Think back to your college days…what classes do you remember most? Chances are, regardless of major or credits earned, they’re probably the ones that unexpectedly changed your perspective, where an instructor seemed to go the extra mile to help you, or in which you felt a true sense of belonging. What your most memorable classes all have in common is that they engaged you. Now, just how did those instructors do it?
That’s the question we set out to answer in our latest webinar, Creative Techniques & Tips for Engaging Students. During this webinar, we use online English as a use case, as we explore with Dr. Gina Terry, Associate Professor of English at Germanna Community College, and Dr. Samantha Lay, Creative English Instructor at Meridian Community College, the innovative and effective ways instructors can improve engagement and student achievement in their online courses.
“If you leave room for students to misunderstand, they will.” Dr. Lay takes care to be as detailed as possible when it comes to directions, so that her online students know exactly what is expected of them. Similarly, Dr. Terry layers in the why behind those instructions. She wants to be sure students understand why she’s asking them to produce an assignment in a certain way.
One way both approach this is through the use of Harmonize’s ChatGP integration for building discussion prompts. The prompts generated are based on Bloom’s taxonomy, and once the instructors add in their topic, what comes out is a clear and engaging prompt for their writing students.
The ChatGPT discussion prompt builder in Harmonize allows you to scale across multiple lessons, courses, and instructors. Here’s an example of how you can build better discussion prompts faster and at scale. The prompt is well thought out, designed to engage students from multiple viewpoints, and extensive in what it asks for and how students are expected to approach it. To do this every single time, for each discussion, across multiple instructors and courses, would probably make you run for the hills.
But then, what if you want to change the discussion strategy? Maybe it’s too early in the course for the class to engage in a debate. Perhaps a small-group discussion would encourage greater student participation and better engagement as well as lead to richer exchange at this point. No need to redo any work. We coach ChatGPT on a new discussion strategy — small-group discussions — and you get a new prompt.
Building creative and engaging discussions like this helps students circle back to discussions.
An engaging online discussion board includes multimedia, polls, and ongoing interaction.
As another way to set expectations for students, be sure to set multiple due dates for students, or what we call ‘Milestones’ in Harmonize, let an instructor set clear expectations for student participation. By setting milestones with notifications, students are reminded of approaching deadlines — pulling them back into the conversation on an ongoing basis AND eliminating the onslaught of eleventh-hour posts that often inundate instructors.
Milestones allow an instructor to set multiple due dates for an assignment, requiring a certain number of discussion posts, comments, and reactions by specific due dates. This provides students with clear instructions and sets baseline expectations for how often students should be interacting.
Students can easily view their progress and due dates on each post as well as in the calendar/to-do list within Canvas. Best of all, milestones encourage more meaningful contributions from students, encouraging them to post beyond the surface-level comments that often accompany last-minute submissions. And when you enable Harmonize’s auto-grading with your milestones, you can save time by automatically evaluating student participation.
The dreaded thread…you know it. As Dr. Terry says in the webinar, traditional discussion boards in online courses can tend to be boring and a one-and-done kind of thing for students. But in online courses, it’s important to keep students coming back to the conversation and make sure the conversation is lively. One to do that is to rethink the tools you’re using and be sure you’re engaging students in ways they understand — think social.
You know as well as anyone that today’s students are digital natives and accustomed to communicating with one another online and building community virtually. Because of that, they naturally expect this to bubble over into their online learning experiences — and that includes online discussions. So if you want to increase engagement in discussions, you’ll want to be sure your discussion board is something they’d want to use.
Harmonize’s intuitive, user-friendly design looks similar to social media apps, which makes it naturally easier for students and instructors to use. With familiar features like tagging, notifications, and in-app & email notifications, students can complete assignments without any training, which increases the likelihood they’ll continue using it. It’s also available 24/7 and made for mobile devices — perfect for students on the go and allowing all students to connect and participate at any time.
Need more proof? When Brown University implemented Harmonize, conversations became better and more frequent. With features familiar to students, like the ability to post and reply with in-line media, tagging, and social-media reactions, students felt comfortable and began participating voluntarily — often without being prompted. James Foley, Director for Digital Learning & Design, adds, “Harmonize elevated our course discussion experiences for students. With features that keep students engaged, it’s flexible for all users and has the kind of built-in social engagement that increases student participation.”
Couple that social engagement with multimedia and annotation. The more traditional discussion approach to discussion forums only gives students one way to contribute, and that’s limiting for many. What results are long, text-heavy discussions, a lack of interactivity, and a recipe for total student disengagement.
But with Harmonize, students can submit written responses, create snippets of audio, make and send videos, annotate images and video, as well as launch or respond to polls right from within discussion boards. Instructors can also use multimedia and annotate students’ work, providing a visual form of feedback to help students improve — important when you consider the role visuals play in improving students’ learning.
Dr. Terry uses annotation with her students. She asks her students to provide analysis and pinpoint certain passages. It’s a way to keep the discussion ongoing. Students can tag each other and the instructor, asking questions or providing analysis. It’s a way of making the text come alive — and provides so much more value than simply a reading quiz. Both Dr. Lay and Terry encourage instructors to use video to provide instruction. Students are sure to watch it, and it’s easy to put together for each assignment.
A weekly journaling assignment for each student helps each student work on specific skills. Dr. Lay uses Milestones to set multiple due dates for these each week. She sets these to auto-grade but also goes in to see each student’s work and provide feedback. A private journaling activity provides a written record for the student to revisit over the course of time, allowing them to reflect on their skill growth.
You can also use polling in your course or within a discussion. For example, Dr. Terry asked a poll about the creation scene in Frankenstein — and then used those poll results to create what turned out to be a truly lively discussion on the scene.
For more tips from the webinar, including discussion prompts, assignments ideas, links and other resources, click here. Harmonize is everything instructors need to increase student engagement online, and in just 30 minutes, you could well be on your way to building a stronger, more engaged social learning community for students.
