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Why students do not turn on their video cameras during online classes and an equitable and inclusive plan to encourage them to do so - Castelli - 2021 - Ecology and Evolution - Wiley Online Library

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ACADEMIC PRACTICE IN ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTION

Corresponding Author

Investigative Biology Teaching Laboratories, Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
Correspondence
Investigative Biology Teaching Laboratories, Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA.

Email: frankcastelli@cornell.edu

Contribution: Conceptualization (lead), Data curation (lead), Formal analysis (lead), ​Investigation (equal), Methodology (lead), Visualization (lead), Writing - original draft (lead), Writing - review & editing (equal)
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Investigative Biology Teaching Laboratories, Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

Contribution: Funding acquisition (lead), ​Investigation (equal), Methodology (supporting), Writing - review & editing (equal)
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Abstract

Enrollment in courses taught remotely in higher education has been on the rise, with a recent surge in response to a global pandemic. While adapting this form of teaching, instructors familiar with traditional face‐to‐face methods are now met with a new set of challenges, including students not turning on their cameras during synchronous class meetings held via videoconferencing. After transitioning to emergency remote instruction in response to the COVID‐19 pandemic, our introductory biology course shifted all in‐person laboratory sections into synchronous class meetings held via the Zoom videoconferencing program. Out of consideration for students, we established a policy that video camera use during class was optional, but encouraged. However, by the end of the semester, several of our instructors and students reported lower than desired camera use that diminished the educational experience. We surveyed students to better understand why they did not turn on their cameras. We confirmed several predicted reasons including the most frequently reported: being concerned about personal appearance. Other reasons included being concerned about other people and the physical location being seen in the background and having a weak internet connection, all of which our exploratory analyses suggest may disproportionately influence underrepresented minorities. Additionally, some students revealed to us that social norms also play a role in camera use. This information was used to develop strategies to encourage-without requiring-camera use while promoting equity and inclusion. Broadly, these strategies are to not require camera use, explicitly encourage usage while establishing norms, address potential distractions, engage students with active learning, and understand your students' challenges through surveys. While the demographics and needs of students vary by course and institution, our recommendations will likely be directly helpful to many instructors and also serve as a model for gathering data to develop strategies more tailored for other student populations.

1 INTRODUCTION

Student enrollment in distance education courses in postsecondary institutions has been on the rise (NCES, ; Palvia et al., ). Some forms of distance learning utilize advances in technology that allow for synchronous class meetings over the internet using videoconferencing software (Al‐Samarraie, ). Moreover, the ongoing COVID‐19 pandemic has led to a widespread need for instruction to move online and for instructors to hold synchronous class meetings using videoconferencing software to maintain social distancing and prevent the spread of infection (The Chronicle of Higher Education, ; UNESCO, ; Yuan, ). Many educators now find themselves teaching remotely for the first time and facing a new set of challenges (e.g., Reich et al., ). One such challenge in the world of remote instruction, and the focus of this study, is not being able to see students during synchronous class meetings held via videoconferencing software, because students do not have their video cameras turned on.

Midway in the spring semester of 2020, like at many other institutions in the United States, courses at Cornell University made an emergency shift to remote instruction due to the COVID‐19 pandemic (Cornell University, ; Milman, ), and our introductory biology laboratory course, covering topics in ecology and evolution, was among them. We desired to continue the course with synchronous laboratory section meetings due to the many educational benefits for students of synchronous remote learning compared to asynchronous.

Benefits of synchronous remote learning include the following: opportunities for higher interactivity and engagement among students, timely and constructive feedback, and real‐time collaborative learning (Racheva, ). Additionally, synchronous learning helps to build a stronger sense of community that fosters interactions, discussions, and the sharing of ideas (Lin & Gao, ), something we valued to maintain after transitioning but is also important in future semesters as new cohorts of students begin classes remotely. Another benefit of synchronous learning is that the increased social interaction that comes with it compared to asynchronous learning is strongly related to greater remote learning enjoyment, improved effectiveness of remote learning, and a higher likelihood of enrolling in another online class (Muilenburg & Berge, ). Student performance in synchronous remote courses also has the potential to be similar to performance in face‐to‐face versions of the same course (e.g., Francescucci & Rohani, ). Lastly, interactions from synchronous instruction may help to counter the effects of social distancing policies that can increase feelings of loneliness and result in negative cognitive (Cacioppo & Hawkley, ) and other health consequences (Aleman & Sommer, ).

Despite our desires to teach synchronously while remote for the rest of the semester, we, and the rest of the course staff, endeavor to practice inclusive pedagogy, which includes having a mind‐set that values course design and policies that do not exclude students due to inequities (Gannon, ). Hence, we were initially concerned about the "digital divide," in that many of our students might not have access to a reliable internet connection or to a computer with a working webcam and microphone (Cullen, ). To find out if this was the case, we surveyed our students during a pause in classes before remote instruction began. Fortunately, only a small percentage of students indicated these problems (webcam: 2%; internet: 5%; N = 301). Therefore, we felt it was not unreasonable to resume instruction for our laboratory sections in the form of live synchronous class meetings held via Zoom (Zoom Video Communications), with video recordings of meetings and asynchronous means for participation for those who could not attend synchronously. Students without reliable access to the necessary technologies were also referred to university resources put in place in response to the pandemic.

After deciding that we would hold synchronous class meetings, the next question became whether we should mandate that students turn on their video cameras during class. The supervising staff agreed that the best student‐centered policy would be to not require students to use cameras because they may not be comfortable doing so, particularly if they do not have access to a private space or are embarrassed of their home environment (Costa, ). Such concerns have been expressed by other educators (Reich et al., ). The COVID‐19 pandemic has already increased college student anxiety and depression (Huckins et al., ), and a mandate for camera use may add to that trauma (Costa, ). Furthermore, students of some populations may be disproportionately affected by stress from the pandemic (McGinty et al., ). For example, national surveys of adults in the United States show that measures of symptoms of psychological distress increased from about 4% to 14% from 2018 to April 2020 with the highest increases in adults aged 18-29 (4%-24%), adults with household incomes of less than $35,000/year (8%-19%), and Hispanic adults (4%-18%) (McGinty et al., ). Thus, the negative effects of mandating that cameras be kept on may also be disproportional to some student populations, such as underrepresented minorities in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), and contribute to already high attrition rates (PCAST, ).

