fbpx
#62: Connecting with Students Through Zoom

#62: Connecting with Students Through Zoom

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
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | Stitcher | Pandora

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.

 
#61: Five Creative Ways to Enhance Forum Discussions

#61: Five Creative Ways to Enhance Forum Discussions

Discussion forums in online classes can sometimes get repetitive and stale. In this episode, APU professor Dr. Bethanie Hansen suggests five creative ways for online teachers to spice up discussion spaces to revitalize the discussion and get to know students better. Learn about role playing, technologies to create video responses and collaboration sites, and more.

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.

Have you ever struggled to engage in the discussion of your online course? For some courses we teach, it might seem that over and over we’re discussing the same topics with the same students from the same approach.

Of course, it may be a new group of students, but it seems like we’re having that same dialogue over and over again. And sometimes there might be a feeling that it’s difficult to find new questions to ask, or new ideas to share. If this sounds familiar to you, it might be time to try some creative alternatives to the traditional discussion format. And when you take a totally new approach, it can revitalize your thinking about online discussion spaces and help you engage much more with your students too.

Today, we’ll review five alternative discussion forum ideas for your next online class. And by the end of today’s podcast, you’ll walk away with something new you can try this coming week.

Role Play Can Enhance Forum Discussions

Number one, role-play. The idea of role-play in online discussions involves creativity and imagination. To be able to engage in the dialogue, students must do a little research about an individual from the past, their context and culture, and their life’s achievements. There are forum prompts like this in music appreciation courses that I teach. So I’m going to share my own experience with you on role-plays.

In the first discussion we have that involves this role-play idea, students are asked to create five questions that a media interviewer might ask prominent musicians from the 1600s. Then students create replies as if that composer might provide them. And they format and post their discussions in some ways that are also creative.

I noticed some of my students take it further, so they even introduce the entire post in character as if they are the interviewer, complete with fictitious names for the magazine or newspaper they represent, and some additional fun details.

By doing this approach, students must weigh the facts on a historical musician and find those lesser-known details that can really pique your curiosity. They also have to think in present tense, first-person voice, as if they are speaking as that composer in their responses. It can help students start to think about people from hundreds of years ago much more humanely, and understand more than just some facts and some dates that they could write about. And it elicits their creativity, so they will spend a little more time putting it together.

In the other role-playing discussion we have, we have students who write imaginary conversations that take place between three composers, which they get to choose, from the romantic era. They bring in people like Beethoven, Berlioz, Chopin and Liszt, and they write the conversation as if these three people they selected really did meet at a party or a gathering. Sometimes students will write the conversation as if Beethoven has completely lost his hearing and keeps ignoring other people, asking loudly, repeatedly what they have said. And some of them portrayed Liszt as this dark emotional person, bringing in a mention of various elements from his life struggles.

We’ve been able to dive into the conversations about composers they select and explore musical issues, and the cultures the composers lived in as well. But more than that, some wider topics come in like musicians and mental health, relationships, and even challenges they face in life. And many of the students find that they understand these composers and the challenges and musicians as fellow humans, instead of just names and dates.

And some have even remarked that they contemplate the challenges that certain musicians have faced and overcome these, and they think about their own lives as well. So they liken perhaps the deafness of Beethoven and his composing symphonies anyway, to whatever life struggle they’re having. And a few students have even said they’ve been inspired to overcome their own challenges and keep moving forward because of these experiences, these stories.

Role plays can be powerful and useful if you want to help your students connect to their learning. To make discussions successful, clear and detailed instructions are needed. Step-by-step instructions can be important to help students know exactly what is expected and how the post should be written.

Create Video Discussion Forums Using Flipgrid

For this second idea you’re going to leave the learning management system completely. You’re going to get out of the LMS and go into a program called Flipgrid. Now, if you haven’t tried Flipgrid, it is definitely worth a shot. You leave, you use Flipgrid, and then you post it in the classroom.

This is a free video discussion forum tool. It builds your students’ perceptions of the connectedness in the online classrooms, so it takes discussions to a totally different place. You can use Flipgrid for video discussion forums. They’ll take the video and embed the video in the online course that students have created. And you can use it in a lot of different ways to connect yourself to your students and to connect students to each other.

