Conveying Care Online

This article was originally published on the California Acceleration Project (CAP) blog.

One of the most significant factors correlated with student persistence, success, and learning in online courses is the relationship between the instructor and students (CCCCO Distance Education Report). An instructor’s empathy, care, and compassion distinguish the quality of those relationships.

This four-part blog series focuses on humanizing online teaching and learning. Michelle Pacansky-Brock defines humanizing as “a student-centered mindset that involves recognizing and supporting the non-cognitive components of learning. In a humanized course, faculty intentionally cultivate an inclusive learning environment that fosters psychological safety and trust and forms connections that grow into relationships and a community.” My first article was about humanizing your online course with Flipgrid. The second article was titled “Beyond Discussion Forums: Asynchronous Student-Student Interaction Online”, and the third was ”Beyond Lectures: Synchronous Student-to-Student Interaction”. The other side of the humanizing coin is a warm instructor presence that imparts empathy and awareness. In a recent article, “Humanizing Online Teaching to Equitize Higher Education,” Michelle Pacansky-Brock, Michael Smedshammer, and Kim Vincent-Layton highlight, “Instructor-student relationships lie at the heart of humanizing, serving as the connective tissue between students, engagement, and rigor.”

Humanizing And Equity

For minoritized students, having an authentically caring instructor-student relationship is foundational to their learning and success. Dr. Luke Wood, in his 2018 Online Teaching Conference keynote entitled “Reaching Underserved Students through Culturally Responsive Teaching and Learning in the Online Environment,” emphasizes the equity-minded practices of being “relational” by forming relationships with your students and being “intrusive” by reaching out when they need our support. Zaretta Hammond, author of the book Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, encourages us to be a “warm demander” by explicitly focusing on building rapport and trust while still holding high expectations of our students. In Fabiola Torres’s “Practicing Radical Love: Breaking Down Instructor-Student Hierarchies” presentation for the @ONE Humanizing Challenge, she illuminates students’ needs for “care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust.” Meeting these needs is even more essential for underserved, marginalized students.

A Warm Welcome Package

Your opportunities to greet students at the “door” and make a positive first impression are in your welcome email before the course begins, in your welcome video, and in your syllabus. Your warm, caring, and inviting language and tone are vital here, along with your facial expressions and emotion conveyed in your welcome video. Flower Darby, author of Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes, illustrates at her 2019 Online Teaching Conference keynote “Answering the Call: New Motivation for Online Teaching Excellence” that students feel from the start, “I don’t care how much you know until I know how much you care.” Establishing trust from the beginning is paramount.

Welcome Video

Short videos are a powerful way to make personal connections with your students. Imperfect is perfect, and there’s no need to go beyond the first take. Students just need to see and hear from you. In a two to five-minute humanized welcome video, you should introduce yourself personally, share your enthusiasm for teaching the course, and explain how to be successful in it. It’s a salient technique for initiating a personal connection with your students and making them feel welcome in the course. Below are two examples of my welcome videos where I instill a culture of care and personal warmth.

The @ONE Humanizing Challenge offers four options for creating videos depending on your comfort level and preference, including the Clips app, Zoom, Adobe Spark Video, and Screencast-O-Matic. After recording and captioning your welcome video, I invite you to share it with the CAP community and comment with feedback on each other’s videos.

For more wonderful video production ideas, I recommend Karen Costa’s recently-published book, 99 Tips for Creating Simple and Sustainable Educational Videos: A Guide for Online Teachers and Flipped Classes. If you’re feeling anxious about creating videos, view this two-minute “Maritez’s Video Production Journey” video. 

