Student engagement is especially important for students to support their own learning in a remote or in-classroom setting. To be engaged, the students need to be motivated, ‘see’, and ‘experience’ the value from engagement. Forcing students to attend and participate through marks will have the bodies present, but not the minds. The students will gladly go through the motions to get the reward, but we know that this does not create deep learning or understanding of the material. They need to think.

The following is based on an article about some of our experiences.

Here are some ways to help students effectively engage with course content.

• Consider a partially flipped-classroom approach to create opportunities for students to engage in online activities that promote active learning. For example, students can be given a weekly short assignment based on the next week’s topics to become prepared for future lessons – this creates a cascade in the course content.
• Incorporate higher levels of Bloom's Taxonomy in the learning activities and assessments to support learning outcomes that promote depth in student learning. This can include discussions about assumptions and reflection activities; encourage students to think about the learning process and develop their metacognitive skills.
• Offer several live Q&A sessions, personalize your emails to students, and communicate your targeted turnaround time for responding.
• Create frequent, anonymous feedback opportunities for your students to share perceived challenges and provide management-style constructive feedback – how they think the problem can best be resolved.
• Provide students with a weekly schedule and checklist of required activities and assignments. Remember to establish a pattern to not be late with your deliverables, deliver what is promised and don’t surprise students by announcing that there will be a quiz or test the next day.
• Listen to and have the appropriate respect for the student voice and input. Do not talk at the students, talk with them. It is not about you, it about the students and their learning. If you care about the students, they will likely care about the course. The same goes for the students, and we point out to them that if they do not care about the course, do not expect the instructor to care about their marks.
• Have something (not too much) in every lecture that hurts their brain a bit, so they start to learn what they do not know and that there are ways to address the brain-hurt; i.e., you are helping them learn to think and do things. Students will engage more if they feel like that they are learning and improving, and value the changes.
• Create some suspense about what will be done in the lecture. Give them something to look forward to. Something to raise an eyebrow over. Give them something to talk about after class, in their chat groups. Give them a reason to come to class and pay attention. Marks alone will not do that. Telling them to engage will not do that. Hoping and wishing that they will engage will not make it so; it is up to you to create the situation where they will engage.
• Provide some kind of eureka moment. This does not have to be edutainment, but through narrative methods and constructive mistake learning loops, it is possible to have most of the students have a light bulb moment and be aware of it each lecture.

Some online points follow...

Some online points follow. Another note talks about generating value in live-streaming situations (question: “why are the students not attending my live sessions or coming to class?”; answer: there is zero added-value).

• Devise strategies and opportunities to foster connection more frequently throughout the term, beyond what you might do in a face-to-face course.
• If you are live streaming your lectures, keep them to under an hour and no more than twice a week. Ensure that students have the opportunity for Q&A; even up to half of the session. Students want to hear from you, therefore be sure to keep lectures personalized and limit the number of external and third-party resources.
• If you are prerecording your lectures, keep them to segments of 15 minutes or less and provide coordinated opportunities for students to ask questions after; for example, via a discussion board or a subsequent online chat.
• When possible, stick to educational technologies – such as LEARN(D2L) – that you and your students are already familiar with to limit learning curves. If you have to introduce something new, go slowly and gently.

Further reading

• Early Engagement Quick Tips. Centre for Teaching Excellence, University of Waterloo. https://uwaterloo.ca/centre-for-teaching-excellence/teaching-resources/teaching-tips/creating-positive-learning-environment/early-engagement-quick-tips-eeqt
• Fostering engagement: Facilitating online courses in higher education. Centre for Extended Learning, University of Waterloo. https://contensis.uwaterloo.ca/sites/open/courses/FEFOCHE/toc/home/home.aspx
• Prince, M., Felder, R., & Brent, R. (2020). Active student engagement in online STEM classes: Approaches and Recommendations. Advances in Engineering Education, 8(4). 1-25.