Building Engagement While Learning What May Work In The Future
Are you creating an environment where students freely engage with both the teacher and the students as they would in a face-to-face classroom? Developing creative and engaging courses online while measuring student impact is an ongoing struggle especially when engagement is the other issue. When a student is spending a lot of time on a course, is it because they are enjoying it, or are they having a hard time learning? These are questions teachers are always asking but need help identifying these specific metrics unless you survey the students themselves. Remember, the survey must be conducted so the students feel like they can provide honest answers without any repercussion.
Let’s cut down the class sizes!
One suggestion to improve class engagement is to shrink the size of online classrooms. It is hard enough to manage 25+ students when they are face to face with a teacher, so regulating and trying to engage 25 + students behind a laptop can be overwhelming so, shrinking the size of the online classroom sometimes helps. Teachers will be able to engage their students by providing them with more one-on-one time and getting to know their specialties and tweaks they can make for their class. In a study of over 500 online courses, the classrooms with the highest amount of student-teacher engagement had 14 students or fewer (Quality Matters, 2019).
The vast majority of teachers can easily teach face-to-face classes without an issue, but there is a steep learning curve. So, any school district that wants to develop an online course program must find teachers who can effectively teach online courses and who are excited and willing to transform their practices.
According to an article by the Harvard Graduate School of Education, an effective online teacher can adapt to students' learning speeds and abilities, guide a classroom throughout the week, and encourage self-learning in their students (Harvard Graduate School of Education). Along with the skills, an online teacher must be completely proficient in educational and internet technologies.
Are your teachers struggling online?
If you have a teacher who struggles to turn on the PowerPoint software when teaching face-to-face classrooms, that might not be the teacher you want teaching online classes unless they are ready to grow as a teacher. Not only do online teachers need to be able to use zoom and any other video software, that is incorporated in the online platform but they need to be able to navigate the core software, reference different educational materials around the internet so students can easily access them, as well as real-time course software to tutor students who are struggling. Online teaching is still new to most countries while the pandemic is forcing everyone to adapt. So, let’s take these years of mandatory online learning and see what works best for our students.
References:
"Class Size in Online Courses: What the Research Says." Quality Matters, 20 Aug. 2019, www.qualitymatters.org/qa-resources/resource-center/articles-resources/research-on-class-size.
"What Makes an Excellent Online Teacher?" Harvard Graduate School of Education, www.gse.harvard.edu/news/uk/20/07/what-makes-excellent-online-teacher.