Syllabus and Course Policies

While your contact information and quick response times are fundamental to your syllabus, even more so is the language itself. In the Center for Urban Education’s webinar “How to Express Care with a Focus on Racial Equity,” Dr. Frank Harris III delineates that the language of the syllabus sets the tone and establishes the relationship between the instructor and students. I encourage you to reevaluate your syllabus and course policies through an equity lens. Do you communicate with a warm, welcoming tone? Does your late work policy give grace to students? Deliver student-centered messages of “I’m here to support you” and “I care about you and your success.” Instead of using rigid and punitive language, aim for caring and compassionate language. For instance:

Before After
No late work accepted! NO EXCEPTIONS!!!I understand that life happens sometimes, so I offer a 24-hour grace period on all assignments, no questions asked. If you are unable to meet a deadline, contact me, and let’s work together to create a plan for your success.
Failure to submit the first week’s assignments will result in a student being immediately dropped from the course and replaced by a student on the waitlist.Tip for success: To count as your attendance during the first week and to avoid being dropped, be sure to log into the course and complete the assignments in the orientation module. I will check in on you if you forget to participate.

Student Surveys and Canvas “Notes”

We can easily identify early on which students may need more of our attention and support by administering a quick student survey during the first week. Surveys can be created using Canvas QuizzesGoogle Forms, or other survey tools. I ask my students questions to gauge their feelings about the class and anticipate their needs, for example, “How are you feeling about this online course?” and “What is one thing that can get in the way of your success in this course, and how can I support you?” See Michelle Pacansky-Brock’s sample student information survey for more excellent questions.

When I review their first-week survey results, I implement the Canvas “Notes” column in the Gradebook to enter details about individual students. Before sending them a message, I check my Notes so I can communicate care into the conversation. For instance, if I note that a student is working a full-time job, has a toddler, and had surgery, I might ask how work is going, how their child is doing, or how their recovery is coming along in my message. I also note the pronunciation of student names and their nicknames for when I have a synchronous meeting with them and when sending them messages.

In addition to administering a student information survey at the start, solicit your students’ anonymous feedback on surveys during and at the end of the semester to improve their experience of the class. You might consider asking them what they enjoy about your class, what suggested changes they would like to see in your course, and then immediately apply their feedback as your course continues.

Maintaining Your Presence

Weekly Video Announcements

Instructor presence can be applied weekly through quick video announcements that express your personal warmth. You might consider including: 

A student wrote on my anonymous post-course survey, “I will miss her awesome greetings through her Monday morning video announcements!” 

Here are two examples of my weekly video announcements:

Feedback/Feedforward 

An online instructor’s human presence is also maintained throughout the semester by giving students rich, timely feedback on their work. Engaging in dialogue with students about their progress is critical to the learning process. In the Center for Urban Education’s webinar “Being Aware of Learning Constraints and Opportunities Posed by Online Teaching,” Sim Barhoum demonstrates the “feedforward” approach that focuses on a future they can change, not a past they can’t, for example: “I like that you did x. In the future, can you try y?” and “Can you explain this in a different way?” To save time and to better express your emotion, you might even consider giving students audio or video feedback while in the Canvas SpeedGrader. 

Individualized Support

Canvas “Message Students Who”

Another effective humanizing and equity-minded strategy of online instructors is having a keen awareness of their students, paying special attention to when students need support. The Public Policy Institute of California study reveals that the most successful online instructors monitor student engagement and seek out students who seem to be disengaged or struggling. The Canvas Gradebook makes it easier for us to send messages to students who we want to check in with using the “Message Students Who” feature. Once a deadline for a major assignment has passed in my course, I use this feature to nudge students who did not submit it. It can also be used to praise students who are excelling or to provide just-in-time remediation, one of the CAP principles

Canvas interface showing how to "message students who"

Instead of writing to a student, “You’re missing assignments,” I use the language of care and empathy such as, “I’m checking in. Is everything okay?” Most of the time, I discover that things are not okay and work with the student to get them back on the path to success. At the close of a semester, a Latinx student who was working full-time sent me a letter of appreciation expressing, “I was going through a hard situation a couple weeks before the semester ended and I was thinking of dropping the class and giving up on everything, but thanks to you I decided to keep it. If it hadn't been for the text message you sent me that day and the support you kept giving me, I would have dropped the class and I would have lost my financial aid and other benefits. In other words, you were my hero.”

