Transitioning from a classroom to an online video conference is and has been challenging for everyone involved – we teachers have had and continue to make extra efforts to engage students effectively, and students in turn have had and are expected to continue having to make an extra effort to stay engaged in spite of difficulties and distractions at home. Therefore, we need to consider more carefully how to increase student engagement during online schooling and how to make online schooling the best experience possible for all students.

There are some challenges we inevitably face when teaching online. We often take for granted a lot of the small interactions that happens throughout our teaching like checking that our students have understood concepts or instructions, setting up tasks, conducting the tasks, pair work and group work monitoring.  Through our interaction with the students or their interaction together we’re able to monitor the level of engagement. That’s a harder to do online, not impossible.

In order to help keep students engaged through the challenges of distance learning, and to avoid exacerbating the previously existing gaps in learning opportunities born of systemic inequities, we need to incorporate three learning mindsets: sense of belonging, purpose and relevance, and growth mindset. If we want to design for intrinsic motivation, this is where we need to start. Some of these learning mindsets may sound like a self-help guru best-seller or you may be familiar with them. Truth is they are often misunderstood and misapplied.

Make students feel heard:Include activities, topics, and examples that students can relate to so they feel it’s fine to be themselves in class each day.

For example, encourage students to speak from their own perspective; co-create class rules and norms with your students and post them on the first page of each unit on your learning management system (LMS), and revisit and renew the norms periodically.

Reduce barriers to connecting online: Let students know that there is an easy way to communicate with you outside of class—you can manage expectations by telling them how quickly you’ll respond—and that they are welcome to do so.

For example, you can set up one-on-one phone or video calls with each child on a rotating basis, or offer them the possibility to text or call you directly.

Remind yourself that social time is as important as academic time: Use some of your time for social connection. For example, begin your class time with a social ritual: try a short “mental stretch” break; offer some monitored hangout time before class starts; or create small groups that meet socially asynchronously.

Work hard to articulate purpose: Sometimes we may underestimate the importance of purpose and relevance in building motivation. Deliberately and regularly state the purpose of assignments and activities. Use online surveys to find out about student interests. Ask students about their interests and passions, and design activities that target things that your students genuinely find personally relevant. It’s not always necessary to make the activities academic. We can cut down some of the traditional content in order to forge deep connections.

Build connections to real life: Research suggests that students’ motivation is improved when they take the time to link their learning to their existing interests or to the world around them.

Give students choice: Adding well-chosen, constrained elements of choice in topic or medium are great options to help boost motivation during distance learning. But be careful. Too much choice may create decision fatigue. Example activities: Choose from a selection of four essay prompts; select a renowned leader that meets a set of criteria to study for your project; produce your work in the form of a podcast, a book, a short video, an art installation, etc.

Explain how learning works:Begin by talking to your students. Tell them that studying is hard, but it gets easier over time when you begin to use effective study strategies.

Give them effective study strategies like articulating key concepts in their own words, active retrieval, and spaced practice over rereading and highlighting. Build in time to let them practice and refine those strategies. During distance learning it is especially important to be deliberate about this because students are learning and working on their own more often and need strategies for self-regulation.

Help them get unstuck: Be concrete with students about the fact that they will periodically get stuck, so they’ll need tactics to overcome this situation. Create a class climate where kids feel comfortable asking peers for help. Consider setting up small study groups to facilitate better communication. Give your students easy ways to contact you during work hours when they’re stuck. Create a useful, easily accessed list of class resources in your LMS.

Use tech to create a low-stakes environment: Create quizzes or use tech tools like Pear Deck, Quizlet Live, and Poll Everywhere to support formative assessments. Reposition these “quizzes” as part of continuous learning, and help students see them as useful tools to get a sense of where they are, how well their study strategies are working, and what they need to do next. Build time for getting things wrong and learning from those mistakes into every class.

Alter your grading systems and structures: Even if summative assessments are beyond your control, consider adjusting your mid-unit grading by awarding points and grades based on student work related to continuous improvement. This not only helps the struggling learners, but also pushes the top achievers to show that they are putting in the effort needed to demonstrate clear improvement in their skill levels.

Be constantly ready to adjust your teaching: Because it’s hard to “read the room” and determine what your students know in a virtual classroom, use your formative assessments to continually adjust your own teaching.

Create a digital record of competence: Motivation can be boosted when students notice their growing competence. Create short activities to promote this, for example, bring back a piece of older work and do a then-and-now comparison, or create a simple online portfolio that can be regularly updated and revisited. Be sure that students link their competence to hard work and the right strategies.

Now let’s have a look at some tips and ideas. I’d say my top tip is explain demonstrate and check and only after that are your students ready to do the activity. So, you need to give your instructions verbally and also display them on the screen. Sometimes a student who has hearing difficulties would also need a visual support, sometimes there’s a technical problem and the student might be able to hear you even if they temporarily cannot see the slides.  If possible, demonstrate the activity so they have a better idea of how to do it and you don’t waste the activity time.  Then check students have understood. Now they’re ready to go!

One of the challenges of distance learning is that you can no longer tackle misconceptions collectively. Therefore, simplicity is key. It is critical to design distance learning experiences that have very clear instructions and use only one or two resources. It’s also best, when possible, to provide resources like readings as PDFs that students can always access.

Use your chatbox for brainstorming or for ‘races’ for students to type an answer or an idea. We can have our students write the instructions for a task in the chatbox, so we know they’ve understood what we’ve asked them to do. We can use it to provide feedback as students are speaking (thereby not interrupting them) and we can decide if that feedback goes to individual students or to the class as a whole (private / public messaging). We can get our students sending us ideas privately, read them out and have the rest of the class guess who said what, and why. We can even download everything that is written in the chatbox and provide it to our students with a task or revisit it in further lessons.