Embedding a tool that brings voice, tone, and body language to the classroom really does build that sense of connection, and you can see who everybody is. You get a sense of the other students in the class and the instructor. And this raises the bar for everything happening in that discussion forum.

There’s a post on Edutopia about several different LMS strategies, and Flipgrid is one of those. They quote a high school English teacher named Kyleen Gray. And Kyleen said, “Flipgrid is a fantastic oral communication application that is easy to use.”

It’s a video-sharing platform, as I mentioned, and you can write the forum prompt to the discussion just as you always would. But instead of having students type the answer, you simply have them answer it in a short video. So this is a great tool that’s going to give you feedback in sort of an informal way. You can find out how students are doing in their learning, and you get to hear it in their own voice.

And of course, there’s been some research done on this, and it’s been found that Flipgrid actually boosts students’ feelings of being connected in the online classroom, which overcomes a lot of that sense of anonymity, and also that disconnection that is really common in online education. And it also helps them to bridge the gap between you and them, so they’re willing to ask you for help.

Of course, there are some additional fabulous ideas for using Flipgrid that you might also be interested in. Not only can your students just post videos of themselves talking and embed these in your forum discussions, but you can invite outside speakers. So there’s a guest mode in Flipgrid, and you can invite a guest speaker to participate in the online discussion asynchronously. Guests can watch the student videos and respond to them. This gives your expert a way to share knowledge from the field, and also allows them to share it at the convenient time for them.

If you’d like to have guest speakers in your online class, this is a really creative idea about how it can be done, and it can be done in a discussion, so that throughout the week everyone can engage with that guest and go back and forth.

We can also take this a little further. Flipgrid is great for sharing language acquisition if you’re teaching a world language, and, of course, you can share and celebrate work. If you celebrate completed projects, essays, assignments, and things like that in the discussion area using Flipgrid, you can have students talk about their projects and show them off at the same time. And then post that video so that each person can go through and sort of see a showcase of work. What a great alternative in a forum discussion.

Using Padlet to Improve Collaboration and Sharing

Today’s third creative idea for discussions is to try Padlet. There are many lists out there on the internet available for you on creative ways to use Padlet in your online classroom. I’ll just highlight a few of these today.

First of all, if you’re wondering what Padlet is, it’s kind of like a Post-it board, so you can put notes on there and everyone else in the class can do that as well. You can use Padlet in your online classroom by installing the app on your device or opening the Padlet website. You make a board and then you have posts there that everyone can add.

There’s a lot of ways to do this. First, you can use Padlet to brainstorm topics. If students are going to be writing an essay, this might be a great way to use your discussions face for the week. They can brainstorm topics together, thesis statements, projects, ideas, and other things that they might turn in for the class. You can try this and have students just collaborate with each other, and together they just might come up with even better ideas.

You can use that same space to create a live question bank. And a live question bank would be where students ask questions about the lesson, during the lesson. You could take this further and have them design three or four questions that each of them would ask if they were the one creating the final exam. This is a wonderful way to create creative questions in a big list all at once. And it won’t take very long when you have each student contribute.

Another way to use Padlet in your discussion area is to create icebreaker activities. For example, if you really like that activity, Two Truths and One Lie, students can post something about themselves and we can all go through and guess which were true and which were not, and have fun getting to know each other the first week of class.

And of course, you can use that same space to share highlights from the semester, or things that they’d like to honor about each other. It can be a celebration space for reflection at the end of the semester in your discussions. You can also use it as a question board, so your students can go there and ask and answer questions for each other.

And the last tip I have on Padlet today is to use bubble maps, thinking maps, or brainstorming maps. Padlet is a great way to organize the ideas, move them around, and create them into various ordering systems to help students think through the way they might use the information they have learned.

And all of these ideas I’ve just shared with you here about using Padlet came from an article called “30 Creative Ways to Use Padlet For Teachers And Students,” posted by Lucie Renard in 2017. There’s a link in the podcast notes here, so be sure to check it out.

Using Jamboard for Live Collaboration

The fourth creative discussion idea is actually a synchronous one. If you teach hybrid or live synchronous online courses, or if you teach face-to-face you could even use this idea. Google has a product out there called Jamboard. It’s all one word if you’re going to search it.