Personalized Synchronous Meetings

Strong instructor-student relationships are better fostered over synchronous sessions when they are in a more personal one-on-one or small-group format. I encourage you to consider holding scheduled conferences or study sessions with students during your office hours where you could review how a student performed on an assessment, give individualized feedback on a draft, or hold a small group review session before an exam. My schedule always fills up with students signing up for an appointment slot. I even award my students extra credit for attending to reverse the psychology and stigma associated with needing help from the teacher. For ease of schedule management, you could use Calendly, a shared Google Doc, or the Canvas Calendar. Below is an example of how I begin a typical writing conference with a student where I prioritize our relationship by first checking on how the student is doing.

Recap

Without a warm, caring instructor's presence, the online classroom can be a lonely place, and many students who feel isolated may end up dropping out. An online instructor’s care has a significant impact on student success and retention, especially for minoritized students. I hope that my ideas have inspired you to think about how you will create a culture of care and implement your warm human presence. To leverage the potential of humanizing and equity-minded pedagogy in the online environment, we must be intentional in our course design and facilitation to be fully present, convey care and personal warmth, establish trust, and build relationships with students. A Black working mother who I interviewed for my Online Student Voices Inquiry Project disclosed, “We can tell which teachers want us to succeed.” Be that teacher.

Beyond Lectures: Synchronous Student-to-Student Interaction

Scrabble pieces spelling the word "zoom."

This article was originally published on the California Acceleration Project (CAP) blog.

Humanizing And Equity 

The theme of this four-part “Notes from the Field” blog series has been humanizing online teaching and learning with an equity-minded lens. Michelle Pacansky-Brock, the highly-acclaimed CVC-OEI Online Teaching and Learning Faculty Mentor, writes, “In humanized online courses, positive instructor-student relationships are prioritized and serve as the connective tissue between students, engagement, and rigor.” 

My blog on “Humanizing Your Online Courses with Flipgrid” kicked off the series by exploring ways to use video to humanize online courses and engage students, followed by my second article, “Student-to-Student Interaction Online (Asynchronous).” This article centers on live student engagement using Zoom. Stay tuned for my last article in the series, which will be an examination of instructor-to-student interaction in “Conveying Care Online.” 

Not Just Lectures 

The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered an unprecedented surge in synchronous online teaching and learning. Synchronous instruction is popular because it provides the opportunity for students to interact with each other and with their instructor in real time, much as they might in an on-campus class. Because it most closely mirrors in-person teaching, many instructors who did not have much (or any) online teaching experience prior to the pandemic have gravitated toward this style of teaching, and most instructors now know how to share their screen and deliver a lecture. 

But Zoom also provides many tools to go beyond lecturing and foster students’ higher order thinking skills, something that is critical to equity-minded teaching. 

“School practices that emphasize lecture and rote memorization are part of what Martin Haberman calls a ‘pedagogy of poverty’ that sets students up...with outdated skills and shallow knowledge,” writes Zaretta Hammond in Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain. “They are able to regurgitate facts and concepts but have difficulty applying this knowledge in new and practical ways. To be able to direct their own lives and define success for themselves, they must be able to think critically and creatively” (14). 

My goal in this blog is to share a sample lesson plan and other tips that promote interaction, engagement, and deeper learning when using Zoom. Following a consistent lesson routine helps students feel more comfortable and open to learning since they can anticipate how the class meetings will progress. 

Many of the following strategies require that you enable these Zoom settings and prepare materials in advance, so plan ahead. 

Getting Started 

Early in the semester, set the tone for interaction by establishing your Zoom culture and norms. Invite your students to co-create a few community agreements for participation and reinforce them throughout the semester. These might include norming expectations for unmuting mics and speaking during class, as well as non-verbal interactions. Carving out the time to do this will pay off in better engagement over the semester. 

