Engagement Strategies
Good instructors identify measurable learning outcomes for their students, communicate their expectations, and regularly interact with students to monitor, support, and provide feedback on their learning progress. These practices are effective and essential, whether you are teaching in a face-to-face classroom, in a fully online course, or in a hybrid learning environment. Learn more about these approaches by selecting one of the categories below.
Active Learning
In the framework of Backward Design, learning activities include any type of activity that students undertake to work with the concepts and skills that lead to reaching the desired learning outcomes. In an online or hybrid class, the focus is on providing opportunities for students to interact with each other, with the instructor and with the course content. Read more about how interaction supports active learning in online and hybrid courses.
Actively Engaging Students in Asynchronous Online Classes (Riggs and Linder, 2016)
This excellent IDEA paper provides details on creating “a three-pronged approach for conceptualizing active learning in the online asynchronous class:
- the creation of an architecture of engagement in the online classroom,
- the use of web-based tools in addition to the learning management system, and a
- re-imagining of discussion boards as interactive spaces.”
If you are looking for ways to infuse active learning pedagogies into an online asynchronous course, including innovative approaches to student reflection, this is a must-read.
From Passive Viewing to Active Learning: Simple Techniques for Applying Active Learning Strategies to Online Course Videos (Moore, 2013)
Discover active learning methods that can help increase the educational effectiveness of an online course video. Faculty can implement these methods using Canvas Studio.
Synchronous Online Classes: 10 Tips for Engaging Students (Norman, 2017)
From Faculty Focus, learn “concrete steps you can take to run class sessions that are energetic, interactive, and productive.”
(AND from under “Hybrid Teaching & Learning”) For years, universities have been mixing face-to-face and online delivery modalities as a way to harness the benefits of instructional technology, maximize the use of campus resources, and maintain high levels of student-instructor and student-student engagement.
Online synchronous teaching using tools such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams can feel more like a regular in-person class since you’re communicating with learners in real-time and have the ability to hear and even see your students.
Online Asynchronous Discussions
- New Article from Educause: Engaging Students Through Asynchronous Video-Based Discussions in Online Courses. Learn ways to promote interaction with tools such as VoiceThread and Flipgrid. Using the comments feature in Canvas Studio is also a great option for asynchronous engagement.
- Develop an interesting question or prompt. With the right question, online discussions can be “ideal for exploring complex ideas and entertaining multiple perspectives” (Stavredes, p.138). Remember to avoid questions with one or few answers and little room for interpretation. Questions can be written at various levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy (adapted from Stavredes, p. 134).
- The strategies below can help you design and manage engaging asynchronous discussions that promote student learning in your online course. Note: students do not respond well to discussion boards they perceive as busy work or “fillers” and this will be reflected in the quality (or lack thereof) of students’ posts. Focus on having a few engaging and worthwhile asynchronous discussions, rather than numerous forums that are of limited value.
- Use a grading rubric. Rubrics can be used for various types of assignments in Canvas and are a great way to communicate your expectations to students regarding their participation in discussions. Create a rubric in Canvas, add the rubric to a graded discussion and use the rubric to grade submissions in Speed Grader. Need a rubric example? Check out UCF’s discussion rubrics page.
Bloom’s Taxonomy Example
| Level of Thinking | Verbs to use in stems for Discussion Questions |
| Apply | Carry out, demonstrate, execute, implement, operate, apply |
| Analyze | Compare, contrast, differentiate, outline, distinguish, classify/categorize, distinguish the parts, combine parts in a whole… |
| Evaluate | Critique, check, appraise, argue, defend, judge worth/value, provide a rationale for |
| Create | Synthesize to plan, design, build, compose, invent, predict, etc. |
Interactions
You can promote student success by keeping students actively engaged with you, the content, and with each other, by prompting them to observe, do, communicate, and reflect. These types of interaction are at the center of the teaching and learning process. When moved online these interactions change. However, slight adjustments to your teaching and learning strategies can enable you to leverage the positive changes and avoid potential negative effects. As you re-think your approach for online instruction, consider and plan for five types of interaction:
Interaction between students can include formal course-related collaboration and interaction as well as more informal social interaction, which can increase students’ comfort with each other and with the online environment. Student↔student interaction-based activities include but are not limited to:
- group projects
- group case studies
- peer instruction
- role playing
- synchronous or asynchronous discussions or debates
- collaborative brainstorming
- peer review of selected work
For more on using Canvas tools to manage peer review, see the Peer Review section of the Instructor Guide.
