Unknown Speaker  0:01  
Hello, everyone. Thanks so much for joining us. I hope to set the stage today by sharing some pedagogy and strategies are facilitating engagement in a virtual class. So what do we mean by engagement? Let's begin by looking at this graphic creative education workshop is that the important focus in this image is the direction of the arrows. The T stands for teacher and the s for student. And by looking at where the arrow originates, and where it's pointed, we can ask ourselves, who's doing the thinking, who's active? What's the relationship between student and teacher or between students. As we all know, community interaction and collaboration have been proven to deepen learning and can help to solve some of the isolation that can happen in virtual classrooms. When students feel they belong to a class community, they're more likely to be motivated to contribute to discussions and be open to feedback that can help them improve and work as we quickly shift from traditional to virtual teaching and response to the current COVID outbreak. It means we have to decide how the course will be re envisioned an online format. And it isn't easy. We need to consider the diversity of our learners with to decide how much will be asynchronous such as recorded lectures, versus synchronous live sessions. We need to brainstorm how we can bridge the transactional distance and still create community around instruction. This visual may be familiar to you. It's a very simplified version of a framework called the community of inquiry, or Seelye developed by Dr. Randy garrison, who researches distance education and blended learning. There are many different frameworks. But this is one that called to humanize thinking about discussing engagement with you, and they think it's a great reference as to why it's so important. This framework posits that the three key presences that sustain a community are teaching social and cognitive. Of the three presences the social is often the hardest for many to achieve online. And this is important because online community building has positive effects on the quality of student learning. It increases student engagement. And so just to be a bit more specific social presence is defined as the ability for the learners to engage in their course community and project their own personal characteristics into the learning environment. Cognitive presence is the extent to which learners are able to construct meaning by their interaction with the course content. And the teaching presence is concerned with the design and facilitation of the learning experience. The underpinning assumption here is that an ideal educational experience occurs when all of these areas intersect. So I've overlaid on the framework the three basic types of interaction that are defined in online education, learner to learner, learner to content, and learner to teacher. These are not part of the formal COI model, but they are often associated with these areas. In fact, each presence in the COI model implies some form of interaction in the online environment. So using this as our guide, let's take a quick look at what this looks like in a virtual course. And what strategies we can consider to scaffold community in order to increase engagement. So student to teacher interaction encompasses all the many ways in which students, instructors and teachers reach out and connect with each other throughout an online course. online teaching presence emerges from how a course is structured and organized and facilitated. So basically, it's the guide for students. As part of modeling engagement, instructors might make a point to welcome students share personal insights, particularly around a course topic, and invite student questions and interactions through a variety of modalities like email, virtual chat, or discussion forums. An example of this is offering optional virtual office hours through zoom. Frequent and timely feedback can model expected academic behaviors and clarify expectations. When we are communicating with students such as emailing and creating announcements, we might write as we speak to students, like we are in person rather than using a formal or very academic tone, which can be a challenge when we aren't used to communicating online. But we could use first person pronouns like we and our to emphasize class community. An important step towards establishing an authentic sense of community is to first establish our own presence. Like this statement says, research shows that students perception of their teachers presence are strong predictors of student interest. In particular, by sharing what we find so interesting and important about the course topic or discipline. If we can help to build student interest and emotional engagement.

Unknown Speaker  4:52  
We can scaffold learning by finding ways to have student interact with the content. So designing reflective discussion activities centered around a course Topic can elevate understanding and create intellectual investment. Integrating avenues for feedback like knowledge checks, peer feedback activities, and teacher response to formative assessments, further guide students to interact with course concepts. Designing activities that promote authentic learning and are applicable to real world or to students personal experiences are great for helping them make strong connections to course material. And using rubrics sets expectations and can be another way to provide feedback, and also tie the student into both cognitive and teaching presences. Have learner to learner interaction, we will want to create opportunities for both formal and casual interaction, you might put them into pairs or small groups in breakout rooms with a task that will get them talking about the syllabus. But it's not just about the content. Remember, it's also helping them to feel connected and to get to know their classmates. Other approaches can encourage participation such as assigning roles during small group discussion, or allowing for some flexibility and picking and choosing a preferred topic. You might use interactive technology such as polling throughout a presentation. In short, we want to use every opportunity to promote critical thinking and trigger more class interactions and discussions. Consider group assignments where students are asked to work together to carry out a specific task or to produce something together. peer reviewer assessment can be formal or informal, and it can be assigned as part of nearly any course activity. An example for this is having students give feedback on a peers written work. While in the physical classroom, this may have worked with them sitting at tables to discuss online it can work through a random pairing assignment, for example, with the course plus peer assessment tool or commenting on each other's Wikis. And if we think again about the COI model, students attain a cognitive presence in the community through forming their own inquiries. they achieve social presence by engaging with and being exposed to expose to their engaged peers, and also by gaining alternate perspectives. So it's essential that we understand how these approaches can help us connect and retain the integrity of our instruction and our learning communities. Every course every instructor is different. We have different class sizes, comfort levels, with technology, different time constraints and differences in how we prefer to connect. But by designing meaningful interventions for engagement, we can really elevate the course experience. And if things don't go as planned, use that feedback to tweak and revise. We can contact our peers, faculty, mentors, the senior ta or CTL, instructional designers for ideas and troubleshooting. We're always here to help. Thank you so much for listening.

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