Class norms should not include requiring students to turn on their cameras. These requirements counter the humanizing principles of having empathy as well as respecting and trusting students. They also violate legal guidance from the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, which states, “Districts should adopt policies strictly limiting or prohibiting faculty from instituting cameras-on requirements in order to protect against violations of student privacy...and ensure compliance with FERPA, California’s student privacy law, and federal disability laws” (7). 

It can be challenging for instructors to teach a class to black boxes on Zoom, so consider showing students how to use a virtual background and how to add their profile photo to connect names with faces. Instead of mandating cameras on, offer students an invitation like, “I invite you to turn on your video if you can. If not, I understand.” 

Sample Lesson Plan 

Check-Ins 

To encourage community, have everyone check-in at the beginning of your Zoom meetings. This communicates to your students that your class will not be a passive experience similar to watching TV but instead, an engaging learning session requiring their attention and active participation. 

A grid of emojis representing various emotional states with the question at the top, "How do you feel today?"

Check-ins or warm-ups can be as simple as asking students to type a word, number, or emoji in the chat to describe how they are doing today or how they are feeling about an upcoming essay or exam. 

If students are not participating in the check-in, try a more structured and easy way for them to interact. For example, you might consider screensharing emojis or animal faces that are numbered to prompt them to share which image corresponds with their current mood. 

Providing an opportunity for more creative student contributions can also boost participation. For instance, ask students to find and paste a meme or gif into Google Slides or Google Jamboards to describe how they are doing today, such as in Esther Park’s Jamboard check-in template. After students get used to this routine, they tend to come prepared with fun contributions. 

Short Direct Instruction with Interaction 

Direct instruction, a.k.a. “lecture,” is useful if your goal is to teach a new concept or to demonstrate a skill, but keep it short. Studies show that the average attention span for video conferencing is only around 10 minutes. I only “teach” the most challenging or confusing concepts through a short presentation, and I chunk this instruction with student participation every few minutes to keep them focused and check for understanding. 

Here are some tools besides chat that you can use to make direct instruction interactive: 

Zoom interface showing Reactions including applause, thumbs up, heart, laughing face, surprised face, celebration, green check, red x, slow down, go faster, and raise hand.

Student-to-Student Interaction in Breakout Rooms 

After direct instruction, provide an opportunity for students to practice higher order thinking in breakout rooms. Give them a task that warrants group interaction and deeper thinking by requiring them to apply, analyze, evaluate or create using what they learned. If students have a well-defined deliverable, they are more likely to engage and collaborate. For example, the task might require students to add to a Padlet, contribute to shared Google SlidesDocs, or Jamboards, or you could use the annotation tools in Zoom and ask students to collaboratively mark-up texts or solve problems. 

You will need to adjust your Zoom settings for breakout room activities. John Montgomery’s Zoom blog “All You Need to Know About Using Zoom Breakout Rooms” explains your options and will help you think through the nuances of how you want to structure the interaction. Will you pre-assign groups or allow students to self-select into a group? Will the group work be timed? Will students be allowed to rejoin the whole class session at any time?   

For example, before the Zoom meeting I set-up breakout rooms that correspond to skills required on an upcoming essay assignment: thesis, introduction, citations, MLA, and conclusion. I ask students to choose their room based on what they need to work on. On a shared Google Jamboard are links to my class resources on each topic. When in the breakout room, they can access and discuss these resources and add their questions and ideas to Jamboard’s collaborative digital whiteboard using images, sticky notes, text, or drawings. For some fantastic activities and templates using Jamboard, visit Matt Miller’s Google Jamboard resources

When students work in groups, sometimes they may be hesitant to engage in the task or to participate. Here are some strategies that may help: 

Breakout room toolbar showing chat, record, ask for help, reactions, and leave breakout room.