It’s for sketching out ideas and using a whiteboard style collaborative space. When you use Jamboard, students can write on it at the same time and they can add their own sketches or calculations. You could use Jamboard for a lot of different things.

For example, if you have some kind of visual art class and you want students to literally sketch things, you can use Jamboard. If you’re teaching mathematics, especially if you have a real-time meeting where you’re going to collaborate and do problems together, this is a fabulous way to help students get involved. And they can also put images on there and notes and take different assets from the web or pull in documents or slides or different sheets from the Google platforms. And they can all collaborate at the same time, no matter where they are.

It’s totally free, unless you want the freestanding Jamboard to be in your physical classroom, in which case there is a cost to it. But it’s a wonderful collaborative tool for synchronous use online in your discussions.

Integrating Photography into Discussions

And we’re down to our number five example. This fifth example comes right back to the traditional discussion format. So we’re not using the external technologies, but we are using one kind of media, and that would be photography. This example is shared by Kristin Kowal in 2019. Kristin says that, “This is adding images of examples in students’ posts.”

So for this example, you’re going to have students post the image along with their written response in the discussion forum. One of the best things about this strategy is that it’s somewhat personalized. It helps students be motivated to use more than one modality in their discussion post, and it helps them connect more to each other and to the ideas.

There are a lot of visual learners. It’s something like 60% to 80% of all people are visual thinkers. So when you start adding the image to this discussion post, you have something really interesting coming out. It’s personal. It motivates students. It connects them.

Erin Ratelis, an online instructor says that, “It not only feels different for the students, but it’s also a different type of activity that will stand out for them. It leverages a different technology and photos are a great visual tool to solidify class insights. It requires students to explore class topics through a very personal lens, no pun intended.”

So in the course where Erin used this strategy, she had her students go to a retail environment in their community. So they were looking for 10 ways that a consumer marketer would influence the purchasing decisions. And she asked her students to post photos, but made it optional. Most of the students chose to include picture examples, like retail displays at Target or other stores. And students even commented directly in their posts about how much they enjoyed taking the pictures and including them.

You can draw attention to all kinds of real-life examples, no matter what course you’re teaching, by asking students to show an example in a photograph. It could be the bonus point on that forum discussion.

You can also use it if you’re asking students to take a field trip. So if you ever have an assignment where your online students need to go out of the classroom and prove that they’ve done something, such as attending a concert or going to a museum, it’s best if they also have a picture of themselves at that event.

Lastly, think about privacy concerns when you have students post photos. If they’re taking photos at work and sharing them, it might be a good idea to get permission from their employer. Think about which areas you might want to use this activity in, where it might pique the most ideas. And you might consider doing it again later in the course.

So these five creative forum discussion ideas are here to give you alternatives so you’re not just posting and writing and posting and writing and students are doing the same. That kind of repetitive approach to a forum discussion gets old. And even if you’re having a very stimulating discussion, students tend to repeat the approach that they’re using. As you stretch and try these alternative methods, I think you’ll really spice up your online class and have a lot of fun doing it. I wish you all the best this week in your online teaching. 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.

 
#53: Setting the Tone in the Online Classroom

#53: Setting the Tone in the Online Classroom

When teaching an online class, instructors must work hard to connect with students and set expectations for the course. In this episode, Dr. Bethanie Hansen talks to APU Faculty Director Dr. Craig Bogar about effectively communicating with students. Learn the benefits of publishing a welcome video so instructors can virtually introduce themselves to students in the beginning of the course. Also learn tips on conveying netiquette practices to students and why it’s so important for instructors to ask Socratic questions to enhance critical thinking and promote engagement of online students.

 

 

Subscribe to Online Teaching Lounge
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | Stitcher

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.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Online Teaching Lounge. This is the first episode of our second year of this podcast, and you’re in for a real treat today. We’re going to be interviewing Dr. Craig Bogar from American Public University, and I’m really excited to have Craig with us today. Craig, welcome to the podcast. Can you tell us a little bit about your background, so listeners can get to know you and your connection to online education?

