Engaging students when teaching online: Opinion

Instructors can use a variety of techniques to engage students when teaching an online course, writes Beckie Supiano. The author provides a number of suggestions compiled from instructors who have discovered ways to evaluate student understanding through using online tools. The most common suggestion was to use the chat feature creatively, as it can allow for engagement without requiring students to use their cameras or microphones. Supiano describes how instructors used chat to respond to student comments, encourage student feedback through rating the classes, and pose simple questions to gauge student understanding. Some other strategies included uses of polls, gifs, word-clouds or open-ended comments to both check student understanding and encourage active participation. The Chronicle of Higher Ed (International)