Closure 

After group work in breakout rooms, reconvene the class in the main room to bring closure to the lesson. Depending on the lesson and your goals, this time might be spent sharing and discussing the deliverables they created, assessing learning, or gathering information about your students’ experience that you can use to plan the next lesson. Perhaps more important, when you elicit feedback and use it, students feel that you care about them and their learning, and this is at the heart of humanizing the online classroom and equity-minded teaching. 

Here are some ideas and tools for closing the lesson: 

Socrative interface showing buttons for quiz, space race, exit ticket, multiple choice, true/false, short answer.

Cautionary Notes

Conclusion 

Synchronous online instruction allows valuable class time with our students, and we owe it to them to use this time in the best service of their learning. Zoom contains simple but powerful tools for humanizing online education, developing students' critical thinking and creativity, and fostering community. Fabiola Torres, Glendale Community College Ethnic Studies Professor, explains that “through care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, humanizing online education becomes a practice of radical love.” 

If you're looking to level up your synchronous online teaching skills, register for the 2-week online course offered by CVC/@ONE, Introduction to Live Online Teaching & Learning!

Beyond Discussion Forums: Asynchronous Student-To-Student Interaction Online

Photo by Omar Flores on Unsplash

This article first appeared on the California Acceleration Project blog.

When I asked my students for anonymous feedback at the end of my online course, they responded, “I loved being able to still have interaction with my classmates. I didn’t think I would really get that interaction in an online class so that was definitely a bonus for me,” and “I liked how the professor was able to keep us all connected with each other and made it feel as if we were in an actual classroom even though we were in the comfort of our home.” 

Students taking online courses that are intentionally designed with opportunities for asynchronous student-to-student communication and collaboration reap the rewards of not only the cognitive benefits of sharing ideas with peers, but also the socio-emotional benefits of being a member of a learning community. By cultivating engaging interactions and interconnections among students, we create a quality humanized learning environment where students, especially BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) students, thrive.

Humanizing & Equity

This is the third blog in a series within the theme of humanizing online teaching and learning with an equity-minded lens. Michelle Pacansky-Brock’s transformative work on humanizing delineates how this practice “leverages learning science and culturally responsive teaching to create an inclusive, equitable online class climate for today's diverse students.” View the latest Humanizing Visual Guide on “How and Why to Humanize Your Online Class.” 

Implementing equity-minded and culturally responsive teaching practices to establish trust, make connections, and foster community is critical to serving minoritized students. Geneva Gay offers suggestions for improving the education of marginalized BIPOC students in her book Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice as she illuminates, “Cooperation, community, and connectedness are central features of culturally responsive teaching. Mutual aid, interdependence, and reciprocity as criteria for guiding behavior replace the individualism and competitiveness that are so much a part of conventional classrooms. The goal is for all students to be winners, rather than some winning and others losing” (43-44). Author of the book Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, bell hooks expresses, “As a classroom community, our capacity to generate excitement is deeply affected by our interest in one another, in hearing one another’s voices, in recognizing one another’s presence.” This is true for producing equitable outcomes and completion in the online classroom, as well. Culturally responsive online courses provide BIPOC students with a sense of community and belonging because they are not working in isolation--but in close collaboration with their peers.

In the online classroom, instructors need to be intentional in their course design to not only have a caring instructor presence, but to also provide multiple learning opportunities for students to cultivate trust, build community, and develop relationships with each other. For more on cultivating trust, view the “Sending Cues of Trust Online” session archive from the spring 2021 @ONE Humanizing Challenge Encore with Michelle Pacansky-Brock, Jennifer Ortiz, and me as your guides.

Why Student-To-Student Interaction?