There are several reasons that students having cameras on may be beneficial for teaching and learning, justifying our encouragement of their use, and we review some of them here. Perhaps the most obvious benefit is the ability to communicate with nonverbal cues. Instructors benefit from receiving nonverbal cues from their students such as smiles, frowns, head nods, looks of confusion, and looks of boredom, so that they can evaluate their teaching in real time and adjust accordingly to improve student learning (Miller, ; Mottet & Richmond, ). Instructors that perceive a higher amount of nonverbal responsiveness also rate themselves as having been more effective (Mottet, ). Students similarly benefit from being able to see other students when collaboratively learning. Students with video in addition to audio were more able than students with only audio to tell how their other study group members were reacting to things they said while remote learning (Olson et al., ). The inclusion of video has also been suggested as a way to address the fact that students in remote classes without video reported that a lack of nonverbal communication "reduced their educational experience" (McBrien et al., ).

In addition to improving instructor effectiveness, being able to see students while teaching makes for a more positive affective experience. For example, instructors that perceived a higher amount of nonverbal responsiveness reported higher satisfaction and a higher preference for wanting to teach in a remote video class (Mottet, ). Additionally, instructors of our course expressed displeasure with a general feeling of "talking to yourself" that occurs when students do not have their cameras on. This is consistent with feedback from remote meeting participants who preferred videoconferencing over audio‐only conferencing because the former had the advantage of "not talking into a void" (O'Conaill et al., ). If instructors have a negative experience, they may do a poorer job teaching, and poor teaching may lead students to switch out of science, math, and engineering majors (Seymour & Hewitt, ).

Students having their cameras on also helps to build instructor‐student and student-student relationships. Instructors that perceived a higher amount of nonverbal responsiveness while teaching remotely with video reported instructor-student interpersonal relationships that were warmer, closer, and more comfortable (Mottet, ). The majority of students of a virtual classroom indicated that using videoconferencing helped build trust and rapport with other students and helped them to develop a sense of identification with others in their group, commenting that being able to hear and see each other in real time helped construct a "more complete picture" of their peers (Falloon, ). Moreover, building stronger relationships via videoconferencing likely helps fend off loneliness that may come with remote learning and social distancing, as videoconferencing has been shown to decrease feelings of loneliness in nursing home residents (Tsai et al., ).

Nevertheless, by the end of the semester, many students had often chosen to leave their cameras off, as reported by our frustrated instructors. This attrition with camera use in online classes has been reported elsewhere (Tonsmann, ). Given the potential benefits of students having their cameras on and the costs of having their cameras off, we were wondering what strategies we could use to encourage students to voluntarily turn on their cameras during laboratory sections. To develop strategies informed by data, we asked our students in an end‐of‐semester survey about why they might have chosen to not turn on their video cameras during class. In this paper, we present the results of that survey and the strategies we developed based on those results in combination with successful experiences of some of our instructors, conversations with colleagues, suggestions from articles and social media, and a review of the literature. We plan to try these strategies going forward as the need for remote instruction continues for us as well as many instructors across the globe during the COVID‐19 pandemic (UNESCO, ). While the demographics and needs of students vary by course and institution, we believe that these strategies are likely to be helpful to many instructors directly, or at least, serve as a model for gathering data to develop strategies more tailored for their students.

2 METHODS AND MATERIALS

2.1 Course description

The students surveyed were undergraduates enrolled in the Investigative Biology Laboratory course at Cornell University (Ithaca, NY, USA), a PhD‐granting institution, in the spring semester of 2020. This course is required for majors in the biological sciences and uses an inquiry‐based approach to teaching the scientific method within two main topics: the evolution of antibiotic resistance in bacteria and the ecological impact of limiting nutrients on algal growth. Before the COVID‐19 pandemic, this course was taught with one 50‐min lecture and one 3‐hr laboratory section per week. After the switch to emergency remote instruction (Cornell University, ; Milman, ), lectures were prerecorded for asynchronous viewing and sections were held synchronous via Zoom (Zoom Video Communications) with recordings available for asynchronous viewing. We decided on this format after surveying our students before remote instruction began in order to assess the challenges they would be facing once they left campus, including differences in time zones, distractions from family obligations, and access to technology. Each of 12 graduate student laboratory instructors led two sections, and most were assisted by one undergraduate teaching assistant. Section enrollment was capped at 18 students. During synchronous laboratory sections, instructors gave short presentations while screen‐sharing a slideshow and incorporating active learning techniques such as polling (Sarvary & Gifford, ) and think‐pair‐share (Tanner, ). For several weeks, a portion of each class meeting was devoted to students meeting with their long‐term groups to work on data analysis and a poster presentation using the breakout room feature of Zoom. Instructors could move between breakout rooms to help students. Students also presented their group posters to the rest of the class and responded to questions during the last synchronous class meeting.

2.2 Student sample

Total enrollment for spring 2020 was 312 students. Ninety‐one percent of enrolled students took the end‐of‐semester survey ( N = 283), and seven respondents were excluded from analysis because they either did not attend any live synchronous remote class meetings or skipped all the relevant questions, resulting in a final sample of 88% ( N = 276) of enrolled students.

Students were assigned demographic categories based on self‐reporting and had the option to skip demographic survey questions or indicate that they choose not to disclose. Results were broken down by gender based on male and female, as only one respondent identified as nonbinary ( N = 1). Students were asked about their race and ethnicity ("How would you describe yourself? Check all that apply."), and their responses were used to assign them an underrepresented minority (URM) in science and engineering or a non‐URM. URMs were defined as three racial or ethnic minority groups: blacks or African Americans; Hispanics, Latinx, or Spanish origin; and American Indians or Alaska Natives, or a mix including one of these groups (NSF, ). Non‐URMs included: whites; Asians; Native Hawaiians or other Pacific Islanders. URM status was unknown for 23 students. Freshman or non‐Freshman (Sophomore, Junior, or Senior) status was unknown for ten students. Non‐Freshman were combined due to relatively small sample sizes (Freshmen, N = 215; Sophomores, N = 32; Juniors, N = 14; Seniors, N = 5).

