Instead, if you’re going to just put everything online and let students come and go to participate at their own convenience, you can create many different types of content for that and you can make it an asynchronous class.

Maybe one of those, if you go that route, is going to be a short set of videos where you’re explaining or demonstrating a concept. Then there can be some reading material, and maybe you have a few videos that also help teach the concept. And students might be in a discussion area chatting among themselves in an asynchronous discussion as well.

There are a lot of options to help you, if you realize that you don’t really need them to be there live in real time. Whatever you do, be prepared and plan the lesson content, and the way you would deliver it as well, in advance.

You should be more specifically prepared in your online etiquette expectations. You can begin the class by sharing your standards about what they can expect from you and what you can expect from them in terms of how often and in what ways they will interact during your class. These instructions could include some kind of guidance about muting and unmuting their microphones, as well as what kinds of things can be written in the chat box, and whether they need to be on video or just have an image on the screen and their cameras turned off.

You should share these expectations out loud. Tell your students in front of the camera, when you’re actually there in the live class. Don’t just send them by email and expect your students to read them. You’ll want to reiterate them a few times and emphasize them, especially if you’re going to have these live courses throughout the semester where you’re meeting online, yet at the same time.

There are some additional ideas, like telling your students that online engagement is expected and required as class members. Camera issues and technical issues are not as common of an excuse for not engaging. Students can always use their smartphones as a backup if they have tech issues on their computer, and it can be helpful to engage the classroom support team early and often if there are any issues with technology access.

If you share your beliefs about why they need to engage and about how it’s going to actually cement what they’re learning, this can help your students purposely engage and be much more involved in your live classes.

Make Participation Part of the Grade

I also make participation a part of the grade during a live class, and you might consider doing the same thing, especially for younger students and if it’s a Gen Ed college class. You can use all kinds of brief exercises to interact or chat or get ideas from students throughout the class. And you can even call on students individually and take volunteers to answer questions.

So there are a lot of strategies to help you prepare. And as you think through what types of engagement you might want to use; you can plan your content throughout the lesson around these different methods available to you.

Adjusting Your Mindset

Now, the other half of the preparation is looking at your mindset. What are you thinking about your own teaching generally? And what will you expect to happen when you’re teaching online? How do you see yourself when you’re on video or when you’re coming across an online platform? And what might you do if everything goes wrong?

Let’s talk about that mindset a little more. Even though you will plan and prepare, be prepared for backup plans. In the past, you might have been able to deliver masterful classes and engage your students face-to-face remarkably well. But online, sometimes what you think will be a wonderfully developed and clear lesson turns out to be flat, confusing, and unengaging.

If you are new to teaching online, you will need to prepare with a beginner’s mind. Realize that you might not be as polished or put together as you would like to be. Have a plan B. You can share this plan B any time with additional content, different methods to teach the content. And if you have these backup plans, this is going to help you to feel calmer and help you stay calm if things don’t go according to plan. This is especially helpful if major adjustments are needed.

Because you might need to move to a backup plan, also realize that if it’s your first time teaching online, you might need to be more patient and flexible with yourself while you’re teaching. And you will also need to be more accommodating to your students who are trying to learn your teaching style as well as how to navigate that online space.

It’s really easy to clam up, get a little tense and hold students to a higher standard when things become frustrating for you. So, dial it down just a bit and be more accommodating to yourself and your students equally.

Improving Student Interaction with Polling Software

Lastly, we’re going to look at some ways you can get interaction from your students when you’re in that live synchronous online class to help them move, talk and engage. So how can you interact with these students during this live class?

One of the ideas I’d love to share with you today is to use polling software. There are many kinds of polling software. I’m going use four different kinds today and the first one I’d like to tell you about is called Poll Everywhere. This is one great option. They have interactive activities, attendance methods, quizzing, and ways to check understanding in real time.

You can add Poll Everywhere into a PowerPoint presentation that you already have. This makes it an easy way to add polling or any kind of interaction there. Once you’ve collected the responses, you can save them on the slide deck so if you’re going to share them with students later, those responses will be right there in the slide deck.

This Poll Everywhere also works with Keynote and Google slides. So with Poll Everywhere, you can make live synchronous online classes far more engaging and interactive without really having to change your slide deck very much from your traditional lesson you might’ve given in the past.

A second piece of software is called Mentimeter. Mentimeter lets you build interactive presentations right there on their platform, so you don’t have to go to something like PowerPoint. You can also collect polls, data and opinions from your students using their smartphones. They have 13 different types of interactive questions that can include word clouds and quizzing. The word clouds are especially beautiful because as students add their comments, any repeated statements become bigger in the word cloud and it starts to form right before your eyes.

You could put your whole lesson presentation in a Mentimeter presentation, and the engagement parts could appear throughout this lesson where students will respond, where they will interact, and where they will reply to your questions through Mentimeter. This platform includes themes for your presentations and free stock images to spice it up. And once you’re done, you can analyze the data, export it in a PDF file or in Excel, look at the trends and do some deeper analysis.