Dr. Craig Bogar: I sure can, Bethanie, and thanks for inviting me today. I’m super happy to be here. And I was a college athletic director at two universities some years ago, and I also coached swimming and track at those institutions, and I also worked as a college recreation and intramural director at one point. And after doing those things for a number of years, I decided to go back to school and get my doctorate, and at that time, I lived in Alabama, near the United States Sports Academy, and I was accepted into their hybrid program, which was on-ground and online.

Start a degree in Education at American Public University.

And once I completed my doctorate, opportunities started to arise and I began teaching online. And I also was serving as the Dean of Student Services at the Sports Academy for a few years, and had the opportunity to teach on-ground courses in both Thailand and the Kingdom of Bahrain while I was there.

I’ve been with American Public University , for the past nine years. I taught part-time online for three years, and then I got the position as Faculty Director for the School of Health Sciences, and that’s what I currently do for the institution. I still live in Alabama, but I live now on the Gulf Coast, right here in Gulf Shores. So it’s good to be with you.

Dr. Bethanie Hansen: It’s wonderful to have you as well, Craig. Thank you for giving us a little bit of your background. Sounds like you’ve had some pretty well-rounded exciting experiences there. I’m curious, how would you have thought of being online long ago before this was really a mainstream thing to do, early in your career?

Dr. Craig Bogar: Wow. That is a great question, and the world as we know it, has changed exponentially in the past couple of decades, and it’s just so hard to conceive of the type of traditional education that we used to have and a number of us went through to get our bachelor’s degrees and onward.

But I think that the key for me, as I said, was being in a hybrid program for my doctoral program, where I got a taste of online instruction and online teaching, and just fell in love with it. And it offers so many different opportunities that one doesn’t necessarily get in the on-ground format, not the least of which is that it’s so much more convenient for students, especially the non-traditional student who may be in the workforce, and might have a family and children, and so forth.

Where years ago, as you recall, if people wanted to either finish a degree or maybe get an advanced degree, they were gone X number of nights a week after they left their job, and they rarely got to see their families, or have dinner with their families, and so forth.

Now with an asynchronous type of online program, as we know, people can do their coursework really anytime, any day. And with us having so many military students, especially in my program where close to 70% of them are with American Military University, they can be students overseas. So it’s really, as I said, it’s a new culture and a new world for many things, not the least of which is higher education.

Dr. Bethanie Hansen: Yeah. Fantastic. Thanks for that. A lot of our listeners have found themselves teaching online for the first time, and of course, we also have a lot of listeners who have taught online for quite a lengthy time, many in higher ed, and in also what you might consider public school ages, primary and secondary, so just to fill you in a little bit about our listeners.

And I know that you have a lot of best practices that you use in working online, but also in working with your faculty. So what is a best practice that you’d like to share with us today to help our listeners be even more effective in their online teaching?

Dr. Craig Bogar: Okay, well, I’ve got a few things in mind, but one thing I wanted to talk about was that we now require our instructors to post a welcome video that students see when they enter a given course. And one of the reasons we’re doing this, is because the welcome video is a great opportunity to provide a personal welcome to students, and of course, meet the university requirement now, but also to acquaint students with the essentials of a course.

And what I have found over the years that I try to communicate to my faculty, is that by the nature of online education, it is remote by nature, and we have to do our very best at what I call “touching” students in every possible way. It’s by greeting students by name when we see them in the course, when they respond in the course and such, and one of the ways, as I said, is this welcome video.

And in the welcome video, there are some things that I suggest, and I’ll just go through a few of them, is one is obviously to introduce yourself to your students and to welcome them, and if there’s a number of a course or description of the course name, to tell them that, and tell the students why the course is relevant to the program. What will this course do for you? I always refer my students to the syllabus, and to make sure they read that, because it includes course materials and learning objectives, and gives students a good blueprint for what they need to do each week in a given course.

I always explain my expectations for student participation. In other words, by what date do they have to make their initial post in the discussion forum each week? How many responses to their peers do I look for? I give them that information.

I tell the students what they can expect from me, and one of the key things in the online format is timely feedback from instructors. Here at APUS, we have a deadline for faculty grading, which is five days after a given week has ended, but I tell my students that, “Hey, this is the deadline, but I’m going to do better than that. You can get your feedback from me, you can get your grades from me before that deadline each week.” So I try to set the tone that I’m going to be doing my best to exceed expectations.

