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 Slides, PowerPoint 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?

Student-Student Interactions Professional Development Guide

Make your own copy.

Learning is a social process. That's why active learning has long been touted as an exemplary instructional approach for college classes -- whether they're taught in a traditional classroom or online. It's also why student-student interactions are part of the CVC-OEI Online Course Design Rubric and are now part of the Title 5 Education Code for California Community College Distance Education courses (Instructor Contact, Section 55204). Peer-to-peer interaction is foundational to developing a sense of community in your online courses. But meaningful interactions don't just happen; they are fostered through effective course design and teaching.

Neuroscientists like Antonio Demasio have shown that thinking and feeling are not distinct processes. Rather, feelings directly impact human reasoning and behavior. Thinking and feeling are inseparable from one another. And if you apply that to the way you teach, you'll notice big shifts in your students' engagement. Research shows that online classes can make some students feel more isolated, which can further exacerbate the feelings of stress and marginalization that many community college students experience. Throughout their lives, many of our students have been informed through the media and other messages that they're not cut out for college. It's your job to let them know, "I believe in you. You've got this." Just like in your face-to-face classes, validating your online students and establishing that your class is a safe place are the first steps to establishing a sense of belonging for your students (Rendón, 1994).

Providing low-stake opportunities that enable students to draw upon the wealth of experiences they bring to your class is also key. Doing so demonstrates that you value your students' diverse experiences and perspectives, as noted in the Peralta Equity Rubric. As students share what's meaningful to themselves, they will feel more included in your class and will also recognize things they have in common with their peers. When names on a screen begin to transform into human beings with rich stories, your class is on its way to becoming a community.

To support you in your efforts to foster student-student interactions and build community in your online courses, CVC-OEI/@ONE has developed a Student-Student Interactions Professional Development Guide, which you'll find embedded at the top of this page. We've shared the guide with a Creative Commons-Attribution (CC-BY) license and provided it in Google Slides format to make it easy for you to copy, adapt, and re-use as you'd like. In the guide, you'll find:

Leave a comment below to let us know what you think and how you plan to use the guide or share your favorite strategy for fostering meaningful interaction in your online course.

Is it time to Zoom it up a notch with a klatch workgroup meeting?

In my previous post, I shared how I use ConferZoom in Canvas to conduct “Live” orientation meetings with my online students.  I call these meetings "klatche workgroups," which is a term I learned from Greg Beyrer, Cosumnes River College faculty and facilitator of the @ONE Introduction to Teaching with Canvas course. Are you ready to zoom it up a notch with a klatch workgroup meeting using ConferZoom?

klatch: a social gathering, especially for coffee and conversation

There is only one you…and you have lots of students, right? How can you use ConferZoom throughout your online course to provide the varying levels of personal attention your students need to synthesize the new concepts they encounter in your course.

Learning is variable. This means students process information at different rhythms and are better supported when content is provided in more than one modality. Zoom empowers me to meet my students where they are in the learning process… on their unique learning journey through nutrition or health.  Throughout my online course, I use ConferZoom to hold klatch work group meetings to meet students and support them no matter where they are in mastering our learning outcomes. In our klatch meetings, I check in with my students. Based on their needs, I can demo a required task or assignment by using a sample of current student’s work (with student permission) or work from a previous term to clarify what they need to do. When we start a new klatch workgroup, I will ask for students to volunteer to share their work. Students often jump at the chance to have their instructor view their work and receive feedback in a supportive atmosphere that allows them to ask for clarification on the spot. Once I have a sample, I share my screen in ConferZoom and we work together as a class to identify potential problems and find creative solutions.  The goal is to facilitate student mastery of the assignment’s objectives, while encouraging peer to peer interaction and support (which aligns with the CVC-OEI Online Course Design Rubric, elements A-3 and B-4).

ConferZoom interface showing a presentation slide defining a "Basal Metabolic Rate" and a small image of the instructor.

