Student Engagement in a Virtual Environment

Webster University Teaching Resource Center

Tips for Engagement in a Virtual Session

In the original format of these new classes, instructors have students right in front of them, in a traditional classroom, for the "class time" together.  As we are currently experiencing the COVID-19 crisis in Spring and Summer of 2020, the courses will all be completely remote. Still partly synchronous, partly asynchronous.

Therefore, we offer some tips for Sustaining Engagement when hosting a virtual teaching session, From our friends at the Teaching Center at Washington University:

  • Set community guidelines for active participationcommunity
    Take the time to discuss with your students what appropriate participation looks like in these sessions. As a group, come up with a list of expectations (group norms) for participation in virtual meetings. Develop protocols for contributions.
  • Get students thinking
    Pose a problem, challenge, or provide a short narrative story to get students interested. Ask students to react, respond, brainstorm, do something activity with the content that you’ve provided.“Prime the pump” with this sort of activity at the beginning of class.
  • Provide Variety
    Attentions spans fail even more quickly in an online environment. The longer you talk without asking students to engage, the more quickly you will lose your students. If you are meeting with your students for an hour, try to have something different planned for every 10-15 minutes in class.
    For example,
    • 10-minute warm up activity using WebEx whiteboard annotation,
    • 15- minute content delivery through a ppt,
    • 8-minute small group discussions/problem solving,
    • 10- minute report out,
    • 5-7-minute wrap up.
  • Use the breakout rooms/group space/chat area to give students the space to discuss and be heard
    For example, ask students to think on their own, discuss in a pair, and be ready to share out (just like you might in a regular class). If you are using a version of breakout rooms (outside of WebEx) the WebEx Chat feature, or sending students back into WorldClassRoom, be sure to give students:engagement
    1) a concrete set of directions
    2) a set amount of time to work and
    3) some kind of product related to their small group work that they’ll need to be able to show/talk about as a demonstration of the work they’ve accomplished in that group.
    For example: “In groups of 3, you will look at our reading and select a passage that supports “x” idea. Once you’ve got a passage picked out, hone in on particular words or phrases that are central to this passage and that will be important when we discuss it in the large group. You’ll have 8 minutes to talk in your small groups and I’ll ask each group to report out what they’ve found. Make sure to choose someone from your small group who will report to the class.”
  • Use the whiteboard function
    The whiteboard can be used for anonymous collaboration, brainstorming, group annotation, discussion record keeping, or problem-solving. It’s a flexible, fun tool that can be used in a myriad of ways to increase student engagement.
  • Pose good questions
    Aim for questions that rely on student recall, but that also move beyond recall towards more complex mental processing like synthesis, evaluation, or analysis. Ask open ended questions that have multiple answers, or multiple ways of approaching.
  • Try some polling
    Ask students to raise hands (low-tech in a high-tech world!), use the polling function in WebEx, have students anonymously type into the whiteboard, or (if you’ve already been using it before the switch to online) engage students with PollEverywhere (Links to an external site.) questions.
  • Provide thinking and or reflection time
    thinkingSome students may need the space to think for a minute or two on their own before they are ready to share. This can feel like an eternity in an online space. Actively give students a chance to think and encourage them to write down ideas before you start calling on people during discussion.
  • Keep students on track
    Have a plan for how you’ll keep students on track and focused during small group work. Check in with them when possible.

Tips for dealing with Possible Issues

From our friends at WashU, here are a few strategies for dealing with potential issues in the synchronous environment:

The majority of students are content to let a few talkative students speak up and dictate discussion.

  • Extend the wait time until you see at least 3 hands go up, call on someone who you’ve not heard from yet.
  • Suggest to students that you’d love to hear from someone who you haven’t heard from yet today
  • Mix up the discussion format to break up the pattern (e.g. small groups with a report out). Assign a “reporter” for each group based on some benign characteristic (e.g. who’s had the most recent birthday).
  • Ask students to "sign up" in the chat to speak

Students are inattentive, focused on their phones or they claim to be “multitasking.”

  • Help students understand why it is that discussion is valuable, what you want them to learn from it and provide information about multi-tasking really means task switching
  • Incentivize discussion by attaching a participation grade. 
  • Incentivize active listening and quality of contribution (e.g. At the end of class have everyone write down one great contribution that was made by someone else.
  • Ask students for specific deliverables in small group work: Answer these questions on this handout and be ready to turn it in. Remind groups every so often that they’ll need to be ready to share their work.
  • Plan a 5 minute “check your phones” break for the middle of class. Tell students that this break is coming and ask them for their attention until that break.

The class size is too big for everyone to talk with frequency.

  • Acknowledge that the class is large and that some people might be feeling less comfortable contributing than they would in smaller classes.
  • Ask students to do think-pair-share work.
  • Assign small groups of 4-5 that are kept the same throughout the semester to help foster a classroom climate that can feel more collaborative and friendly.
  • Break the class up into “large small groups” of 8-10 and incorporate the use of WorldClassRoom tools to discuss something (a task or questions complex enough to need a bunch of suggestions) and have a “deliverable” that will be shared with the whole group. Be prepared to share that deliverable in your synchronous session.

It’s a really quiet class of students. No one wants to talk in large group.

  • Begin by offering students low-stakes opportunities to speak up (e.g. summarize what we talked about last class)
  • Start with an in-class writing prompt (e.g. what is one key idea from the reading today?) and then move to discussion.
  • Try starting class with anonymous polling (e.g. Poll Everywhere) where students can text in an answer or a question that will appear on the screen.