Not only is course design with student interaction an equity-minded and a humanizing practice, but it is also required for compliance with both the California Education Code Title V regulations on Regular Effective Contact (§ 55204. Instructor Contact) and the federal Higher Education Opportunity Act

Research reinforces how vital a sense of belonging, the establishment of relationships, and collaborative group work are to online student learning, retention, and success. The 2017 CCC Chancellor’s Office Distance Education Report highlights, “A sense of belonging to a learning community is an important factor for distance education students” (33) and “students who are comfortable establishing relationships in an online environment tend to persist at higher rates” (52).  A 2015 Public Policy Institute of California report delineates that “a student’s perceived learning is correlated with how much of a sense of social presence is created in an online course. When the course structure allows students to develop strong working groups, they perceive the course to be ‘congenial,’ see themselves as a community, and perform better” (11-12). One of the four factors most directly correlated with California community college student success in online courses is regular effective contact (2015 Public Policy Institute of California).

Furthermore, interaction among students is an important component of the CVC-OEI Online Course Design Rubric (Section B4 and B5 on Interaction: Student-to-Student Contact) and the Peralta Equity Rubric (Section E8: Connection and Belonging).

Not Just Discussion Forums

For years, online courses have depended on whole-class discussion forums to encourage interaction among students. Imagine being a full-time online student whose courses all require you to post and reply to discussion forums week after week. It becomes disengaging as students suffer from discussion forum fatigue. 

My experiences participating in and assigning formal, contrived discussion forums have not been effective at building a strong online classroom community. It’s easy for students to get lost in whole-class discussions because they can be lengthy, clunky, and overwhelming with multiple conversations going on at once. In fact, two students speaking on a panel at the Online Teaching Conference 2019 session on “Online Student Community: What Do Students Need from Us?” shared that they loathe weekly whole-class discussions where they are required to post, reply to two peers, and meet the minimum word count. One student honestly disclosed, “Personally, I hate discussions. Hate them.” She explains the reasons for her aversion are that they are forced, that they are not organic, and that connections don’t form out of them.

I encourage online faculty to consider designing student-to-student interaction activities such as those described below that utilize asynchronous, low-bandwidth methods, which offer online students with unstable internet connections and with work or family responsibilities the flexibility they need to succeed in college. For additional examples by California community college faculty, view the @ONE Student-Student Interactions Guide

Student-To-Student Interaction In Practice

Low-Stakes Collaborative Practice

Low-stakes, formative practice activities are an excellent vehicle for heightening student engagement and retention. These checkpoints of student learning can be conducted online in the spirit of collaboration.

Group Discussions

To better foster community, consider placing your students into small groups to discuss your content instead of assigning whole-class discussions. When you break your class into diverse smaller groups to have more intimate discourse about your course content, there is a boost in meaningful student-to-student interaction. Students experience both a deeper engagement in the content and a greater chance of forming connections by focusing on the replies of 3 to 5 students instead of 30 or 40, especially when the groups are sustained over several weeks. Students in my online classes have expressed their appreciation of the small group discussions over a month as they discuss the book we are reading together in “book clubs.” View the first twenty minutes of this video of my CVC-OEI Can•Innovate presentation on “Group Discussions for Increasing Interaction, Engagement, and Equity” for why I choose group discussions over whole-class discussions and how to set them up on Canvas.

Peer Review  

Canvas inteface of the Peer Review option.

Engaging students in giving one another feedback on their work or work-in-progress is another effective method of strengthening student-to-student interaction. Community is built as students support each other’s success and learning concepts are reinforced while engaging in a collaborative peer review process. Evaluating others’ work is a low-stakes, collaborative practice opportunity to reinforce the learning of your course concepts. I find it helpful to give students questions to respond to that evaluate specific criteria as they conduct their reviews. Canvas has a built-in peer review assignments tool, and it can be achieved in peer review pairs or small groups. For instance, students can give and receive art critiques or feedback on their problem-solving, presentations, and writing. 

Social Annotation of Readings

Culturally responsive teaching draws from and then builds upon all that our students bring to the classroom, and Hypothesis provides a space for students to share it in the margins of texts while they read. For example, for low-stakes collaborative practice of strategic reading skills and metacognition, I ask my students to annotate parts of an article where they are making connections, asking questions, inferring, synthesizing, visualizing, and determining importance. This validates their cultures and language and capitalizes on it by using their background knowledge as a window to learning new content. 