Tips for arranging your klatch workgroups

Here’s are some tips to help you get started:

  1. Sign up here for your ConferZoom account if you don’t have one yet, refer to the help guides for assistance in getting started.
  2. Decide the amount of credit you will assign for attendance.
  3. Identify when you should schedule your workgroup klatch meetings to best support your students throughout the assignments and projects. (I will have a regular day and an alt-klatch day). I schedule my workgroup klatch meetings at critical points to provide scaffolded support for assignments or projects. For example, in my Nutrition class, the first project my students complete is a diet analysis self-assessment project that is comprised of 4 components. A critical stage in the project is the point at which students are required to perform several anthropometric measurements. Students can become discouraged, as many students view any mathematical equation as a daunting task, no matter how useful the information will ultimately be to them. I head this off with a scheduled klatch work-group, I offer 2 meetings on different days and times. Students are required to attend one of the meetings with the calculation worksheet in hand. They are required to have a calculator and scratch sheet of paper ready. Students are informed that we will work as a team in the workgroup klatch to use current and previous student examples and solve each equation together. By the end of the klatch, students have solved all of their anthropometric measurement calculations required for their project.  
  4. Send out invitations to your students using the Canvas inbox in the invitation message make sure students know what will be covered and what they need to bring to the work group (worksheet, scratch sheet, rough draft, research topic), and specify any content they will need to review or flipped classroom task they will need to complete before the klatch. If you want students to volunteer to share their work in the klatch, include that request in the invitation. My meetings for the term are posted in unit zero as you can see in this video. I also have the meeting broken down by modules
  5. Send a reminder. An hour before the meeting I send out a reminder message through the Canvas inbox with a recap of the items students need to review or bring to be prepared for our session.
  6. Have your workgroup Klatch!  Use ConferZoom’s built-in Record function to ensure you have an archive of your work-group for students who are unable to attend.
  7. Promote the next workgroup klatch. Don’t miss this opportunity to be sure your next meeting is on your students’ calendars and be sure it’s on your Canvas course calendar too.
  8. Include all students.  for students who are unavailable to attend, provide the option to view the recording and share 1-2 things they learned. This ensures students aren’t penalized if their schedule does not allow them to be present.

Tips for a successful klatch workgroup in ConferZoom

Once your klatch workgroup is arranged, consider these tips for a successful experience:

  1. Adapt to your students’ needs. Have an idea of the topics you plan to cover and how much time you want to spend on each of them but adjust your plan to support the needs of students who attend. For example, if you plan to cover a topic, but discover the students in attendance don’t need it to be covered or the students want more time with another topic, adjust your plans. Be sensitive to what the class needs and adjust your pace to accommodate the needs of your students. If the class is picking up the concepts quickly, speed up. If they aren’t, slow down. 
  2. Encourage participation. Use pauses to encourage students to contribute.  Often, when you ask a question and wait silently, a student will reply.
  3. Encourage students to help each other. By setting the tone you will not be the first to jump in with the answer. Instead, when students ask questions, open them to the class whenever possible. These prompts are helpful: “Can anyone help Joe?” or “Does anyone want to try and answer Maria’s question?” This facilitation tactic can foster students’ connections with their peers and also provide you with a clearer picture of who has mastered the objectives. Klatch workgroups help gauge what students understand at particular points in the term.
  4. Use the archive to support learning. Encourage students to set aside time during the week to review the archive as they go to complete any work left unfinished

How are you using ConferZoom to support your students? Let us know by sharing a comment below!

Zooming to New Heights of Student Engagement

A colorful welcome sign.

I was a college student during the Stone Age of online education…you remember it, right? The age of mile-long content pages where, if you were lucky your professor would include a link back to the top at the half-mile marker on the page! Well, online education has changed a lot since then and there are now more ways to improve our students’ experiences.  For California Community College (CCC) faculty, one way is to  “zoom” to new heights by using ConferZoom in Canvas.

