At Home Connections for the Online Class

Many STEM related classes benefit greatly from lab experiences to fortify students’ understanding of topics. An online class can be devoid of these crucial learning opportunities.

From my experience as a student, finding ways to take the lab home with you is very fruitful. Previous professors of mine have successfully done so by designing the lab to use common household materials or by filming themselves completing the experiment in a short video. However, each time the students were asked to do a written report as follow up for the assignment.

I feel this method was halfway ‘there’. It was capable of working in an online form-factor, but did not involve the full benefits an online learning environment can provide. Canvas’ LMS gives all users an easy way to create video responses/media to participate in assignments. Asking students to do that same as you, the professor, just did (film a lab experiment and provide commentary), can help students retain more than just the loosely rewritten theory that would comprise the written report.

Faculty Involvement

Student involvement has been shown to be directly related to the faculty’s involvement in the course. As a professor if all you do is the bare minimum of showing up and reading from your notes, all you will get in return are students that keep their head down while trying to record what you have lectured. As it goes, “you reap what you sow”. In online courses this is just as important. Letting the students get to know you can be a first big step into coaxing more student involvement. Further regularly showing your face or voice in tandem with required learning materials can show an online student that you are just as invested as they are assigned to be. In some cases, this can even give a student motivation to be more involved/interested in the course experience. It seems only fair to design your courses to include as much faculty involvement as your expected student involvement. This can be as easy as taking part in your assigned online discussions or providing even a video response to some homework assignments. Showing students your opinions and drive for the course’s topics can greatly increase student involvement and success. 

Developing Student Engagement

A lot of times graduate level classes (that I have experienced) are built on the design of all the students being self-sufficient learners. This has in some ways forced or guided me to expect this and act appropriately in graduate scenarios. I have seen the same responses from many of my fellow students.

Imbuing self-sufficiency is very important; however, the draw backs can be obvious in many cases. The motivations to collaborate and have a shared knowledge or learning experience can be extremely stifled because of this.

I have seen many times where a faculty does their best to engage the class (online or not), but no one pipes up. I have only seen one or two speak up on occasion. Then unfortunately these one or two are now the only ones that will ever speak.

There are many ways to engage with learners, using online tools. I wonder what is the best way to elicit positive change with old habits?

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