Amin2

Those who do the work do the learning. If this maxim is true, how can we structure our classrooms so students have the power to make important choices about their learning without creating unnecessary chaos? How can they do more of the work while still relying on us for guidance?

When we give students the opportunity to make decisions about their learning process, they are more likely to form deep connections and practice higher-level thinking skills. According to Deci and Ryan as cited in Stefanou et al. (2004), students need “autonomy, competence, and relatedness…in social contexts” (p. 98) to learn and achieve self-determination. Students must actively construct their learning within intentional, social contexts. Students who feel they have some freedom over their learning are more likely to set “realistic goals, [determine] appropriate actions that accomplish goals, and [assess] progress toward the goals” whereas students who feel powerless to make their own decisions “lack volitional strategies and behaviors” (p. 98).

Choice alone does not guarantee student motivation. Students need the freedom to make choices that relate to their own lives and clearly connect to their immediate goals. Motivation theorists Patall et al. (2010) explain:

... choice may only be effective when it successfully satisfies fundamental needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. As such, having choice or the act of selecting alone is not enough to support motivation. Rather, choices need to be relevant to students’ interests and goals, provide a moderate number of options of an intermediate level of complexity, and be congruent with other family and cultural values in order to effectively support motivation (p. 898).

Because the types of choices we present to students significantly affect their level of motivation, consider how students might contribute to the choices provided in your class. Perhaps you provide two or three choices with an option for students to create their own proof of learning with your approval, for example.

When examining the structure of your course, how might you incorporate one or more of the following approaches to promote student autonomy and greater motivation? Your answer may depend on your goals for the class and how you want students to transfer knowledge from your course into other contexts. Don’t feel you need to redesign your whole course or use all these ideas. Try out one or two, then make adjustments.

What is a flipped classroom? Flipped Learning moves content delivery such as lectures, readings, and other forms of information to students’ individual learning spaces so classroom time is spent engaging with the material in more active, applied ways. Students come to class with at least an introduction to the concepts they can use in creative ways, with their peers and instructor there to support learning. This interactive class time may take the form of group work, experimentation, debate, project work, scenario analysis, in-class presentations, service-learning, problem solving, etc.

According to the Flipped Learning Network, The Four Pillars of FLIP are as follows:

Research has long found that students often don’t retain most lecture material. For example, Donald Bligh reported that when students were not quizzed until three weeks after a lecture, they retained less than 10 percent (1998, pp. 46–47). Even more problematic is evidence that while all students learn better in an active learning environment (a classroom that replaces lecture with discussion, group work, and other forms of student-centered interactivity), lectures favor students who are “white, male, and affluent” (Paul, 2015). The challenge to create an active lecture is really the challenge to help students connect with the material in a meaningful way so they remember it and can use it in future contexts.

Large classes pose unique challenges for instructors and students alike. Active, personalized learning is often best — but difficult in a large class. Structuring your course in specific ways can make a big difference in learning outcomes.

Even in a class of 100 or more, it’s possible to create a collegial atmosphere through regular communication between you and your students. Consider sending a weekly email or announcement with friendly reminders and updates, but also use it to share a bit about yourself. What do you love about the subject you’re teaching? What’s been in the news about your discipline lately? Share a picture of your dog or the last time you saw a hummingbird, and encourage your students to do the same. Give students a forum to share questions, ideas, and newsworthy information related to the course. Casual yet relevant communication helps students feel more connected to the course.

To gauge what they know and how to adjust, students need regular feedback. This can be in-the-moment knowledge checks during class using clickers or other technology, weekly quizzes, or more qualitative feedback on written assignments. Whatever the format, feedback doesn’t have to be terribly time consuming. Students can even help — and learn in the process — by grading quizzes or commenting on student writing using your example as a model.

Students tend to strive for the instructor’s expectations. To help motivate and engage, set high expectations but also tell students you believe all of them can meet those expectations given the right amount of focus and effort. Communicate your expectations clearly, and explain what part you will play in helping students reach their goals. This helps students feel supported, which also affects their willingness to achieve at the level you expect.

Ask questions and encourage students to do the same. Think of students’ questions as a gauge for how fast and in what direction the lecture should head. Move around the room so students at the back experience being close to the instructor. Set up a system for students to communicate with you outside of class via office hours, online Q&A forum, or email.

Students often find new and helpful ways to explain content when they can collaborate. Consider starting the term with permanent groups of five to 10 students as small, friendly communities within the larger class. This will help them connect in and out of class, study together, participate in in-class activities easily, and keep each other accountable — which is difficult for the instructor with a class larger than 40 or 50. You might assign each group a leader to regularly report progress, questions, and ideas.

Students will come to your class with diverse experiences, expectations, and ways of learning. Rather than mold them to your way of teaching, create a flexible environment that helps students connect with the course material in their own way. This may mean giving them choices, asking them to help make decisions about the course, or giving them several ways to study or demonstrate understanding.

The more students do, the more they learn. You can help students apply course content in meaningful ways by using think, pair, share activities; short writing and discussion activities; and knowledge checks with clickers. Also, chances to go to the board or present information to the whole class will activate all students more.

Time on task means the time students spend directly focusing on course content and practicing relevant skills. In a large class, any technique that helps keep students’ attention contributes to their time on task. That may mean using humor, taking breaks, using visual or auditory aids that serve as mnemonic devices, etc. Consider having students create visuals related to what they’re learning, which they could then share in class or online. Students are more likely to incorporate new information into what they already know if they are asked to create something that helps them make connections.

A community is a group of people who share a common purpose. In the context of an online course, a community includes not only students, but also the instructor(s) and, in many cases, experts from outside PSU. Establishing online community helps you and your students to:

• Create meaningful learning experiences.
• Answer larger questions beyond the scope of the class.
• Increase student engagement and autonomy.
• Have dialogues that support learning new skills and applying critical thinking.
• Foster deeper learning connections.