2.3 End‐of‐semester survey

Students were administered an end‐of‐semester survey designed to collect feedback on teaching, course design, and student experiences within the course. The survey was administered with the Qualtrics online survey tool (Qualtrics) during their last synchronous section meeting of the semester. Laboratory instructors were directed to email any absent student after class with a link to the survey and a deadline of a few days. The survey was anonymous, most questions were able to be skipped, and taking it was completely voluntary. No credit was awarded for taking the survey.

The main survey question analyzed for the current study asked, "If you ever left your video off during the live Zoom lab meetings, why did you leave it off? (check all that apply)." Students could select up to 12 reasons we hypothesized a priori or select "Not Applicable - I always had my camera on." When selecting "Other," students also had the option of typing a reason not listed. In order to be included in analysis, students had to indicate that they attend at least some of the synchronous class meetings ("Have you attended any of the Zoom lab meetings as they occurred in real time?"). Additionally, students indirectly offered insight into the phenomenon of leaving cameras off during class when responding to other survey questions that solicited feedback about the course, the emergency switch to remote instruction, and the performance of laboratory instructors.

2.4 Statistical analyses

For each of the 13 possible answer choices to the question: "If you ever left your video off during the live Zoom lab meetings, why did you leave it off? (check all that apply)," pairwise differences between demographic categories (URM vs. non‐URM, male vs. female, and Freshman vs. non‐Freshman) were analyzed with two‐tailed Fisher's exact tests using the GraphPad QuickCalcs website (GraphPad, ). The α level for this study was set at 0.05. We chose not to correct for multiple comparisons by adjusting the significance threshold, because we consider these analyses to be exploratory, with significant results requiring subsequent study for confirmation (Bender & Lange, ).

3 RESULTS

The vast majority of students ( N = 249, 90%) had their video cameras off at least some of the time during remote synchronous class meetings held via Zoom. Students indicated several reasons for doing so. Table 1 summarizes the percentages of students selecting each reason from a provided list, along with break downs by demographic categories. The most frequently selected reason overall and across all demographic categories was being concerned about appearance ( N = 113, 41% of students). The next most frequently selected reason, a concern about other people being seen in the background, was selected by substantially fewer students overall, but was still quite common ( N = 73, 26%). This reason was selected more frequently than the related reason of not wanting their physical location to be seen in the background. Of relatively moderate frequency were concerns about distracting their classmates or instructor. Not wanting to be seen walking away from the computer, not paying attention, or doing other things while at the computer were relatively infrequently selected overall and across demographic break downs. As for reasons related to technology, a very small number of students ( N = 6, 2% of students) reported that their webcam was not working, but a much larger number ( N = 61, 22%) reported having a weak internet connection.

Note

Each student that indicated they did not always have their camera on could select more than one reason. Reasons are broken down by underrepresented minorities (URM) in science and engineering status, gender, and Freshman or non‐Freshman (sophomores, juniors, and seniors) and are sorted in descending order according to all student respondents combined.

URMs more than non‐URMs selected "I was concerned about other people being seen behind me" (URM: N = 25/66; non‐URM: N = 45/187; p = 0.0376) and "I was concerned about my physical location being seen behind me" (URM: N = 17/66; non‐URM: N = 24/187; p = 0.0194). For the same two reasons, females more than males selected "I was concerned about other people being seen behind me" (Male: N = 20/99; Female: N = 52/164; p = 0.0465) and "I was concerned about my physical location being seen behind me" (Male: N = 9/99; Female: N = 35/164; p = 0.0104). However, URMs were not more likely to be females (Female URM: N = 45/161 [28%], Male URM: N = 21/91 [23%]; p = 0.4569). For "My internet connection was weak," females were significantly more likely than males to select this reason (Male: N = 15/99; Female: N = 44/164; p = 0.0326) and URMS only tended to select this reason more than non‐URMs (URM: N = 21/66; non‐URM: N = 37/187; p = 0.0603).

A sizeable number of students selected "Other" from the list of provided reasons ( N = 53, 19%) and could then type in a reason. One student did not state a reason, three gave two reasons each and the rest each gave only one. The open‐ended responses were emergently coded and placed into 15 categories summarized in Table 2. By far, the most common category was "It was the norm," with just over half of the typed reasons falling in this category ( N = 28, 53%). Representative statements from this category include: "Everyone else had their camera off," and, "[it] felt awkward having it on if no one else did." Although concern about appearance was an option to select in the provided list of reasons, four students used the "Other" option to elaborate, mentioning messy hair, wearing pajamas, not having showered, and even crying (unrelated to the course). Examples from "Not feeling a need to have the camera on" include: "I did not see a need to turn on the video...," and "...I felt like it wasn't necessary for my learning." An example of "Not wanting the camera to be on or to be seen, in general" is: "I just didn't want my video on."

Note

Reasons were categorized from typed responses after choosing "Other" from a provided list of reasons. Percentages are of those respondents choosing "Other."

Students also provided additional feedback regarding video cameras being on or off during synchronous class meetings when providing open‐ended answers to other survey questions. Select quotes are drawn into the discussion that follows.

4 DISCUSSION

4.1 Overview

By surveying our students to ask why they did not always turn on their video cameras during synchronous class meetings, we gained valuable information to help us to develop strategies for encouraging students to turn on their video during class. With this information, in combination with feedback from our course instructors as well as conversations with colleagues, published research, and suggestions from articles and social media, we developed the following strategies for instructors to implement in remote instruction moving forward, summarized in Table 3. In developing these strategies, we took a student‐centered approach, being mindful of equity, inclusion, and the diversity of our students and the situations they find themselves in while learning remotely. We encourage any instructor to gather information about their own students to better tailor these strategies.