Any of these examples can be used on a large or a small scale ranging from semester-long project groups doing research and presenting results to an optional live meeting where those present discuss a short video case or a discussion forum where they brainstorm alternatives to a textbook problem.
Depending on the size of your class, you can encourage student↔student interaction class-wide or in smaller groups or pairs. When working with smaller groups, it helps to emphasize individual accountability, positive interdependence, and positive interaction in grading the group’s work (Kirschner, Strijbos, Kreijns, & Beers, 2004). This strategy leads to three grades on a group project emphasizing the three aspects of group work:
- individual contribution to the group project
- synthesis of the individual parts into a project that shows collaboration, consensus, and learning
- working together to encourage and facilitate each other’s efforts to complete the project
For more on using Canvas to manage your student groups, please see the Group section of the Canvas Instructor Guide.
These interactions also include student-initiated interactions. When you plan for student/instructor interaction, be sure to consider the U.S. DOE requirement that online courses include “regular and substantive interaction” (RSI). Fulfilling the RSI requirement determines whether your course qualifies as one for which students can use Title IV funds. A few examples of student↔instructor interaction include:
- providing ongoing feedback on assignments, learning journals, group work, and other projects
- participating in discussion forums or chats
- synchronous lecture and discussion
- posting regular Announcements on the course site to summarize the previous week, describe what’s coming up in the next week, and share important information relevant to all students in the class
- being available via Zoom office hours throughout the semester
- mentoring individual learners
- working with small groups of students assigned to help teach portions of the course (peer teaching)
Reflective exercises prompt an internal dialogue for students that promotes retention, supports content application, and amplifies the relevance of the content to students’ personal goals (Lee & Paulus, 2001). You can also encourage students to consider what is working and not working in their own learning process through reflective work that fosters the development of metacognition, self-regulation, self-direction, and life-long learning skills. You can support student-to-self, reflective processes through these and other strategies:
- Provide focus questions for course readings that prompt students to consider how to apply the content to personal situations, projects, and goals.
- Require students to explore web resources to build a personal knowledge network for the future.
- Incorporate self-assessment surveys to make students aware of competencies expected in the field they will enter, encouraging them to use the results to identify a professional development plan.
- Use ipsative assessments to help students monitor, track, and direct their own learning by comparing learning results to their own previous performance and identifying areas for improvement.
Student↔content interaction includes students’ concrete interactions with the course materials and their more abstract interactions with the concepts and ideas they present. It is more than just reading a book or watching a video. It includes but is not limited to:
- tutorials (using text, still images, audio, and/ or video)
- quizzes (if the feedback is useful and usable)
- web quests or online scavenger hunts
- reading/video discussion or reflections
(Reading a textbook is technically a student↔content activity but explicitly requiring students to reflect on the reading and providing directed prompts for that reflection improves the interaction.) - simulations
It’s helpful to think through the balance of interaction over the entire course. Particularly, providing activities that offer a range of student-student interactions (from substantial to moderate to light to none) allows students with different preferences for the amount of peer interaction to be comfortable at some points and challenged to expand their comfort zone at others.
Not all students are familiar with online learning environments or the specific technology tools used in UT courses. Providing students with an orientation to your course site and the tools they will use is therefore foundational for student success. Your course may also involve other contexts for which students require an orientation, such as a physical lab or outdoor space. You can familiarize students with your Canvas course site, course tools, and other contexts in many ways, including:
- Provide an introductory module in your course that describes the course organization, layout, and assignments.
- Post a course introduction video that provides a virtual “tour” of your course site.
- Provide a LinkedIn Learning list of tutorials for software or other resources to be used during your course.
- Provide a virtual tour or post photos and descriptions of physical sites with which students should be familiar.
- Require students to take a quiz over key elements in your syllabus.
- Provide guidelines and expectations for netiquette, group work, and other collaborative work.