Use breakout rooms (thank you, Harry Waters!)

You can put pairs or small groups of students in different virtual rooms – thereby allowing for pairwork and groupwork. You can pop in and out of rooms to monitor. You can use them for discussion speaking tasks when students come to an agreement, for situational dialogues, for students to do some group research online, before coming back together and presenting what they found. and very importantly, they contribute to keeping up relationships. Here is an example from my colleague, Harry Waters, in which groups of students need to go away and research key information on a music artist in breakout rooms, then post their findings on a padlet.

Use collaborative tools like padlets or Jamboard. Padlets can be used for brainstorming, sharing links, pictures, videos, audios, projects in general and more. Here is an example of students recording their voices in answer to the question ‘Who uses technology the most in your family?’ Their task was to listen to their classmates’ responses and find a similarity they shared with someone.

Use Zoom whiteboard.Make sure students are getting plenty of protagonism by using the drawing tools on your platform. Divide the zoom whiteboard into squares, one for each student. This is an example by a colleague Michael Brand.  He’s revising vocabulary on technology. He told the students there’s a technological gadget which can be found in the picture (in this case ‘selfie stick’) and it’s a race between the students to circle that item. Zoom allows you to see who is annotating (you can turn this function on and off), so everyone can see who got there first (in this case student 5).

To round up, here are some simple, straightforward ways to ensure that online learning gets better.

1.  Build a personal connection with your students.

Instead of simply introducing yourself, consider conducting a student survey.  Then share the results with your students, while inserting your own responses to the questions. 

An anonymous survey can provide many insights into your students’ current circumstances, their assessment of how the previous academic year or semester went.  It can also help you understand students’ motivation, their expectations for the new semester, their special areas of interest, and the kind of support they’d find helpful.

2.  Motivate your students.

Motivation is a key to effective learning, and perhaps the single most important contributor to motivation is the course’s perceived relevance. Help your students understand how the course will help them acquire particular skills or how it will address issues that the students may particularly interesting.

3.  Help students maintain focus.

A major contributor to student failure in online classes is an inability to focus. Without the structure of a traditional school day, many students find it difficult to concentrate, prioritize, organize their time, and stay on track.  Thus, it’s essential to provide them with the structure that they need.

Make sure each class session is purposeful. Share the learning intentions and success criteria for the unit or lessons you’re going to cover and your expectations for them, remind learners of activities, assignments, assessments, and due dates, organize each class around shorter sequences and activities (polls, breakout sessions, questions), interrupt the class frequently to pose or solicit questions. 

4.  Create a sense of community

Help students get to know one another.  Split a large class into smaller units. Within the smaller breakout groups, have the students participate in icebreaker activities.  The breakout sessions also provide opportunities for students to share their opinions, knowledge, and experience.

Be available before and after synchronous class sessions.  Students are far more likely to reach out to you if you are easy to reach.  Stay online after a “live” session ends.  Solicit questions and comments and other forms of feedback.

5.  Make discussions meaningful.

Make sure that discussions genuinely contribute to students’ learning. You can do brainstorming sessions, where students present a variety of ways of approaching a topic or a problem; comprehension exercises, where students help one another understand a complex topic;  critiques, where students challenge a particular argument or interpretation; and sharing activities, where students reveal their own experiences or perceptions.

6.  Increase student engagement.

During individual sessions, check on student comprehension; conduct polls; and pose questions.  Give students opportunities to actively participate during the class session, for example, by asking them to pose a question in the chat or respond to a question.

Provide active learning opportunities.  Have students research the answer to a question; have them analyze a case study; ask them to analyze a text, a document, a video clip.

Set up projects.  Students might contribute to a class blog, create a podcast, a video story, or a poster or infographic, produce a policy brief, research and respond to a controversy, or conduct a study of something in their immediate neighbourhood.

7.  Address equity issues.

Not all students have equal access to technology or to reliable, high speed Internet connections or to a distraction-free study space.  Be mindful of the challenges students face, recognizing that students may vary significantly in their comfort level with online learning. 

Be flexible about how students participate in the class, for example, include both asynchronous and synchronous learning opportunities.  Allow students to access course resources in multiple ways — allowing them to download PowerPoint presentations or view videos at a time of their convenience or take quizzes on their mobile phones. If possible, include more authentic and project-based assessments.

8.  Identify and support struggling students.

During the current crisis, our students are struggling in many ways.  Some need academic support, others, technology assistance.  Others need help in balancing their responsibilities and priorities.

What can you do?  You can monitor their engagement.  Conduct regular check-ins and checkups.  You can reach out proactively or send alerts whenever there are signs that a student is falling behind. 

Empathy has rarely been as important.  Encourage your students.  Provide them with scaffolding: rubrics, check lists, sample responses to test questions, background information, glossaries. Offer some flexibility on deadlines and opportunities to re-do assignments.  And provide prompt feedback.

Useful resources

Cambridge Assessment English blog: https://www.cambridgeenglish.org/blog/12-tips-for-teaching-an-online-english-class/

Laura Rogers’ article: https://www.cambridge.org/us/education/blog/2020/10/05/online-teaching-and-learning-and-how-we-can-adapt/

CUP Education – Ceri Jones’ webinar: https://youtu.be/KoZU8NXl0bA 

Harry Waters https://www.linkedin.com/in/harry-waters-5750ab139/?originalSubdomain=es