Fostering Engagement in Online Learning

By Seth Graves

In 2021, the Carnegie Educational Technology fellows at the Graduate Center met with graduate faculty and student teaching fellows across degree programs to talk with them about the tech tools they teach with and to discuss common challenges associated with teaching online. As an educational technology specialist at multiple CUNY sites, I’ve often heard about struggles to recreate the spontaneous and generative feelings of face-to-face learning in online synchronous meetings on platforms like Zoom or Blackboard Collaborate. The faculty I met with sought solutions to a wall of muted students. I also experienced this audiovisual barrier myself in my writing courses, and felt tensions between the realities of the synchronous remote experience and my offline methods for drawing out discussion and group interaction.

Remote teaching during the pandemic magnified the exigent privileges associated with access—such as to quiet and private spaces from which to connect over video. As a result, despite well-meant desires to connect by multiple forms of sensory interaction—speaking, hearing, and seeing—the constraints of access from multiple fronts both social and physical make more clear the importance of universally accessible designs for learning and multiple avenues for engagement. As a result, it’s been an ethic to not require cameras in live sessions, and to employ other methods of creating a classroom community and interactivity.

In the graduate context especially, many of us are now returning to a more regularly programmed schedule of face-to-face learning. However, signs point to online learning having a much larger role in coursework at CUNY—hybrid courses that substitute face-to-face time with online interaction; online learning programs taught by consortium faculty, graduate, and adjunct instructors; or the one-time uses of moving course sessions online. In any of the situations above, attention to accessible learning by all definitions remains prudent.

With that speculation in mind, I offer some strategies for fostering and maintaining engagement in a synchronous session without the use of live video and audio. In what follows, I thumb through a short index of strategies that could be tried out in different online teaching contexts. Each attempt to foster meaningful dialogue and a sense of classroom community while keeping synchronous audio and video participation optional. These are just ones I’ve tried out in my creative and expository writing courses (at Baruch and The New School), and in the spirit of transparency and sharing, I also include a bit about how I implemented them.

For additional consideration, two of my colleagues over at the Baruch Center for Teaching and Learning have written thoughtfully about synchronous session alternatives to webcams.

Asynchronous messaging

Sometimes it’s better to text than call—or message than meet on Zoom. Students benefit from having a space to leave messages that don’t require live response. Students in gaming communities might already be familiar with Discord; Slack is a sleek option first used in corporate settings; and Microsoft Teams is accessible to all CUNY students through the university’s Office 365 license. The text-forward presentations of each harken back to chat-based interactions of an earlier internet, and files and media can be attached to messages or announcements. Each also has a robust mobile app alternative. In these messaging platforms, students and instructors can leave messages in public, group-specific, or private spaces and include visual, audio, or file-based elements. With text chat as the primary function of these spaces, students can enter and exit on their own time to ask questions that might not need a whole office hours meeting to answer. Users on these platforms can toggle a “here” or “away” status. Receiving and responding to messages also means it’s best to have a conversation with students about setting up their notifications settings (including when they don’t want to receive them), especially when students might be already accustomed to checking a different space for communication, like email or Blackboard.

What I’ve tried out

I maintain a Slack space for each course I teach, where I have created independent channels “channels”—chat spaces—for class announcements (#general), course clarification questions (#course-questions), peer groups (#group1, etc.), and student check-ins (#check-ins, see more below under “Check-ins”). The Slack also has a channel for random stuff (#random), usually memes and other internet humor. I try to put something funny and/or meaningfully topical in there once a week or so.

I use my Slack “green light” time as the equivalent of digital office hours. Sometimes there’s no substitute for a live conversation about a gnarly subject, but other times—especially in a class on writing itself—a private message chat on Slack will suffice. And I can have several of them going, which helps them get answers quickly in less of my time. If they have suddenly stopped attending, or if their paper didn’t come in, I can reach out and touch base. Students can deliver files to me and vice versa, or send each other writing for peer review. It’s a nice hybrid of email and an instant messaging or texting platform—and specifically for the course.