A third area is in the Zoom platform, which many of you might already be familiar with. Zoom has polling software built in. And if you’re having your live sessions in Zoom, these can be set up ahead of time and then they can be put on the screen when they’re needed and you can show the poll results to everyone afterwards. The Zoom polls can be conducted anonymously, or you can have participants names recorded, especially if you’re going to download them afterwards and take a look at those responses.

The last thing is the chat feature, which probably comes in whatever video platform you’re using for this live lesson. So the chat feature in the video platform allows students and you all to add your comments and ask questions.

You can monitor what’s going on there and include some of these comments as you’re teaching the lesson in your own speaking to connect to what students are also saying. You can also call on students who are there on video and just ask them to unmute and speak out loud as they would do in a traditional face-to-face class.

Some students are uncomfortable with this and very shy on camera, but once you encourage this kind of participation repeatedly, it grows. And it encourages more students to also participate in the same way. Those four ways of interacting, polling and getting answers from students can really help your students to wake up, stay alert, and really engage with the content.

Another way to engage your students is a screen share. There are many ways to do this and of course, if you’re in a platform like Zoom, you can either share an app through the platform or your entire screen from your computer right there in Zoom, and you could also share the interactive whiteboard.

When you use the whiteboard, you can just write on it like you would in a face-to-face class although it’s on the computer instead of on the wall. If you’re using Google, Google Classroom, Google Meets, or any of those types of platforms, you can also screen share there. There’s a Jamboard app that you could bring into your Google Classroom to also allow your students to collaborate on those whiteboards.

And then of course you can video share. You can stand up in your home office, just like you might in a classroom, put a whiteboard on your wall, and draw concepts on it while you’re teaching during the lesson and as you’re engaging with your students, just as if you’re standing in a regular classroom in front of that class.

These are all ways to engage your students, to get them to stay alive, alert, awake, to help them manipulate the content and interact with each other, explore ideas, and really learn during your live synchronous online class. I hope this has helped you think about how you might include students to engage them during that live synchronous online class.

Summarize the Lesson at the End of Each Class

As you close the lesson and the class for the day, find a way to summarize what they have done, what you’ve learned together and all that you’ve covered. Ask a student to tell you what their takeaway is from the lesson. You can either call on individual students to speak, or if you’re in a video platform with a chat feature, you can ask everyone to type a one-sentence takeaway from the lesson. Here again, this is going to cement their learning and help them repeat it again and again to remember what was taught, but also what they worked on.

You could ask your students to respond through polling software, if you prefer, to this section of your lesson, or you could have them add their answers to a Mentimeter word cloud. Whatever you do, asking students to help you sum up the lesson is another great way to help them engage more and solidly sift through their learning by sharing out.

Reflect After Each Class, Send out Email Reminders to Students

After everyone’s offline, take a moment to reflect on what went well. Was your preparation adequate? Was your mindset in the right place for this kind of situation? And did you prepare the situation itself with all of the steps needed for success? What would you like to adjust before the next go round? And then send a follow-up email to your class with a few key points and reminders about the next time. This will help them remember how to contact you as well when they have questions and it’s going to help them keep thinking about class when they’re away.

Thank you for being with me today. I wish you all the best in your online teaching this week, especially if you’re teaching live synchronous classes.

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#67: 10 Tips for Personalizing and Engaging Welcome Messages

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#65: Strategies to Make Discussion Boards More Engaging [Podcast]

#62: Connecting with Students Through Zoom

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Integrating Zoom into Online Classes

Review and Update Zoom Settings

Use Doodle or Survey to Find a Good Meeting Time

Send Out Repeated Meeting Reminders

Establish a Backup Plan for Internet Connectivity

Assign a Student Who Can Take Notes, Continue Meeting

Decide on Your Background

Test Your Audio Quality

Prepare a Lesson Plan for the Meeting

Establish Expectations with Students

Think about Level of Student Engagement

Tips on Hosting Strategies

Prepare Breakout Rooms in Advance

Assessing Student Engagement and Community

#60: Building Social Presence in the Online Classroom

This content initially appeared on APUEdge.com.

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What is Social Presence?

Why is Social Presence so Important for Online Instructors?

How to Achieve Social Presence

How Do you Know if Your Efforts to Build Social Presence are Working?

Keep Social Presence Professional and Authentic, but Don’t Overshare

Additional Links and Tips:

#47: Tips for Adding Audio, Video, and Multimedia to the Online Classroom

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Audio Tools to Create Engaging Classroom Content

Adding Video Content to the Classroom

Interactive and Multimedia Tools for the Classroom

Strategy for Using New Tools and Technology

8 Tips to Consider When Using New Tools

Reflect on Your Plan to Use New Tools

#41: Tips for Teaching Live, Synchronous Online Classes

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Engage Students in Synchronous, Live Online Classes

Preparing to Teach a Synchronous, Live Class

Share Expectations with Students, Out Loud

Make Participation Part of the Grade

Adjusting Your Mindset

Improving Student Interaction with Polling Software

Engage through Screen Share

Video Share with Students

Summarize the Lesson at the End of Each Class

Reflect After Each Class, Send out Email Reminders to Students

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