Virtual teamwork

When the Covid-19 pandemic swept in last spring, most teachers in the world from kindergarten through graduate school found themselves teaching online classes, whether they wanted to or not. You may be one of them. Relatively few had done it before, and even fewer had ever received formal instruction on how to do it. Out of necessity they learned from experience, but many troublesome issues remain for many of them. One of the most common goes something like “I always had major problems getting my students actively engaged in my face-to-face classes. It seems pretty much impossible to do it online.”

You stand on solid ground if one of your goals is to get your online students actively engaged in their learning, because a ton of research has shown that engagement promotes almost every conceivable learning outcome other than rote memorization. This post summarizes an article in the December 2020 issue of Advances in Engineering Education (https://tinyurl.com/ALonline-AEE) that surveys techniques to establish online active student engagement. The emphasis in the article is on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education, but most of the conclusions are generalizable to other fields.

You could transfer many of the activities described in the article directly from a traditional face-to-face (F2F) course to any online course. Activities that would be done in F2F courses as out-of-class assignments and projects would be done asynchronously online, and in-class F2F activities (traditional active learning) can be carried out synchronously online using tools in Zoom, Google Meet, Webex, or an equivalent program. For example, if you invite students in a synchronous class session to ask you a question or to answer one you ask, you may have them raise hands physically in a small class or with a raise hands tool in any class and call on them, or submit their questions and answers in a chat window, or vote yes or thumbs up if you are simply seeking their level of agreement with something, or vote for one or more of several multiple-choice options in a poll. For a synchronous problem-solving or document generation or other extended activity, (a) tell the students what you want them to do, whether they will be working individually or in groups, and how long you will give them to do it; (b) for individual activities, tell the students to start working, and for group activities, have the program sort them into groups of any size you designate and send them to virtual breakout rooms; (c) when the allotted time has elapsed, stop the activity, call on individuals or groups to report on what they came up with, and provide affirming or corrective feedback on their responses.

Meta-analyses of the effectiveness of active student engagement strategies show that even if a strategy works well on average, how well it works may vary dramatically from one implementation to another, and sometimes the strategy may even be counterproductive. For example, if you assign online group projects in your class without providing guidance on how to deal with common problems like interpersonal conflicts and irresponsible or dominant team members, many students might have been better off working individually. In other words, how well you carry out active engagement strategies may be more important than which strategies you choose. The following general recommendations are proposed in the concluding section of the article:

• Establish teaching presence (students’ sense that their online instructors are real people who are personally involved in their instruction) and social presence (students’ sense of being with real classmates in a virtual environment) early in an online course and maintain them throughout the course. Research shows that both presences correlate positively with online students’ motivation to learn, academic performance, persistence to course completion, satisfaction with online courses and instructors, and intention to enroll in future online courses. Implementing only a few of the measures to establish them suggested in the article can be sufficient to realize those benefits.

• Make your expectations clear to the students. A common complaint of students in online courses is their difficulty understanding exactly what their instructors want them to do, especially if the students are new to online instruction or if the assignments and exams require skills unfamiliar to many of them. In F2F classes, they can easily get clarifications directly from the instructors and from one another, while doing so online is much less straightforward. You can make your expectations clear by (for example) writing clear learning objectives and sharing them with the students, interspersing online presentations (lecture clips, videos, slide shows, screencasts, etc.) with low-stakes online quizzes that provide immediate feedback, and conducting and debriefing synchronous small-group activities.

• Take a gradual approach to adopting new engagement strategies. The article presents a broad range of strategies for actively engaging students online, and the total number of strategies would be enormous if all their variations were listed. The idea is not to adopt every conceivable engagement strategy starting next Monday, which could overwhelm both your students and you. Instead, select one or two strategies that look reasonable and try them. Don’t just try them once—especially if the strategies are unfamiliar to you or likely to be unfamiliar to many students—but do them enough for both you and the students to get accustomed to them. If a strategy seems to be working well, keep using it; if it doesn’t, have someone knowledgeable check how you are implementing it, try their suggestions, and if doing so fails to help, stop using it. Next course you teach, try another one or two strategies. It should not take more than two or three course offerings for you to reach a level and quality of student engagement that meets your expectations.

P.S. Some of you are struggling to plan for socially distanced face-to-face, synchronous, and asynchronous classes in every possible combination. Derek Bruff, director of Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching, has put together a blog post with lots of concrete ideas for getting students engaged in that challenging environment. Click here to read it.

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