Videoconferencing camera use strategies for instructors

Do NOT require video cameras to be turned on and do offer alternatives

Explicitly encourage camera use, explain why you are doing so, and establish the norm

Address potential distractions and give breaks to help maintain attention

Use active learning techniques to keep students engaged and promote equity

Survey your students to understand their challenges

4.2 Do not require video cameras to be turned on and do offer alternatives

By taking a student‐centered approach, we make pedagogical decisions based on what is best for the student's learning, not the instructor's teaching per se. While some instructors may feel a strong need to mandate that students turn on their video cameras during class, we strongly advise against this. While we surveyed students to find broad reasons why they chose not to turn on their cameras, there are many more specific and very sensitive, reasons for their not doing so. One of our surveyed students strongly captured this point when asked about any challenges they have faced with the transition to online learning: "I would like to mention that no one should assume the living conditions of students when not on campus. Some students live in some of the worst conditions possible." This concern is consistent with those of educators reported elsewhere (Reich et al., ). For example, one teacher told researchers that their students of working class families do not want to turn on their cameras because they do not want their wealthy peers to see inside their homes and another said they have students that lack private spaces and end up connecting to Zoom from inside a closet (Reich et al., ).

College student anxiety and depression have already been increased by the COVID‐19 pandemic (Huckins et al., ), and a mandate for camera use may add to that trauma (Costa, ). Furthermore, psychological distress due to the pandemic has disproportionately affected adults 18-29 years old, adults from low income homes, and Hispanic adults (McGinty et al., ). Thus, the negative effects of mandating that cameras be kept on may also be disproportional to some student populations, such as underrepresented minorities in STEM, and contribute to already high attrition rates (PCAST, ).

We will offer alternative means for students to participate and communicate with the instructor and the rest of the class, such as polling (Sarvary & Gifford, ), discussion boards (Suler, ), shared documents (e.g., Google Docs; Perron & Sellers, ), and cooperative annotations (Zhu et al., ). Additionally, our instructors have had great success using the chat feature within Zoom. Some of them reported that individuals that did not often speak when class was in‐person were suddenly more communicative when using the chat feature online. We also found that our undergraduate teaching assistants were helpful facilitating student participation in several ways including monitoring the chat window during class, creating polls, and managing discussion boards (Asgari & Sarvary, ). Having multiple avenues for participation should improve equity and likely benefit all students, not just those that do not turn on their camera. Our students appreciated this strategy. When asked, "What are some of the positive aspects about how your lab instructor taught specifically during the online Zoom meetings?" one surveyed student wrote, "Using different ways to engage us because many people were not comfortable with sharing their cameras." Another student wrote, "I thought [my instructor] did a good job allowing us to be a part of the class without forcing any of us to speak or turn on our videos when we were not comfortable."

By not requiring camera use, it is inevitable that at some point one or more students will turn off their video cameras, making it more challenging to identify who is speaking or even present. In this case, we have found it to be helpful to ask students to properly format their name as it appears to others in the videoconferencing program. The name displayed in Zoom, for example, is sometimes a student's obscure university ID, merely their initials, or their legal name instead of their preferred name. We also recommend that students be encouraged to add a static image of their face that will appear when their video is turned off. Furthermore, instructors could set a good example by following these suggestions themselves.

4.3 Explicitly encourage camera use, explain why you are doing so, and establish the norm

Instead of requiring video cameras to be turned on, we recommend encouraging it while fostering an inclusive classroom environment. We suspect that some students will not need much encouragement, especially in an age of social distancing to fight the pandemic. For example, one student wrote, "[My instructor] had her camera on [and it] was nice to see another face during times like this [sic]." However, others may need more encouragement.

An early step in encouraging students to use their cameras is to explicitly request it. One of our students wrote, "...if asked to turn my camera on I would have," and another student indicated that they left their camera off because that was the default setting when connecting with Zoom. We plan to include our camera use policies in the syllabus and have instructors communicate explicit encouragement of camera use on the first day of class, repeating later in the semester if necessary. In addition to communicating when cameras are encouraged to be on, it is also important to explicitly communicate when it would be appropriate to turn them off (and separately, the microphone), like when being interrupted by a family member or trying to improve a weak internet connection.

We also plan to explain to our students why we encourage camera usage, as such transparency should build student buy‐in (Seidel & Tanner, ). For example, our instructors could mention some of the many benefits for camera use in remote classes, as reviewed in the introduction section, such as the value of nonverbal cues in communication (Miller, ), improved instructor effectiveness (Mottet, ), and building instructor-student and student-student relationships (Falloon, ; Mottet, ). We also think our students would like to know that when we asked past students for suggestions for improving the online Zoom lab meetings, several suggested that cameras be turned on more often because it made class feel "more interactive" and "more like a normal class," for example. Similar sentiments were reported by students in chemistry classes (Kalman et al., ).

By explicitly encouraging camera usage and explaining why we are doing so from the first day of class, we plan to establish video sharing as the classroom norm. Our survey revealed how powerful setting the norm can be. The most frequent "Other" reason students provided for not having their video on was some form of if not being the norm set in the online classroom. For example, "no one else had it on so I shut mine off as well," "[our class] kept ours off," and "everyone else had theirs off and I felt awkward having mine on." This suggests that unspoken social norms are at play and that some portion of students experience the social pressure to follow what their classmates are doing. Classroom interaction norms implicitly set by student peers have been found to significantly shape participation, and it has been suggested that instructors have the power to shape such norms (Fassinger, , ).

We believe that the focus theory of normative conduct (Cialdini et al., , ) may help to explain our observations and form potential solutions. Applying the theory, students not turning on their cameras because of the perception that that is how most others are behaving would be a "descriptive norm." The more students that the instructor can encourage to turn on their cameras, the greater the student perception that having cameras on is the (descriptive) norm and the more likely students will comply. Another type of norm described by the theory is an "injunctive norm," which guides a student's behavior based on the perception of how most others ought to behave, that is, how most others would approve or disapprove of the behavior. Injunctive norms work even when most are not behaving as desired. Instructors can help set the injunctive norm by explicitly stating that turning cameras on is valued by the instructor and student peers. Theory also posits that a student's actions are more likely to conform to the type of norm that is salient, or in focus, at the time of behavior, so it is ideal if these norms are aligned. To avoid misalignment, we suggest that on the first day of class instructors do not describe the issue of cameras being turned off as unfortunately frequent while they encourage cameras to be on as this would set up contradictory descriptive and injunctive norms. Moreover, aligning norm types makes persuasive messages more likely to be effective (Cialdini, ).