ConferZoom is the CCC-branded version of Zoom, an easy-to-use video conferencing tool that is provided at no cost to CCC educators by CCCTechConnect. Using ConferZoom changed the dynamic of my online Nutrition & Health courses by providing a way for my students to interact more organically with me and each other.  We know that retention rates increase when students feel connected to their professor and/or classmates.  Zoom provides a way for this connection to occur. Since I started using ConferZoom, I have observed increased student-student and student-instructor interactions, which are key to supporting students to  complete the course successfully.

What do I do?

klatch: a social gathering, especially for coffee and conversation

At the start of the course, I have an orientation or klatch meeting, a term I adopted from my favorite online CVC-OEI/@ONE instructor, Greg Beyrer.

In my welcome letter I invite students to my klatch online Zoom meeting and provide three meeting times from which they choose one to attend: one meeting time during the weekend prior to the first day of class and two meeting times on the first day of classes. What I have found is that some students will attend more than one of the meetings. The icing on the cake is that the klatch fulfills Section B: Interaction - Instructor Contact and Student-to-Student Contact of the CVC-OEI Course Design Rubric.

Want to give it a try?

Follow these steps:

  1. Send out your welcome letter before your class begins.
  2. Include the dates and times of the orientation meetings. It is important to let students know attending one session is mandatory and they will get credit. (My orientation is worth 20 points, more than any other week one assignment.)
  3. In your message, encourage students to join from a computer with a webcam or a mobile device so you can see and hear one another. If you are aware that a student requires live captioning as an accommodation, contact ConferZoom support in advance of your meeting.
  4. When orientation day arrives, have your klatch meeting from a computer with a webcam.
  5. Launch Zoom and share your desktop.
  6. Meet and greet your students in real time!
  7. Take your students step-by-step through the basics of your course’s navigation.

You have now demonstrated to your students how useful klatch meetings will be going forward. In a coming blog post I will share how I use the recording feature to Zoom it up a notch!

Laying out the welcome mat

UsingConferZoom for my course orientation not only sets the table for my students to get a taste of what’s to come, but it also allows me to more easily create learner-centered content throughout the term, as students can ask questions and let me know what they’d like to learn about. Their input helps me guide the klatch in the direction the students deem necessary, as opposed to being completely instructor led. I also fulfill regular and effective contact in a more substantive way.

Since personal bonds are developed through shared experiences, we can easily see the significance of bringing students together live as they are entering your virtual classroom. Ensuring the session is meaningful and provides opportunities for social connections is essential. I want my students to know that I am here and available to them, both now and going forward. I also want my students to know that we are on this virtual nutrition or health “journey” together.

ConferZoom empowers me to take the anxious feelings that online students have at the start of a course and turn them into a promise of a shared learning experience. Through this experience, students are more likely to relate to me as their guide, mentor, and comforter. They also relate on a personal level with their peers. Thanks to ConferZoom, we have faces and personalities for the names we see on the screen and our shared journey toward a healthier life.

When We Empower Students to Become Experts

Join Chelsea on a tour of this assignment in the 4-minute video above.

How might you blend research, group work, video creation, and friends and family into an empowering and equitable learning experience for your students? In the 4-minute video below, Chelsea Cohen from Laney College, will show you!

Chelsea’s students, who are English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) learners, engage in a multi-stepped project, beautifully scaffolded into managing meaningful chunks. Each step of the way, students collaborate and increase their knowledge of a particular topic. Chelsea will demonstrate how extending discussions beyond the classroom or Canvas and into a students’ circle of family and friends can foster more diverse dialogue that situates a student as an expert. Can learning get more meaningful than this?

3 Steps to Becoming an Expert

  1. In groups, create a video using Adobe Spark based on your research paper.
  2. Share and discuss your video with friends and family (Extension: share the videos with your Twitter communities).
  3. Reflect upon the experience with your classmates in our class discussion. Summarize the ideas that came up with your friends and families and how it felt for you to facilitate the conversation.  

