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