Understanding your students is crucial. An online course needs a meaningful place for students to share a bio and their interests in taking the class. Understanding their needs makes relevant and meaningful interaction easier.

Some ways you can get to know students:

Encourage students to build their digital identity by sharing a piece of media — a photo, video, article, or sound clip. These PSU tools can help:

Encourage students to develop a help-seeking strategy. Consider who your students go to for help and for answers to questions. As the instructor, you don’t have to be the only one. You could:

• Invite a community expert to monitor a discussion forum for a week.
• Have students help each other answer questions.

Allow for student choice in discussion forums or group work. Give students options in activities and/or assignments. Allow them to choose what’s most valuable and meaningful.

• Each week, give students three topics to choose from — along with your guidelines and expectations for participation.

The previous examples promote student autonomy and flexibility, key strategies in designing for adult learners — but routine is essential as well. For more engaging interactions and a feeling of inclusion, students need you to also supply:

• Clear, simple, consistent expectations
• Regular deadlines in a consistent, weekly format
• Detailed instructions that outline involvement and collaboration

When educators think of the internet as an extension of the classroom, the possibilities are endless. Strategic approaches to activity design can emphasize the learning possibilities of the internet to increase student engagement both online and face-to-face.

Inhabiting digital spaces by engaging in and contributing to those spaces shifts our perspective from consumptive and numbing to thriving and generative. Hashtags, collaborative mind-mapping, social annotation, and digital field trips are just a few design strategies that help shift the way we think about engaging online.

Another way to increase engagement online is to create regular and meaningful touchpoints for students to interact with each other. For example, have students complete one large individual assignment that has components due every other week of the term. Then have them share each component with their peers in an online discussion forum to get and give feedback each step of the way. This strengthens the community of learners in the course and creates a spiral of actions that has built-in feedback loops for students to create an exemplary project. Be sure to give clear prompts for the kinds of feedback you expect students to give. Also share clear expectations that the forum is designed to create a community of learners through posts that offer new perspectives, encourage further discussion, demonstrate critical thinking, and/or model self-reflection.

Here’s a small sample of possible activities to support student engagement. You can adapt the underlying ideas of most for both online and face-to-face courses. You can find many more by speaking with colleagues, exploring online teaching forums and repositories, and chatting with OAI. Remember to consider your learning outcomes, your own expertise with web technologies, and the previous questions.

Engaging online discussion is a mainstay of online courses, and for good reason. Compared to face-to-face communication, online discussion has many benefits for adult learners, especially in flexibility of time and location. Importantly, the benefits of encouraging discussion participation extend to students in face-to-face and hybrid courses. These benefits include:

• You and your students can enter, leave, and re-enter the conversation as time allows.
• Students have time to reflect on what they want to convey before they post.
• The conversation has a durable record, which you and your students can review throughout the course.

However, poor participation in online discussions has been identified as the biggest and most frustrating challenge for faculty who teach online (Hew & Cheung, 2012). Poor participation includes:

• Posting few or no messages
• Posting questions or messages unrelated to the topic or not appropriate for a full class discussion
• Demonstrating superficial or surface-level critical thinking or understanding

Asking good discussion questions is a key best practice for virtual discussions because the questions posed have a large impact on how students participate. Questions that have only one or a few answers, or that can be answered with little more than memorized facts, will limit student contributions and peer interactions as well as hinder higher level thinking. For example, consider the following discussion prompt:

After reading textbook chapter 5, please describe challenges that social workers face due to social climate, economic changes, and political environment.

Once a few students have responded to the question, it’s likely that all potential answers will have been given. The rest of the students will have little to add without being repetitive. Also, fact-recall questions don’t help students identify their own knowledge gaps, explore multiple perspectives, or negotiate content meaning.

Open-ended questions — with many possible answers, or no single correct answer — can offer more extensive discussion opportunities.

Questions that invite students to share their own point of view from their personal and/or work life also generate multiple perspectives. For example:

Reflect on an article, present examples that illustrate the point of the article, and explain why these examples were relevant by sharing your own opinions.

By sharing personal experiences and ideas, students can create a community where they can learn from one another, expanding their ideas through the experiences of others (Curry & Cook, 2014). The best questions allow learners to integrate their knowledge and comprehension of concepts and apply, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate them in real-world scenarios that reflect Bloom’s Taxonomy of critical thinking.

Curry and Cook outline an approach to discussion questions to promote deeper student interaction — not only with course content, but also with each other. Implementing MANIC strategy is straightforward. For each reading (or combination of readings, depending what the instructor chooses), students answer:

• What was the Most important thing in the reading?
• What was something you Agree with in the reading?
• What was something you do Not agree with in the reading?
• What was something you found Interesting in the reading?
• What was something you found Confusing in the reading?

Students should quote directly from the text and give a detailed explanation. For each week’s assigned readings or videos, students are required to complete two tasks:

• Their own MANIC responses (and they must answer all five questions to get credit)
• At least five meaningful responses to their classmates (You can change the number of required responses at your discretion.)

Students post their MANIC responses and reply to others as a way to keep a conversation going, which allows them to interact with each other and course texts. Curry and Cook recommend these tips for implementing MANIC:

Another factor contributing to poor participation is unclear expectations. Without clear expectations, learners may not feel the need to participate. They may have difficulty understanding where to submit, how much they are expected to contribute, or what their messages should look like.

Finally, to increase interactions among learners, many instructors ask students not only to post comments to the discussion questions but also to respond to one or two other students. If you employ this method, make sure you assign different due dates for initial posts and peer-to-peer interactions. This will help prevent learners posting on the last day of discussion, giving them no time to interact with each other.