Hypothesis logo

If you assign readings in your courses, Hypothesis allows for social annotation and replies for class conversations to unfold in the margins of PDFs and websites. In the recording of “Liquid Margins 18: Social Annotation in Community College: A California Case Study,” Kat King, Brandon Harrison, and I highlight how weaving in social annotation as a teaching practice has significantly increased student engagement, critical thinking, and learning outcomes.

Student-Created Videos

Text-based assessments come to life through video and audio with Flipgrid and Canvas Studio. Both of these humanizing tools can be implemented for both low-stakes practice and higher-stakes student presentations, debates, or speeches. A conversation unfolds as students interact through recorded videos and video, audio, or text replies to one another. For more on Flipgrid, see my previous article titled “Humanizing Your Online Courses with Flipgrid”.

Higher-Stakes Collaborative Summative Assessments

If you assign a wonderful group project or presentation in your on-campus class, then retain it for your online version. You might consider having groups collaborate on creating real-world, authentic infographics, pamphlets, slideshows, webpages, or videos on shared Google SlidesPowerPoint Presentations, or Adobe Spark posts, videos, and pages. For instance, math squads could design webpages on statistics of racial disparities in their community, groups of biology students could create pamphlets that might be found in a doctor’s office on diseases affecting marginalized populations, or ESL teams could record videos presenting different grammar concepts. Groups could then share their final products with the entire class, perhaps on a Padlet, which is a straightforward digital bulletin board that allows students to share digital content and leave feedback or comments to one another. 

Canvas makes it simple to turn an individual assignment into a group assignment. For more on online group work and helpful resources, view the “Byte-Sized Canvas” video by Helen Graves, an @ONE Instructional Designer, on “Why Group Assignments Are Worth Your Attention.”

Canvas interface showing group assignment checkbox.

Some may cringe at the idea of group work. I’ve found that the more clearly structured and scaffolded the projects are, the better the experience for every group. Monitoring the groups helps ensure their success and gives me better insight into their group dynamics, so I build in regular check-ins, ask them to self-reflect, and evaluate their peers at the end. Providing models of exemplary work is a helpful resource for students to clearly understand what they are being asked to produce. I find it important to allow ample time for online students with busy schedules to successfully collaborate than I do when teaching on-campus courses. In Vanderbilt University’s guide entitled “Group Work: Using Cooperative Learning Groups Effectively,” Cynthia J. Brame and Rachel Biel offer helpful recommendations for structuring group work and making it effective that are transferable to the online classroom.

Informal Student-Initiated Contact

In addition to course-related collaborations and interactions, high-quality online courses provide spaces for unstructured student-initiated social contact with their peers. I’ve attempted implementing Canvas Discussions and Flipgrid for this purpose, but I have experienced the most success with Pronto.

Pronto logo

Pronto is the social space for students to connect more organically as they communicate through modalities they are already familiar with: text chats, GIFs, emojis, and live video. In my whole-class thread, students are asking questions, making clarifications, troubleshooting technology, and supporting one another on assignments. With Pronto, students have the ability to form their own groups, such as study groups or project teams, and it makes private or direct text exchanges possible between study buddies or friends.

Conclusion

Connections and relationships do not form as organically online as they do on campus. However, the formation of strong relationships between students and a robust classroom community is possible to achieve from a distance. Incorporating both formal and informal student-to-student interaction opportunities to establish trust and foster a social presence online is a humanizing, equity-minded, and culturally responsive pedagogical practice that addresses educational inequities and increases minoritized students’ success.

How will you design engaging asynchronous student-to-student interaction in your online courses?


Humanizing Your Online Courses With Flipgrid

This article was originally published on the California Acceleration Project (CAP) blog.