We would also like to note that when influencing the injunctive norm, an instructor must be careful to not create the perception that having a camera off is disapproved so much as having a camera on is approved. Part of the classroom norms should be that it is okay to choose not to have your camera on (Stanford University, ). An analogy to this would be the injunctive norm that stopping to make a donation (e.g., at a Salvation Army charity kettle) is a behavior that most would approve of, but continuing to walk past is a behavior that most would not likely disapprove of.

Instructors can seek to set the norm of having cameras turned on early on so that students who are willing and able to turn their video on are more comfortable doing so. For example, on the first day of class instructors can devote time for students to introduce themselves to the rest of the class with icebreaker activities like show‐and‐tell. Subsequent classes could begin by checking‐in with each student, asking them to at least briefly turn on their cameras if they are comfortable doing so, and asking fun short questions like "what was your favorite cartoon growing up?" In larger classes where this is not practical, students could dress according to rotating themes like "funny hat day" or "show your school pride day." While setting the norms for the class, we will be mindful that no student should be made to feel uncomfortable for choosing to leave their video off. Offering alternative methods for participation and building an inclusive classroom should help with not causing any student to feel excluded.

Setting the norm that camera usage is encouraged should also help to address the most frequently cited reason our students gave for not turning on their camera: concern about their personal appearance. If students anticipate that they will likely want to have their camera on during class, they are probably more likely to prepare their appearance by, for example, brushing their hair and not wearing pajamas. It may be also helpful to tell them that a common tip from people whose careers involve working from home is to maintain a routine that often includes getting dressed and good personal hygiene (Knowlton, ; Limón, ; Rivkind, ). We should also note that the Zoom program currently offers a feature to "Touch up my appearance," which airbrushes a user's face in real time, although we do not promote its use as we suspect it contributes to the negative effects of unrealistic beauty ideals despite being an obvious manipulation (MacCallum & Widdows, ).

A state of public self‐awareness, when individuals focus their attention on aspects of the self that are able to be perceived by others, has been shown to be induced by the presence of an audience or even only a video camera (Davies, ; Froming et al., ; Govern & Marsch, ; Myllyneva & Hietanen, ). More similar to videoconferencing, the presence of a camera and seeing one's own video image was shown to heighten public self‐awareness in pairs of strangers that were engaged in video chatting (Miller et al., ). It stands to reason that a videoconference like those of a Zoom meeting would also increase public self‐awareness.

Increasing public self‐awareness may increase concern about one's personal appearance as that is one aspect of the self that is visible to the public. The level of concern that a student has for their appearance may be due to a number of different psychological and social factors that are beyond the control of the instructor, including aspects of personality (Johnson et al., ), culture, gender, and relationship status (Aune & Aune, ). As all these factors cannot possibly be addressed by an instructor, we speculate that if students are expecting to turn on their cameras, they will more likely prepare their appearance in a manner that assuages their individual concerns about being seen. While enhanced public self‐awareness is an antecedent to social anxiety, it does not necessarily lead to it (Fenigstein et al., ). Nevertheless, instructors should be aware that cameras may trigger such anxiety in students and so this is another reason not to mandate camera use.

To help maintain the norm of camera use throughout the semester and combat a potential decline in usage (e.g., Tonsmann, ), we plan to individually reach out to those students that regularly do not turn on their cameras. We will let them know that we have noticed their camera has been off and to ask whether there is anything we can do to help them feel more comfortable with turning it on. When doing so, we will be mindful of student-teacher power dynamics and seek to avoid pressuring a student into doing something they are not comfortable doing. We will also reiterate that camera use will not affect their grade and remind them of the alternative ways to participate in class and to communicate with instructors. Reaching out to students creates the opportunity to make them feel more welcomed and to gain a better understanding of the challenges they face while learning remotely. Knowledge of these challenges may allow us to provide solutions or direct students to helpful resources.

4.4 Address potential distractions and give breaks to help maintain attention

While a sizeable number of our students selected concerns about distracting their classmates and their instructor as reasons for not leaving on their video during class, we suggest ways to minimize these distractions while encouraging general camera use.

Students may be assuming that sharing their video feed while the instructor is presenting distracts from the instructor and is thus disrespectful. For example, one student wrote, "I left my video off when [my instructor] would present his slides out of respect so that all the attention would be on him." Instructors who actually prefer students' cameras to be on may not realize that some students assume their preference to be the opposite. Obviously, explicitly communicating camera polices that include when it is inappropriate to have cameras on would help.

If students find themselves distracted by the video feeds of their classmates while the instructor is presenting, they can likely alter their personal viewing settings in the videoconferencing program being used. For example, Zoom has a "speaker view" which automatically focuses on the person speaking and an option to pin the instructor's video so that it remains in focus (for an instructional video see Finio, ). If, as the results of our survey suggest, some students may be preoccupied by the thought that their classmates are "looking at them the whole time," it may be comforting to briefly inform students about the "spotlight effect," which is the tendency of people to overestimate how much they are watched and evaluated by others (Gilovich & Savitsky, ). If students are distracted by their own video feed, which is consistent with the findings that mirrors have been shown to increase self‐awareness (Froming et al., ; Govern & Marsch, ), they should look to see if the videoconferencing software being used has an option to hide it, as Zoom does (Zoom, ). Alternatively, students can place a sticky note on the portion of their screen that shows their own video.

The second most frequent reason given for not turning on their camera was concern about other people being seen in the background. There are several reasons why this may be concerning to students such as protecting the privacy of their family or roommates. Regardless of why, students may be distracted by the possibility of someone else coming into view. Similarly, students were concerned about their physical location being seen behind them. Students can be provided suggestions to deal with these concerns, including communicating with roommates and family members about when they have class and ask not to be disturbed, finding a private area of their home where they can connect with minimal distractions (Basile & Beauregard, ), staging their background to look more presentable, using a virtual background in the videoconferencing software if their computer allows it, or simply sitting with their back against a wall.

However, we must be mindful that not everyone will have access to a private space, as one of our students pointed out, "It has been difficult to stay focused for long periods of time because there is a lot of commotion in my house, and I have nowhere quiet to go work." Furthermore, our results suggest that URM students may be disproportionately more concerned about their physical location and other people being seen behind them than non‐URM students. Again, we recommend against requiring cameras be turned on and instead to look for other ways to promote inclusion.

