How To Simulate In-Class Student Engagement When Teaching Online

This article is part of a series on the pedagogy of effective online teaching and learning to engage students in active learning tasks.

Engaging students online is part science, part art.

Susan’s Story

Susan had always received ‘Highly Effective’ ratings on her routine teacher evaluations. She diligently followed the best practices and the principles of student engagement when preparing her lessons. The students always seemed engaged work learning when her principal or the vice principal stopped by. She was so preoccupied with keeping the fine balance between her image of a model teacher and her role as a mother of two that she couldn’t see the curve ball life was about to throw at her.

During the second week of March, she was called to a hurriedly gathered all-staff meeting. The visibly shaken principal asked every teacher to submit at least two weeks worth of student work in hard copies. That amounted to 5000 copies or ten reams of photocopies for Susan’s 100 students. At 16.67 reams per tree (average amount of paper produced per tree), that would amount to chopping down fifty trees for all 100 teachers at her school; and that’s only for two weeks worth of student work. Little could she predict this was no more than just a token work for the long stretch of teach-from-home she was entering into with the dire announcement of a raging virus pandemic.

And the token work it turned out to be. Experienced teachers, like Susan, were trained on the best practices and the principles of engaging students in-person, which centered on high amounts of interactivity among students, between the teachers and the students, and between the learner and the content. And now suddenly, all that interactivity had disappeared. Teachers droned on and on in endless monologues in Zoom calls and on Google Meet, or recorded shoddy grainy videos which was even worse. While the best of the students were mere passive listeners, most busied themselves on multiple screens in non-academic entertainment on the side.

But, what could we have done about it?

The best practices and the principles of engaging student attention remain the same, whether we are teaching in-person or teaching online. The question is how to replicate the in-class delivery of instruction online in ways that the learning outcomes are either similar or very close to mimicking in-class teaching. Towards this end, the following fundamental principles of online teaching and learning must remain at the front and center of any planning for online lessons and activities.

1. The learning tasks and activities must remain student-centered. Between 70 and 80 percent of instructional time, students must remain engaged with the content, whether online or offline. The remaining 20–30 percent is for teacher-student and student-student interactions. That means selecting technology-based content or tasks in ways that would pique student curiosity for engaging their attention independent of the teacher’s presence. Curiosity is the trigger of independent learning. Once we make our students curious enough, the rest they will do on their own. This observation is supported by Sugata Mitra’s research on Self-Organized Learning Environments (S.O.L.E.).
2. The 20–30% of the instruction time that we had set aside for interaction among students, and between teachers and students provides for the human need for sharing new learning with others and for sizing oneself against others in a group. Embedded within this instructional time is also the need to acknowledge each individual student’s identity as a member of the group. That means giving each student a digital character or an avatar that best represents that student’s personality. That’s acknowledging one’s social presence, an important factor in belonging to a group with a common goal.
3. Creating space for socializing. The best part of a student’s day is when they are with their friends in the lunch room or in the gym, or in the locker rooms. This fulfills the human need for supervision-free hanging out with one’s friends. Creating safe and unmonitored spaces for students to hang out is essential to foster a sense of community among learners. These hangout spaces could very well be within students’ existing choices of social media platform, or new ones within school’s own technology platforms.

This list, by no means, is exhaustive in its scope. K-12 applications of these principles might differ from post secondary and higher education. Yet, it provides a foundation on which to align our professional development programs for teachers and administrators in the future. Online teaching seems like is here to stay for a foreseeable future and we must not squander the human capital accumulated over centuries of learning, just by not being ready to deliver that capital online.

Note: This article is part of a series of collections that makes the basis for Dr. H. M. Saleem’s LIVE Interactive Online Workshop series: The Best Practices For Effective Online Teaching and Learning. To know more about this workshop series and to register for the upcoming schedule, please visit www.keynote180.com. The next article will discuss Five Types Of Interactions That Engage Students In Online Teaching.