Humanizing And Equity

Students’ learning ignites when they trust their instructor and form relationships with their classmates. Michelle Pacansky-Brock is helping faculty nationwide to humanize their online teaching. She defines humanizing as “a student-centered mindset that involves recognizing and supporting the non-cognitive components of learning. In a humanized course, faculty intentionally cultivate an inclusive learning environment that fosters psychological safety and trust and forms connections that grow into relationships and a community.” She illustrates that the two key ingredients for humanizing are instructor presence and social presence

Strengthening the sense of community and humanizing online learning are inclusive, equity-minded practices. Dr. Luke Wood, known for his “Black Minds Matter” webinar series, delivered a keynote entitled “Reaching Underserved Students through Culturally Responsive Teaching and Learning in the Online Environment” at the 2018 Online Teaching Conference. Wood emphasizes the need to create a “community-centric” environment where students have opportunities to share their perspectives, stories, and reflections. 

This point is echoed by Zaretta Hammond, author of the book Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, who emphasizes creating “a community of learners” by building on students’ values of collaboration and connection to create intellectual safety and reduce stereotype threat.

Flipgrid supports a strong sense of community and social presence as students interact with each other and as instructors reply to students beyond text alone. Students are speaking and listening to each other, with audio and video enhancing their online exchanges. Tone, facial expressions, accents, and the sound of each other’s voices humanize each person and the whole online environment. 

I’ve witnessed quiet and reserved students absolutely shine on Flipgrid because it gives every student a voice. In an on-campus or synchronous setting, you are constrained to the time allotted for your class meeting, so not every student is allowed the opportunity to speak. That is not the case with Flipgrid; students are at the center and have equal opportunities to contribute.

Student Feedback

Students reported on my anonymous feedback survey how much they love Flipgrid:

Flipgrid Features

Instructors create prompts on Flipgrid (called “topics”), and students post their video responses to the forum for that topic (called a “grid”). Flipgrid enables faculty to:

See the faculty and student resources below for how-to videos. I encourage you to give Flipgrid a try from the students’ perspective. Go to our CAP Community Flipgrid, record a video response to the prompt, and reply to colleagues. (Note that this Flipgrid is not integrated into Canvas.)

Maritez’s Examples

I use Flipgrid to foster a high challenge, high support pedagogy in line with the CAP principles. It is easy to build fun Flipgrid assignments that prompt low-stakes collaborative practice on meaningful and challenging tasks. Just-in-time remediation takes care of itself using Flipgrid when students and the instructor reply to each other with friendly suggestions and support. The result is ultimately a community of learners with affective benefits that encourage effort and persistence. 

Consider replacing some of your Canvas Discussions with Flipgrids to prevent discussion fatigue. I have heard of colleagues who alternate between Canvas Discussions and Flipgrids each week. I enjoy sprinkling Flipgrids throughout the semester.

For The Camera-Shy

Students may be hesitant to record videos of themselves or show their faces on camera for various reasons related to their cultural background or comfort level. It’s important to practice inclusivity in our teaching and provide alternatives for students to still participate in our courses. 

Show your students the features in Flipgrid such as using the rear-facing camera (on any device that has one), pixelating their face with a filter, or inserting a large emoji over it. Similar to screen sharing, the Flipgrid camera is filled with new powerful features including a series of boards - whiteboard, blackboard, graph paper, lined paper, and more - which allow your students to share their voice either with or without their face being on camera. They can still successfully participate in Flipgrids by contributing their audio recording with alternative visuals.

Flipgrid “Topic” Ideas 

Flipgrid provides many opportunities to make learning authentic and communal by asking students to actively process course material, apply concepts to their lives, and collaborate with each other.

All Disciplines

English

ESL

Math

I hope that my ideas have inspired you to think about the kinds of discussions and interactions you would want your students to engage in Flipgrid. If you intend to create an online course with a strong social presence and community, Flipgrid is a powerful tool for applying student-centered, equity-minded pedagogy.

Faculty Resources

Student Resources