Helpful Student Engagement and Interaction Strategies
Thinking through your course from the perspective of how students interact with you and other students and aligning the technologies to enable these instructions will improve the learning experience and reduce confusion. Without the engagement piece, a course that only delivers content is a correspondence course.
Best practices and tools for engagement are available for you. You can also use this tool (MS Excel file) as you think through student engagement in your course.
In-class discussions when some students are attending remotely
All centrally scheduled classrooms are equipped with frugal/low cost AV technology (camera and microphones). If you hold discussions in the classrooms, students who are attending remotely will not be able to clearly hear or participate in these discussions since in the frugal AV rooms only the podium and its vicinity will be broadcast/recorded.
Alternatives to these in-class discussions can be:
- using Canvas Discussions for student Q&As
- holding virtual office hours to enable better interaction
- having remote students to use the chat function in Zoom or Teams to ask their questions. You can ask a student, or a group of students taking turns, to moderate the chat questions for you while teaching.
Georgia Tech faculty have provided useful tips on how to facilitate online discussions Links to an external site..
Other tools for student engagement
- Virtual office hours: You can refer to best practices on synchronous lectures and office hours to plan and conduct real-time engagement opportunities for your students. This blog post created by Georgia Tech experts
Links to an external site. also includes useful tips.
- Student presentations: Students (in-class or remotely attending) can connect to the Zoom or Teams session and share their screen to present remotely.
- Live polling among in-person and remotely attending students: TurningPoint
Links to an external site. clicker technology, which is available inside Canvas, can be used to engage students in the classroom as well those who are remotely attending. If you allow mobile devices in the classroom, students do not need separate clicker devices to participate. You can email clickers@gatech.edu to help set this up and receive assistance in how to include information in your Syllabus.
- Students collaborating in groups: Canvas Groups
Links to an external site. tool as well as Microsoft Teams
Links to an external site. can be used for students to collaborate synchronously or asynchronously.
- Canvas peer review of assignments Links to an external site. and peer review of discussions Links to an external site. can be used for students to give each other feedback on their assignments or projects.