Chatfalls

Chatfalls facilitate interaction in the chat and are an effective tool for gauging responses to course material. I first encountered this activity in Rebecca Tedesco’s June 2020 workshop on “experiential education” and found it simple and useful. In a synchronous session like on Zoom or Blackboard Collaborate, students write responses to a discussion question in the chat but wait to post their responses until prompted by a moderator or the instructor (I usually count down to zero for dramatic effect). This exercise keeps responses personal and original while facilitating text-based-input from the whole class at once. It’s useful when wanting students to produce an independent response uninfluenced by other students’ takes. A follow-up round can turn responses into a dialogue (such as asking them to “choose one post and respond to it”). And all those posts now in the chat become mineable for conversation topics.

What I’ve tried out

Here’s a typical set of instructions I would put on a slide for the activity:

Chatfall

1. Type your response in the chat box, but don’t press Enter
2. We’ll count down together
3. Hit Enter at the end of the countdown
4. Read the responses and reply to one, placing the author’s name in front (example: “Seth:”)

***

For a peer review session, I used chatfalls to ask students a set of questions meant to talk about the feedback they want from each other. I asked them to talk about what ideal and non-ideal peer review would be like, and to reflect on past experiences. The chatfall process gave them the opportunity to quickly recognize trends in their responses, like not wanting a substance-free thumbs up, or not wanting only cosmetic grammatical marks. Students talked about wanting to be read and understood, wanting to locate sites for confusion, and wanting to receive suggestions for additional paths for discussion.

Check-ins

Incorporating “check-ins” into course meetings makes for low-stakes moments to maintain student engagement. Open-ended check-ins can give students a self-guided opportunity to place their educational lives within the complex subjectivities of personal, domestic, and work life during the pandemic. Space to check in, written or aural, can move freely between humanizing moments, course questions, discussion topics, and updates on how things are going with writing or research—with students having agency over what to include.

What I’ve tried out

I ask students to “check in” by posting once weekly to a Slack channel. I offer a suggested response question about the course (like “how did you put together or think through your blog post for this week?”), as well as one about them (like “what’s a song that’s been helping you stay active lately?”). They receive a completion grade for posting. To foster more community and interaction, I often dedicate the opening five minutes of a synchronous meeting time to reviewing and responding to each other’s check-in posts.

Collaborative writing

Students work together during class time to assemble writing into a shared space. This could occur on platforms like Google Docs or Microsoft Office 365. Collaborative writing could include co-authored responses; individual responses to review, combine, or remix; or commenting on each other’s work in the same space.

What I’ve tried out

I’ve used collaborative writing spaces for online peer review. I give them a simple chart to complete as a starting point for peer review conversations.

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I might setup a collaborative Doc for peer review like this simple table below, one for each group member:

When they are with the groups, I drop in briefly to say hi and then leave. At the beginning of the pandemic, I perceived them as less interested in vocalizing about peers’ writing than in in-person sessions. I found that incorporating a written component to assembling feedback has helped.

Coworking space

Students can benefit from a virtual space that is available at a consistent time for getting work done. I’m in a weekly one of these with a dissertation writing group, and I can say it’s really been helpful. I’ve tried to keep this going with my undergraduate students.

What I’ve tried out

When I tried this for a semester, I didn’t always attend, but we were all registered to a link where for one hour each week, students were welcome to jump into a Zoom room, video muted or on, and work in a virtual study hall. It became a habit for students to assemble and share a playlist during this time. I kept no record of attendance, but often 5 or more students were there.

Private response

I was really impressed by a demonstration on the use of private responses by Dr. Harold Ramdass in the English department at Baruch, so this idea comes from him. Given a reflective prompt or problem, students could send their response as private messages directly to the instructor. Harold demonstrated, mic off-mute, how he would acknowledge the receipt of the messages he received (with some nods and mhmms). Meanwhile, he would reach back out to certain participants asking if they would be willing to talk about their responses to the class. It felt like a simple way to give students options for engagement amid layers of privacy and validation.

What I’ve tried out

I’ve used private messaging to ask students questions about course readings. This way, if students didn’t do it, they could just tell me and not also the whole class. I can ask for some of their thoughts on a reading, give them some time to respond, and acknowledge those responses as they arrive. When I sent folks private messages about if we could talk about their response with the class, some would say yes and some no, generally related to what was going on in their environment while on Zoom.

Note: As of the time of this writing, saving the chat on Zoom also displays any private messages sent there. For consideration if you want to send your students a copy of the chat transcript.