Accessibility tips! If you have a student in your class that uses a screen reader to navigate the web, you will need to provide an alternative to Adobe Spark Video. Also, if you have a student with a hearing impairment, have at least a few students caption their videos before sharing them with the class. To caption an Adobe Spark Video, download it from Spark, upload it into YouTube, and edit the auto-captions.

We suggest surveying your students in week one to let them know about your multimedia project plans and ask if they will need any accommodations. They'll appreciate your efforts to support them!

An Equitable Ice Breaker Using Google Maps

Does your online ice breaker need a refresh? Chelsea Cohen has a great idea that will get your students connected and take the edge off the start of a new course!

In the 4-minute video embedded above, she will take you on a tour of her course and show you how she blends a Canvas Discussion with an interactive Google Map to create a 2-part assignment. Her students, who are English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) learners, drop a pin on a Google Map that designates their home town and add a photo of that location. As you will see, the map transforms into a contextual representation of the students’ backgrounds, inviting them to share meaningful experiences.

If you use Google Maps in your course, include a link to Google's Accessibility in Google Maps page to ensure all your students can engage with the content. And offer an alternative pathway for students to contribute their content if they experience challenges.

Let Chelsea be your guide -- click the video above and enjoy the ride!

Learning from Students Who Use #EdTech

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In November, a group of five college students representing the California Community Colleges and California State University systems participated in a virtual panel at the annual Directors of Educational Technology in California Higher Education (DET/CHE) conference. Projected on a screen in front of hundreds of educators, students shared their candid reflections and experiences with technology in teaching and learning.

I had the honor of moderating the panel with support from J.P. Bayard, Director for System-Wide Learning Technologies and Program Services at the CSU Chancellor's Office. As always, listening to student experiences inspired me and reconnected me with the reasons I do what I do. As technology plays a more expansive role in teaching and learning, we must make efforts to center what we do around the real experiences of the humans at the other end of the screen. I also find myself reflecting on the courage it took these students to volunteer to participate and be candid about their experiences. And that is also something all of us can learn from.

I hope you listen to the 30-minute recording and let the students' messages inform your practices as you start the new term ahead. Leave us a comment below and share a takeaway -- we'd love to hear from you!

https://youtu.be/tjEf6SDtvqk
30-Minute Archive of a student panel from the 2018 DET/CHE Conference.

Quick Links

Don't have 30 minutes to listen? Here are the 5 questions the students were asked and a video quick link to their responses.

List of Panelists

View student bios here.

Byte-sized Canvas - There's No Place Like Home

Your Home page is a special place in your course. It’s the virtual “first impression” you’re making with students (and remember what Mother said about the importance of first impressions!). In this Byte-sized episode, we’ll look at the many functions of a Home page and offer some examples for you to model.

Empower Me! An Online Student’s Perspective

Empowering students is a critical part of education and there is room for improvement in the United States. Students need self-worth, motivation, determination, and persistence to thrive in a course, and often times those traits come out of student empowerment. Giving students the opportunity to shape their education, develop their lessons, and apply it to their own path is essential because it encourages critical thinking, and gives lessons that can be applied outside of the textbook and the classroom, and eventually applied to their career. Being a passionate student about this topic, I have much to share and a few suggestions too.

In 2017, I graduated from College of the Canyons (COC), a California Community College, with associates degrees in Mathematics, Computer Science, and Physics. After that, I transferred to Cal Polytechnic, San Luis Obispo where I am now majoring in Computer Science and minoring in Entrepreneurship. I have been taking online courses since I was in high school and I was also employed at COC as a member of their Open Educational Resources (OER) program. From these experiences, I have gained a great deal of insight about how to engage and empower students in the online environment.