Also in this welcome video, I tell them what I expect as far as plagiarism, or not to commit plagiarism, and I expect them to follow the rules of netiquette. In other words, being courteous to their peers and also being courteous to me. Again, setting the tone, and I want a professional environment in the course, and I try to communicate that to students.

Also in the welcome video, I suggest that faculty mention the degrees they’ve earned, and give a concise description of their teaching experience or their relevant professional experience, because we want our students to know that, “Hey, we are qualified to teach these courses.” Students are very interested in knowing this, for obvious reasons. They want to make sure that the people who are teaching know their stuff. So in the welcome video, this is a great way in which we can give that information to students.

There’s some optional elements. You can tell the students in your welcome video where you’re from, where you live, the institutions that granted your degrees, maybe your hobbies, what do you like to do in your spare time, and any other personal information that you’d like to share.

But knowing that and hearing that, I also suggest that faculty stick to about three minutes for their welcome video. I know that for all those things that I mentioned, it may be a challenge, but after three minutes, I personally believe that we start to lose people’s focus and attention. So that’s just a ballpark estimate of how much time they should use.

I encourage faculty to write a script, and if you’re using a built-in camera, what I do is I position my script right at the top of that window or that monitor, so it doesn’t appear that I’m looking down and reading the whole time from a script.

It’s also good to be mindful of the setting and the background, and to look professional, and wear a solid color shirt or a blouse to make sure you contrast the background that students are seeing. You want to be about an arm’s length away from your camera. You want to not be overbearing in both your physical presence and your volume, so an arm’s length is good to know. And your lighting should be really in front of you, not behind you, so you don’t have shadowy recordings. Last of all, smile when you speak. That’s always something good to do.

Dr. Bethanie Hansen: Wow, Craig, you have given us so much detail and so much great information about these instructor welcome videos, everything from your own practice, to what you’re sharing with your faculty. And I can imagine that not all online faculty are super excited about creating a video to share with their students. So I’m curious, what do you do to help your faculty get in there and actually do this welcome video creation? What works for you?

Dr. Craig Bogar: Well, actually, I really have not had any problems or any complaints from faculty. I think the people that get into the teaching profession are already pretty versed in speaking to groups. I always am available to help folks, but I try to give our faculty as many resources as possible in my weekly communications with faculty, to let them know I’m here to assist them if they need any assistance. But, fortunately, just in our new learning management system, it’s very easy to make a recording. So knock on wood, we really haven’t had that kind of problem, per se.

I did want to go back, Bethanie, and talk a little bit about netiquette as well, and just something that I have experienced or observed over the years. And I go back to my statement before about setting the tone in the course is so important, and for people to be professional, both the instructor and the students towards each other. And I have had some faculty who have had students who have used improper or foul language in a discussion forum, and they’ve come to me and said, “Hey, what do I do about this?”

And where I’ve had an occasional problem in the past, I’ve told students that when I’ve observed that, I say, “Hey, that kind of language, number one, we want to be professional in the classroom,” but that kind of language, especially if it’s a guy to guy thing, I say, “Hey, that’s more appropriate for the locker room, but this is a public forum.

This is a place where we need to be professional. And what I’m going to do,” fill in the blank, “John, is I’m going to give you another chance to repost, to delete your post, and to post again and see if you can do a little better job in meeting my expectations.” And that has worked 100% of the time for me, and that’s the advice that I’ve given to faculty that have come to me for assistance, saying that, “Hey, we can handle these kinds of situations,” and especially for first-time online students, they may not realize that what they say, and they should, but not everybody realizes that this is an academic setting, and we can’t have improper language.

Dr. Bethanie Hansen: That’s fantastic help, Craig, and I appreciate you mentioning netiquette as part of this setting the tone that you also would be doing with your instructor videos. We’re going to take a quick break for a message from our sponsor. Craig, thank you for sharing all that you’ve given us so far, your best practice of the instructor welcome video, and also you mentioned a few things about netiquette. I’m wondering, what do you really want listeners to take away from those kinds of practices?

Dr. Craig Bogar: Well, I think that what I’d like them to take away is that it’s so important to set a tone in an online course as to what you expect from students, and what students can expect from you. And one of the ways to do that is through one’s welcome video that, as I said, we post in the very first week of an online course, it’s what we call the discussion module.