To help maintain attention, we also encourage giving students breaks, especially with longer classes. Students can use that time to go to the bathroom, get something to eat, and relax while fighting off "Zoom fatigue" (Jiang, ; Morris, ). They will then also be less likely to turn off their video and take a break during class anyway. When students return from break, it is potentially a good time to encourage cameras to be turned on again by facilitating an activity that makes use of them.

4.5 Use active learning techniques to keep students engaged and promote equity

Several of our colleagues at Cornell and other institutions have expressed concern that students sometimes leave their video turned off in order to not be seen being inattentive or doing other things. Indeed, this does seem possible based on our students having selected as reasons for leaving their video off: not wanting to be seen not paying attention, walking away from the computer, and doing other things on their computer. Students may be bored or falling victim to the perils of multitasking (Klemm, ; Mokhtari et al., ). To capture student attention, while also improving student learning, we suggest regularly employing active learning techniques which have been shown to increase persistence in STEM, improve academic performance, and lower failure rates (Braxton et al., ; Freeman et al., ). Furthermore, active learning was found to narrow achievement gaps between students from overrepresented and underrepresented groups by improving examination scores and passing rates for all student groups, but disproportionately so for those from underrepresented minorities (Theobald et al., ). However, it should be noted that active learning does not guaranty equity and instructors should be vigilant of inequity due to a number of factors including small group dynamics (e.g., Reinholz & Shah, ) or potential hidden biases (e.g., Ernest et al., ).

By establishing engaging activities such as polling or typing into the chat window as a regular part of class, students should be less tempted to do other things during class and thus less likely to turn off their video in order to conceal themselves. Using the think‐pair‐share/listen‐think‐pair‐share technique (Lyman, ; Tanner, ) along with Zoom's breakout room feature may be a particularly helpful in this regard. Based on feedback from our instructors and students, some students seem to be more willing to turn on their video when the class is split up into smaller breakout rooms within Zoom. This pattern has also been reported by our colleagues at Cornell and other universities. We also recommend incentivizing students with a participation grade while promoting equity by providing multiple ways to participate in active learning that does not require sharing video, mentioned above. Keeping students actively engaged may also have the added bonus of decreasing the likelihood that they feel like everyone is looking at them the whole time.

4.6 Survey your students to understand their challenges

Our end‐of‐semester survey has given us information we have used to plan for the fall semester as the COVID‐19 pandemic continues. We have shared our data‐driven recommendations for encouraging camera use here but caution other instructors to consider that the challenges facing their student population may differ and require different solutions.

In addition to an end‐of‐semester survey, we surveyed our students multiple times to better understand the challenges they were facing in the switch to emergency remote instruction, and what we learned influenced our teaching practices. For example, we were initially concerned about the "digital divide" (Cullen, ) in that many of our students would not have access to a reliable internet connection or to a computer with a working webcam and microphone. However, only a small percentage of students indicated these problems (webcam: 2%; internet: 5%; N = 301) in a survey we gave during a break in classes before remote instruction began. This partly informed our conclusion that it was not unreasonable to hold live synchronous class meetings that encouraged the use of webcams while also offering asynchronous learning opportunities to those that could not attend. Those students without reliable access to the necessary technologies were also referred to university resources set up in response to the pandemic.

5 CONCLUSIONS

Our end‐of‐semester survey of students revealed insights into why students might have chosen not to turn on their video cameras during online synchronous class meetings held via Zoom. This information has helped us to develop a plan for encouraging-but not requiring-camera use as we continue remote instruction during the COVID‐19 pandemic. While the demographics and needs of students vary by course and institution, we believe that these strategies are likely to be helpful to many instructors. Our data‐driven plan also provides a model for other instructors to gather information about their own student population to develop more tailored strategies that also promote equity and inclusion.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work was considered exempt from review by the institutional review board of Cornell University and was supported by Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Active Learning Initiative Grants Program. We thank the students and laboratory instructors for providing information on this important topic. We also thank colleagues at Cornell and attendees of the Summer Institutes on Scientific Teaching remote happy hours for discussing this topic and sharing ideas. Lastly, we thank Robert Castelli, BOCP, BOCO, and Stephanie J. Kleine, CPA for their input while developing survey questions.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

None declared.

AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

Frank R. Castelli: Conceptualization (lead); data curation (lead); formal analysis (lead); investigation (equal); methodology (lead); visualization (lead); writing - original draft (lead); writing - review and editing (equal). Mark A. Sarvary: Funding acquisition (lead); investigation (equal); methodology (supporting); writing - review and editing (equal).

In order to best protect student privacy, we decline to share data beyond what is reported in the manuscript.

Abstract

Enrollment in courses taught remotely in higher education has been on the rise, with a recent surge in response to a global pandemic. While adapting this form of teaching, instructors familiar with traditional face‐to‐face methods are now met with a new set of challenges, including students not turning on their cameras during synchronous class meetings held via videoconferencing. After transitioning to emergency remote instruction in response to the COVID‐19 pandemic, our introductory biology course shifted all in‐person laboratory sections into synchronous class meetings held via the Zoom videoconferencing program. Out of consideration for students, we established a policy that video camera use during class was optional, but encouraged. However, by the end of the semester, several of our instructors and students reported lower than desired camera use that diminished the educational experience. We surveyed students to better understand why they did not turn on their cameras. We confirmed several predicted reasons including the most frequently reported: being concerned about personal appearance. Other reasons included being concerned about other people and the physical location being seen in the background and having a weak internet connection, all of which our exploratory analyses suggest may disproportionately influence underrepresented minorities. Additionally, some students revealed to us that social norms also play a role in camera use. This information was used to develop strategies to encourage-without requiring-camera use while promoting equity and inclusion. Broadly, these strategies are to not require camera use, explicitly encourage usage while establishing norms, address potential distractions, engage students with active learning, and understand your students' challenges through surveys. While the demographics and needs of students vary by course and institution, our recommendations will likely be directly helpful to many instructors and also serve as a model for gathering data to develop strategies more tailored for other student populations.