When students feel valued in a class, they will see it as a meaningful experience. But where do you start with this lofty goal? Start by reflecting on a few questions about your class.

If you struggle to answer these questions, ask your students. They love to give input and opinions, and just want to feel important to the class. Asking students for input is a great way to empower them!

9 Tips for Empowering Your Online Students

Here are some additional suggestions.

Have your online students:

  1. Create their own prompt for an assignment
    • Provide a rubric you will use for grading, and give students the freedom to craft an assignment around the rubric after you have approved the plan.
  2. Create their own test questions
    • This is a great way to see if  students understand the material and get an idea of what they think is important in the class.
  3. Give input on the course at  the beginning and the end.
    • Asking for student feedback immediately is a great way to establish a trust and convey that you are here to support your learners. Some suggestions for week one include: What do you expect from this class? What do you hope to learn? .
  4. Teach some of the lessons in the class (using Canvas Groups )
    • One of the best classes I took had groups of four students teach the class every day for the last half of the quarter. This was great because each group had to know their material well to teach it.
  5. Find resources for the class
    • Students can find great resources, and having additional relevant resources is always a good idea, especially for students who struggle.
  6. Run a socratic seminar  
    • When students facilitate discussions about topics  they are more engaged. Act as the guide of the conversation and requires each student to speak at least once.
  7. Seek out scholarships, competitions, grants, and more.
    • For every topic in school, there is always a way to get students more involved. Encouraging them to apply for an opportunity and let them know you believe in them! . If they are successful, they will have something to  show off for a lifetime.
  8. Help write materials for future courses
    • When students know their assignments are not ‘throw away’, they are usually more willing to invest time in the topic and deliver something that will last. Plus, they may be able to deliver it in a way future students will  understand a bit better
  9. Connect with their community
    • Local companies are always looking for help. Connecting students with local businesses gives students a chance to understand a career and be considered for a potential employment opportunity.

How do you empowering your online students? Leave a comment below so we can keep this list going!

Join Natalie for her keynote presentation at Can•Innovate, Friday, October 276th - a free, online conference!

Meaningful Discussions That Build Community Too

Do you wish your students would engage more meaningfully in your online discussions? If so, you might want to reconsider how you are designing your discussion prompts.  In this 7-minute video, Stacey Smith from Coastline College, shows how she designs discussion prompts that elicit real life examples from her students. Stacey's end-of-semester surveys show high student satisfaction levels with the discussions and a strong sense of community. 

The One Thing You’ve Been Missing to Keep Students Focused on Your Content

Many students are brand new to Canvas or, even if they’ve been using it awhile, just don’t know it very well. You can decrease their floundering and frustration (and make your life easier) by giving students some basic guidance as part of your course design. In this episode, we look at four simple things you can do to keep students from getting sidelined by inexperience with Canvas.


BONUS: I created a "Canvas Tips for Students" cheatsheet you can share with your students. It's currently in a barebones, accessible Word format--I suggest you download and customize it for your class and then add it to a page in your course.

You Had Me At Hello


Course HomepageRecently, I completed the @ONE course, Humanizing Online Teaching and Learning, that was facilitated by Michelle Pacansky-Brock, @ONE’s Faculty Mentor, Digital Innovation. From the moment I logged in to the course, I knew that something drastic was about to change for me. The course homepage had a .gif of Michelle waving and smiling, a banner with colorful and inviting colors, and a greeting that made it seem like someone was talking directly to me. How, I wondered, can I do that? How can I design a homepage so my students feel as welcome and engaged as I did?

It turns out, this was only the beginning. When I first enrolled in this class, I felt a lot of pride about the way I conduct my online classes. I've been complimented in the past for the videos I create to explain essay prompts and welcome students into the class. However, as soon as I logged into our Humanizing course and began exploring, I was amazed by how much I still had left to learn.

