In this episode, Camie gives 3 tips for improving student engagement in your asynchronous online course.

Audio file

5 Minute Tips Student Engagement_mixdown.mp3

Transcript

Welcome to the pedagogy toolkit. This episode kicks off a new series of five minute tips to improve your course. In this episode, Kimmy talks about three ways you can improve student engagement.

Hello everyone and welcome. Thank you for joining us today. So today, we're going to talk about student engagement and.

Three quick ways that you can improve this in an online asynchronous course. Now we've mentioned before that.

Creating inquiry is one of the biggest ways that students become engaged that they get curious.

They want to know something and so ways that you can incorporate this are to add story into your lessons.

You can do this through case studies. You can do this through real world connections.

And we do have a pretty busy news cycle right now, mostly concerning the election. But there are lots of opportunities that you can do. This just doesn't have to be something recent. It could even be like cold case news or something that happened a long time ago, something that.

Students can connect with in some way.

It may even be something that we never found out. The answer to that we walked students through.

See what they see to see what they understand or end up predicting.

About the end conclusion.

Sometimes we'll have an answer for this, and sometimes we won't.

But problem solving is another way to keep that inquiry that curiosity going another way. We can do that is through fostering a course community, and there are several ways that we can do this through.

Using small groups in our discussions and keeping students in these small groups throughout the entire term.

This can help foster.

More of a sense of community because people end up generally opening up more in those smaller groups than they do in larger groups.

Or at least on a discussion board.

They're more likely to give their opinions and and to speak out. It's more noticeable when they are absent from the conversation.

And so also those peers may check on them if if they are absent.

And so you're fostering a peer-to-peer connection there whenever you use small.

Groups a third way to increase student engagement in your course is to add student choice.

In the mix.

Now this is gonna put a little bit more work on you in the beginning when you're setting up your course, because you'll have to set up.

Two or three options for an assignment rather than one, but once it's set up, you can use a rubric that covers all the assignments, because you're looking for certain components, not necessarily at the presentation itself.

And you can give students a choice.

Give them a choice between a written paper, a presentation, something that a video on something they've done. Give them options so they can take it as far as they want, but also so that they are comfortable.

Unless that skill is necessary for your class, like a communications class.

Then then give them options and how they're presenting information, because it will help them take ownership of their work, and also they can present information in a way that they understand really well and focus more on the content rather than the delivery.

So if you want to improve student engagement.

Build inquiry, build community and include student choice.

Thanks for joining us on the Pedagogy toolkit. Don't forget to subscribe.