1 INTRODUCTION

Student enrollment in distance education courses in postsecondary institutions has been on the rise (NCES, ; Palvia et al., ). Some forms of distance learning utilize advances in technology that allow for synchronous class meetings over the internet using videoconferencing software (Al‐Samarraie, ). Moreover, the ongoing COVID‐19 pandemic has led to a widespread need for instruction to move online and for instructors to hold synchronous class meetings using videoconferencing software to maintain social distancing and prevent the spread of infection (The Chronicle of Higher Education, ; UNESCO, ; Yuan, ). Many educators now find themselves teaching remotely for the first time and facing a new set of challenges (e.g., Reich et al., ). One such challenge in the world of remote instruction, and the focus of this study, is not being able to see students during synchronous class meetings held via videoconferencing software, because students do not have their video cameras turned on.

Midway in the spring semester of 2020, like at many other institutions in the United States, courses at Cornell University made an emergency shift to remote instruction due to the COVID‐19 pandemic (Cornell University, ; Milman, ), and our introductory biology laboratory course, covering topics in ecology and evolution, was among them. We desired to continue the course with synchronous laboratory section meetings due to the many educational benefits for students of synchronous remote learning compared to asynchronous.

Benefits of synchronous remote learning include the following: opportunities for higher interactivity and engagement among students, timely and constructive feedback, and real‐time collaborative learning (Racheva, ). Additionally, synchronous learning helps to build a stronger sense of community that fosters interactions, discussions, and the sharing of ideas (Lin & Gao, ), something we valued to maintain after transitioning but is also important in future semesters as new cohorts of students begin classes remotely. Another benefit of synchronous learning is that the increased social interaction that comes with it compared to asynchronous learning is strongly related to greater remote learning enjoyment, improved effectiveness of remote learning, and a higher likelihood of enrolling in another online class (Muilenburg & Berge, ). Student performance in synchronous remote courses also has the potential to be similar to performance in face‐to‐face versions of the same course (e.g., Francescucci & Rohani, ). Lastly, interactions from synchronous instruction may help to counter the effects of social distancing policies that can increase feelings of loneliness and result in negative cognitive (Cacioppo & Hawkley, ) and other health consequences (Aleman & Sommer, ).

Despite our desires to teach synchronously while remote for the rest of the semester, we, and the rest of the course staff, endeavor to practice inclusive pedagogy, which includes having a mind‐set that values course design and policies that do not exclude students due to inequities (Gannon, ). Hence, we were initially concerned about the "digital divide," in that many of our students might not have access to a reliable internet connection or to a computer with a working webcam and microphone (Cullen, ). To find out if this was the case, we surveyed our students during a pause in classes before remote instruction began. Fortunately, only a small percentage of students indicated these problems (webcam: 2%; internet: 5%; N = 301). Therefore, we felt it was not unreasonable to resume instruction for our laboratory sections in the form of live synchronous class meetings held via Zoom (Zoom Video Communications), with video recordings of meetings and asynchronous means for participation for those who could not attend synchronously. Students without reliable access to the necessary technologies were also referred to university resources put in place in response to the pandemic.

After deciding that we would hold synchronous class meetings, the next question became whether we should mandate that students turn on their video cameras during class. The supervising staff agreed that the best student‐centered policy would be to not require students to use cameras because they may not be comfortable doing so, particularly if they do not have access to a private space or are embarrassed of their home environment (Costa, ). Such concerns have been expressed by other educators (Reich et al., ). The COVID‐19 pandemic has already increased college student anxiety and depression (Huckins et al., ), and a mandate for camera use may add to that trauma (Costa, ). Furthermore, students of some populations may be disproportionately affected by stress from the pandemic (McGinty et al., ). For example, national surveys of adults in the United States show that measures of symptoms of psychological distress increased from about 4% to 14% from 2018 to April 2020 with the highest increases in adults aged 18-29 (4%-24%), adults with household incomes of less than $35,000/year (8%-19%), and Hispanic adults (4%-18%) (McGinty et al., ). Thus, the negative effects of mandating that cameras be kept on may also be disproportional to some student populations, such as underrepresented minorities in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), and contribute to already high attrition rates (PCAST, ).

There are several reasons that students having cameras on may be beneficial for teaching and learning, justifying our encouragement of their use, and we review some of them here. Perhaps the most obvious benefit is the ability to communicate with nonverbal cues. Instructors benefit from receiving nonverbal cues from their students such as smiles, frowns, head nods, looks of confusion, and looks of boredom, so that they can evaluate their teaching in real time and adjust accordingly to improve student learning (Miller, ; Mottet & Richmond, ). Instructors that perceive a higher amount of nonverbal responsiveness also rate themselves as having been more effective (Mottet, ). Students similarly benefit from being able to see other students when collaboratively learning. Students with video in addition to audio were more able than students with only audio to tell how their other study group members were reacting to things they said while remote learning (Olson et al., ). The inclusion of video has also been suggested as a way to address the fact that students in remote classes without video reported that a lack of nonverbal communication "reduced their educational experience" (McBrien et al., ).

In addition to improving instructor effectiveness, being able to see students while teaching makes for a more positive affective experience. For example, instructors that perceived a higher amount of nonverbal responsiveness reported higher satisfaction and a higher preference for wanting to teach in a remote video class (Mottet, ). Additionally, instructors of our course expressed displeasure with a general feeling of "talking to yourself" that occurs when students do not have their cameras on. This is consistent with feedback from remote meeting participants who preferred videoconferencing over audio‐only conferencing because the former had the advantage of "not talking into a void" (O'Conaill et al., ). If instructors have a negative experience, they may do a poorer job teaching, and poor teaching may lead students to switch out of science, math, and engineering majors (Seymour & Hewitt, ).

Students having their cameras on also helps to build instructor‐student and student-student relationships. Instructors that perceived a higher amount of nonverbal responsiveness while teaching remotely with video reported instructor-student interpersonal relationships that were warmer, closer, and more comfortable (Mottet, ). The majority of students of a virtual classroom indicated that using videoconferencing helped build trust and rapport with other students and helped them to develop a sense of identification with others in their group, commenting that being able to hear and see each other in real time helped construct a "more complete picture" of their peers (Falloon, ). Moreover, building stronger relationships via videoconferencing likely helps fend off loneliness that may come with remote learning and social distancing, as videoconferencing has been shown to decrease feelings of loneliness in nursing home residents (Tsai et al., ).