Structure

The course started with a helpful orientation module enhanced with 3 instructor-made videos, several images, a Flipgrid assignment, a Google Form, an infographic, Canvas tutorial videos, and consistent, beautiful banners throughout. Naturally, I compared this to the orientation materials that I use, and I discovered that I’m really only using a couple of content pages that introduce students to Canvas. Never had I considered putting an entire module together to get students oriented with the course, Canvas, and policies! Essentially, I learned how I can chunk my traditional syllabus into Canvas Pages and design it into an orientation module! This approach allows students to read through the module in small pieces rather than read, say, a 14-page syllabus!

Sparkly New Toys!

In the Humanizing course,  I was also introduced to a ton of new tools to use in Canvas that can help to humanize us as the instructors and our students as well.

Flipgrid, which is like a video discussion board, was a tool that I felt a little timid about using at first. However, after watching my colleagues post their video responses, I realized it was very similar to having an in-class discussion. As someone who is particularly shy in a student setting, I can empathize with my students who may feel the same way. However, once I got past simply recording my video and talking to the camera, it was smooth sailing!Brianna on Flipgrid

The tool asked me to take a quick photo of myself and add a sticker or two to create picture that would represent my comment. Being able to customize the picture allows for students to have creative license that a text-based discussion simply can’t provide in the same way. I then simply  submitted my recording and could see a grid of all the other participants who had posted their videos. All of the pictures of participants were arranged in a checkerboard grid, so I could become familiar with my peers’ names and faces. This is something that I had never known how to do in an online setting.

After working with Flipgrid for a couple weeks, I used it to create a "Checking In" assignment in my current online class, and my students loved it! I will definitely be integrating Flipgrid on a more regular basis in my classes, especially in the first week as an icebreaker.

Adobe Spark is another tool that has completely changed the way I conceptualize my online teaching. Adobe Spark is free and includes three separate, but equally useful and easy-to-use, tools for digital storytelling: Video, Page, and Post. Not only will I be using the Post and Video tools to introduce course concepts, but I will also be using Spark to integrate project-based learning in my classes. For example, this semester, students will be have the option to create multimedia reflections of an on-campus event as part of their final project using  Spark Video or Page

Last, I had heard of Canva before, but I had never thought to use it in the ways that Michelle did in her course. Canva is a free design tool that allows people to create flyers, resumes, invitations, and so much more. What I didn’t realize, however, is that, as online instructors, we can use the tool to create engaging banners, buttons, and YouTube video thumbnail images to enhance the design of the course. This, to me, is one of the best ways to truly humanize online learning: create a color palette for the course and design consistent banners that use the same color scheme. This creates cohesion in the course and allows students to intuitively follow the structure of the course while also being engaged by the beautiful and professional designs!

Equity

The tools have really made me realize how effectively they can reach, and more importantly, retain students of color and thus begin to reduce the equity gaps that are exacerbated by online classes. These  tools allow students to creatively and personally engage with the material in dynamic and intimate ways that contrast the sometimes cold experience of text-based discussion boards.Rather than simply reading text on a screen, the digital tools allow students to incorporate tone, facial expressions, and gestures, while simultaneously revealing the nuances of their identities as students and human beings. Additionally, by allowing students the creative space to use digital tools to express themselves, instructors and peers can more deeply empathize with each other. For example, in an Icebreaker, if a student discloses on Flipgrid that she is experiencing stress from her course load, work, and children at home, others can respond in a humanized way with an empathetic video.

I can't emphasize enough how much I am taking way from this @ONE course. I am thrilled to rework my online assignments and begin integrating these tools on a weekly basis. I'm even more enthusiastic to see how these changes will influence the dynamics in my courses and how many more of my students I will be able to retain!

If you are looking for a way to make your online class more warm, inviting, and community-oriented, I highly recommend Humanizing Online Learning. You’ll be engaged and learn ways to reach your students that are dynamic, creative, and authentic. You’ll have your students at “hello.”

Learn more about Humanizing Online Teaching and Learning.