Engaging Your Online Class
There are many strategies to increase engagement in your online classes, such as frequent discussion board posts, blogs or wikis, collaboratively authored documents, and shared chat spaces. These activities create more familiarity among the students and may also allow you to identify patterns in writing styles, levels of achievement, basic content knowledge, and typical types of interaction specific to each of your students.
Brightspace
You can use the features of the LMS to create self-graded quizzes or exams, which provide automatic feedback and can be taken multiple times. Remember also to check students’ level of engagement with your materials using the use monitoring features of your LMS. For example, Brightspace’s Class Progress allows you to track access for a given item in your course, and view statistics on access by date, day of the week, and time, as well as by user (student and non-student users).
Here are some additional suggestions:
-
Brightspace Discussion Forums and Topics is a versatile tool. You can integrate a rubric and link directly to your course’s grade book.
-
Web-based versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint have collaborative functions. They can be used as stand-alone tools, within Office 365, or via a link in your Brightspace course.
- Create and manage Brightspace groups: Start by creating a category. Discussions, Assignments, and Lockers (for document sharing within a group) can be created within the Category then create groups.
- Boost engagement with frequent and regular announcements.
- Email the entire class or selected learners from the Classlist (login required)
- Incorporate multimedia by uploading a video or audio note to assignment and quiz instructions, discussion prompts; announcements; and email. You can also add them to your feedback comments.
- Encourage students to use the Brightspace Pulse App
Web/Application Based Whiteboards
A digital whiteboard is a web-based collaboration platform that can be used synchronously or asynchronously. Most digital whiteboards allow the user to sketch and annotate; insert shapes, text, sticky notes, images, and video links.
Here are some whiteboard options:
- Microsoft Whiteboard: Available free to all CUNY faculty, staff, and students. Login to your CUNY Office 365 account is required for all collaborators.
- Padlet: Collaborators post on a “wall.” Your students don’t need to have an account to post to your Padlet, but their posts will be listed as anonymous.
- Miro: Miro’s whiteboard is a zoomable virtual whiteboard that allows users to present ideas, collaborate both asynchronously and in real time.
- Zoom integrated whiteboard
For more information, see this Digital whiteboard and collaboration tool comparison guide.
Microsoft Office Tools
- Microsoft Office Suite comes with integrated drawing tools for several of their applications (Including Word, and Excel).
- Microsoft OneNote allows organizing notes by class, using Ink to Text/Math conversion and inserting and annotation of multiple file types (ie: Word, PowerPoint, PDF).
- Microsoft PowerPoint allows direct annotation on slides.