Pass-the-Mic group response

“Passing the mic” here refers to a structure for moderating synchronous conversations and sharing time. It’s a way of disrupting a phenomenon of online meetings I’ve heard many instructors complain about, a gravitational pull (and muted silence) after a student’s input that brings the impetus to continue back to the instructor. Participants take turns responding to a prompt, and “pass the mic” to each other. The first round may include the following: (1) some kind of greeting or introduction; (2) a response to a singular, open-ended prompt that each participant responds to, introduced at the start by the moderator/instructor (for example: reflection on an assignment or reading, or a discussion topic pertaining to course material); and (3) a pass—to another participant/peer in the session who is not the moderator. In some instances, a fourth action might be to make reference to another person’s comments.

In addition to giving participants greater substantive control of the discussion, this conversation structure can also provide flexibility in modes of engagement (each participant having the floor to choose a medium of engagement among text, audio, or video—or to pass, which says they’re there but just can’t at the time), and makes gestures towards interpersonal interaction (in passing the mic, students have opportunities to address each other).

What I’ve tried out

I start each of my synchronous course sessions with a “pass the mic” round of check-ins. It asks them to talk to the class about the asynchronous prep work they did before the meeting.

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Here’s a typical set of instructions I would put on a slide for the activity:

Pass the Mic

After a planning period of 2 minutes…

1. Say hi
2. Talk about your blog post this week
3. Give a shout-out to someone else’s post
4. Pass to someone else

***

Many students unmute themselves for this, but that’s not a requirement. Others drop their updates into the chat—and I drop in some music to signal we’re going into chat reading mode. I impose a loose time limit of two minutes. I find it a worthwhile use of class time, but I’ve also tried limiting the number of rounds, instead of having every student participate, if I need to budget less time for them.

Shared music

Listening to music together has powerful rhetorical potential, one that the pandemic has really starved in its limits on live music and safe gatherings. Collaborative playlists offer flexible sites of community and exchange. Music in synchronous sessions helps prepare digital space, set tones, and cool anxieties. Music also helps to create cues about what’s happening in the class, and recurring tunes for different activities or portions of the course can work as motifs.

What I’ve tried out

Sometimes I’ve prompted my students to each volunteer one song for a course playlist. That can become what we play in prep or writing time. I also tend to play shared music while students are in breakout rooms; as they return, music keeps the room warm. Assembling collaborative playlists has especially proved useful in downtempo work sessions (see “Coworking Space”). When someone wants to use the chat instead of a microphone, I cue music then too, to signal it’s time to head into the chat and pay attention to what that person is writing—instead of blowing past their contribution in audio dialogue.

Shout-outs

Synchronous class sessions could use a portion of course time to prompt the group to manifest and share praise. These provide an opportunity to showcase student interests, humanize the course, and potentially enrich course topics with what students bring up. I’ve also heard teachers

What I’ve tried out

I usually incorporate “Shout-Outs” into my “Pass the Mic” check-ins with classes. I give them time to choose someone to give praise to, with some comment on why expected. Tangentially, shout-outs, I’ve also asked students to lead dedications to specific figures like authors or inspiring members of personal histories. As my example to the class, I made a land acknowledgment to the Lenape People who inhabited what is now Manhattan.

Stretch breaks

Incorporating a designated period for movement and stretching—as well as time to mute, take calls, or dash out texts—can help humanize the synchronous space and recognize the presence of distractions in online learning settings.

What I’ve tried out

I’ve started incorporating stretch breaks every 45 minutes (as well as in workshops and meetings), for me if not for others (to stretch and relieve chronic pain). With students, it’s been a positive influence on general spirits and participation.

Visual annotation

Doodling is fun, and for some functions as a mode of active listening. The “Annotation” function on a synchronous meeting platform like Zoom allows for some visual interaction including a potential doodle space. Even a brief low-stakes drawing session on a virtual whiteboard at the start of class could make for a de-stressing warmup.

What I’ve tried out

Sometimes at the beginning of class, I’ll put up a map of New York City and ask students to use the Annotate function to circle where they are joining the online class session from. When we’re looking at a reading together, I’ll enable annotation to ask students to mark passages of text. I’ll use Annotate occasionally for brainstorms—in response to writing prompts—and ask students to contribute.

Note: Earlier versions of some of these thoughts appeared as part of a blog post I co-wrote with Zahra Khalid, “Accessible Interactions: Tips for Synchronous Online Learning,” on GC Online, posted April 9, 2021.