And I use the term “to touch” students in the online format is so important because of the nature of remote learning, that we need to use students’ names, and to be as personable as possible with students.

I think about Dale Carnegie, going back many, many years ago, who was one of the top speakers in the country, motivational speakers, and he used to say that, “The sweetest and most important sound in our language is to hear your own name,” and I think that is still true today. And by using students’ names whenever we communicate them or interact with them in the online classroom, is something that we need to do as online instructors.

One thing that I do is when I meet students, quote, unquote, in the “first week discussion/introduction forum,” if a student has a nickname, I write that down in my little log book, and I want to make sure that I refer to that student by his or her nickname throughout the course. And I’ve even had, on occasion, students in their end of course surveys that we do at our institution say that, “Dr. Bogar referred to, fill in the blank, Mary, by her nickname the whole course, and I thought that was so cool!”

And little things like that can help build relationships with the students that we have in our classrooms. There have been studies about brain activation and how when one hears their own name, how that really stimulates a person’s interest in what they’re doing, and I think the more, as I said, the more we can do that, the better in the online course to facilitate relationships and engagement with students in our courses.

Dr. Bethanie Hansen: Wow, that’s really fantastic, Craig, and I couldn’t agree more. I always notice a person who calls me by my name, and I’m sure students really benefit from feeling connected, as if their instructor knows them personally, especially online. There’s such a divide there, such a disconnect when we don’t do those things. Thanks for all you shared with us so far.

I’m just wondering, are there any other tips or strategies you’d really like to share with listeners today that can help them be even more effective in their online teaching?

Dr. Craig Bogar: Sure. There’s one more area that I’d like to talk about briefly, and that is importance of asking Socratic questions of our students, which really promote engagement in a discussion, but maybe more importantly, Socratic questions enhance critical thinking, by asking these questions of students. As opposed to getting one word answers from students when we ask questions.

Socratic questions, of course, begin with words such as “why,” or “how,” or “what,” so the response tends to be more in-depth and critical. Socrates, I think it was about 2,000 or more years ago, thought that being a lecturer was not that effective, and came up with this method of questioning students. And it’s really, in my opinion, very effective in the online classroom, especially in the discussion formats that we have.

You may recall that years ago when Bethanie, you and I maybe were in on-ground classrooms, you always had students who were a little maybe intimidated by instructors asking questions, or for whatever reason, they were fairly shy in the classroom.

Well, in the online environment that is somewhat anonymous, those students who maybe were reticent about asking questions or responding to questions to instructors in an on-ground environment, they’re probably more likely to be more engaged in the online environment. And especially when instructors are asking these open-ended questions that really deserve students to think critically about a particular topic that may be discussed at one time.

Somebody came up with a quote one time, it wasn’t me, but “Our role as online instructors is really not to be the sage on the stage, but instead, the guide on the side.” And I think that when we are being guides and asking open-ended questions of our students, we’re sort of coaching them along, and we’re mentoring them to think differently about topics and think more critically about a topic at hand. So I just wanted to say that to those online instructors, consider asking these types of questions at every opportunity that presents itself.

Dr. Bethanie Hansen: Craig, thanks so much. That is fantastic advice, and what I really love about everything you’ve shared with our listeners today is that you’ve placed the instructor in a clear spot of forging relationships, building that academic environment, and really focusing there, instead of what we might call the checkbox behaviors of teaching online, when we’re just thinking about what must we do, what should we do? That’s really beautiful, and a place I think we want to encourage everybody to be.

Craig, thank you so much for being our speaker today, our special guest, as we kick off this second year of the Online Teaching Lounge podcast. Any closing thoughts before we wrap things up today?

Dr. Craig Bogar: Well Bethanie, thank you for inviting me. I’ve really enjoyed being here and speaking with you, and I hope the things that I spoke about are going to be helpful to any of our folks online, and this type of podcast I think is extremely valuable for people who are teaching in the online environment. Thank you again, Bethanie, and best of luck with your podcast as you continue your role here.

Dr. Bethanie Hansen: Thank you again, Craig, and to all of you who are listening today, we wish you all the best in your online teaching this coming week. 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.