Nevertheless, by the end of the semester, many students had often chosen to leave their cameras off, as reported by our frustrated instructors. This attrition with camera use in online classes has been reported elsewhere (Tonsmann, ). Given the potential benefits of students having their cameras on and the costs of having their cameras off, we were wondering what strategies we could use to encourage students to voluntarily turn on their cameras during laboratory sections. To develop strategies informed by data, we asked our students in an end‐of‐semester survey about why they might have chosen to not turn on their video cameras during class. In this paper, we present the results of that survey and the strategies we developed based on those results in combination with successful experiences of some of our instructors, conversations with colleagues, suggestions from articles and social media, and a review of the literature. We plan to try these strategies going forward as the need for remote instruction continues for us as well as many instructors across the globe during the COVID‐19 pandemic (UNESCO, ). While the demographics and needs of students vary by course and institution, we believe that these strategies are likely to be helpful to many instructors directly, or at least, serve as a model for gathering data to develop strategies more tailored for their students.

2 METHODS AND MATERIALS

2.1 Course description

The students surveyed were undergraduates enrolled in the Investigative Biology Laboratory course at Cornell University (Ithaca, NY, USA), a PhD‐granting institution, in the spring semester of 2020. This course is required for majors in the biological sciences and uses an inquiry‐based approach to teaching the scientific method within two main topics: the evolution of antibiotic resistance in bacteria and the ecological impact of limiting nutrients on algal growth. Before the COVID‐19 pandemic, this course was taught with one 50‐min lecture and one 3‐hr laboratory section per week. After the switch to emergency remote instruction (Cornell University, ; Milman, ), lectures were prerecorded for asynchronous viewing and sections were held synchronous via Zoom (Zoom Video Communications) with recordings available for asynchronous viewing. We decided on this format after surveying our students before remote instruction began in order to assess the challenges they would be facing once they left campus, including differences in time zones, distractions from family obligations, and access to technology. Each of 12 graduate student laboratory instructors led two sections, and most were assisted by one undergraduate teaching assistant. Section enrollment was capped at 18 students. During synchronous laboratory sections, instructors gave short presentations while screen‐sharing a slideshow and incorporating active learning techniques such as polling (Sarvary & Gifford, ) and think‐pair‐share (Tanner, ). For several weeks, a portion of each class meeting was devoted to students meeting with their long‐term groups to work on data analysis and a poster presentation using the breakout room feature of Zoom. Instructors could move between breakout rooms to help students. Students also presented their group posters to the rest of the class and responded to questions during the last synchronous class meeting.

2.2 Student sample

Total enrollment for spring 2020 was 312 students. Ninety‐one percent of enrolled students took the end‐of‐semester survey ( N = 283), and seven respondents were excluded from analysis because they either did not attend any live synchronous remote class meetings or skipped all the relevant questions, resulting in a final sample of 88% ( N = 276) of enrolled students.

Students were assigned demographic categories based on self‐reporting and had the option to skip demographic survey questions or indicate that they choose not to disclose. Results were broken down by gender based on male and female, as only one respondent identified as nonbinary ( N = 1). Students were asked about their race and ethnicity ("How would you describe yourself? Check all that apply."), and their responses were used to assign them an underrepresented minority (URM) in science and engineering or a non‐URM. URMs were defined as three racial or ethnic minority groups: blacks or African Americans; Hispanics, Latinx, or Spanish origin; and American Indians or Alaska Natives, or a mix including one of these groups (NSF, ). Non‐URMs included: whites; Asians; Native Hawaiians or other Pacific Islanders. URM status was unknown for 23 students. Freshman or non‐Freshman (Sophomore, Junior, or Senior) status was unknown for ten students. Non‐Freshman were combined due to relatively small sample sizes (Freshmen, N = 215; Sophomores, N = 32; Juniors, N = 14; Seniors, N = 5).

2.3 End‐of‐semester survey

Students were administered an end‐of‐semester survey designed to collect feedback on teaching, course design, and student experiences within the course. The survey was administered with the Qualtrics online survey tool (Qualtrics) during their last synchronous section meeting of the semester. Laboratory instructors were directed to email any absent student after class with a link to the survey and a deadline of a few days. The survey was anonymous, most questions were able to be skipped, and taking it was completely voluntary. No credit was awarded for taking the survey.

The main survey question analyzed for the current study asked, "If you ever left your video off during the live Zoom lab meetings, why did you leave it off? (check all that apply)." Students could select up to 12 reasons we hypothesized a priori or select "Not Applicable - I always had my camera on." When selecting "Other," students also had the option of typing a reason not listed. In order to be included in analysis, students had to indicate that they attend at least some of the synchronous class meetings ("Have you attended any of the Zoom lab meetings as they occurred in real time?"). Additionally, students indirectly offered insight into the phenomenon of leaving cameras off during class when responding to other survey questions that solicited feedback about the course, the emergency switch to remote instruction, and the performance of laboratory instructors.

2.4 Statistical analyses

For each of the 13 possible answer choices to the question: "If you ever left your video off during the live Zoom lab meetings, why did you leave it off? (check all that apply)," pairwise differences between demographic categories (URM vs. non‐URM, male vs. female, and Freshman vs. non‐Freshman) were analyzed with two‐tailed Fisher's exact tests using the GraphPad QuickCalcs website (GraphPad, ). The α level for this study was set at 0.05. We chose not to correct for multiple comparisons by adjusting the significance threshold, because we consider these analyses to be exploratory, with significant results requiring subsequent study for confirmation (Bender & Lange, ).

3 RESULTS

The vast majority of students ( N = 249, 90%) had their video cameras off at least some of the time during remote synchronous class meetings held via Zoom. Students indicated several reasons for doing so. Table 1 summarizes the percentages of students selecting each reason from a provided list, along with break downs by demographic categories. The most frequently selected reason overall and across all demographic categories was being concerned about appearance ( N = 113, 41% of students). The next most frequently selected reason, a concern about other people being seen in the background, was selected by substantially fewer students overall, but was still quite common ( N = 73, 26%). This reason was selected more frequently than the related reason of not wanting their physical location to be seen in the background. Of relatively moderate frequency were concerns about distracting their classmates or instructor. Not wanting to be seen walking away from the computer, not paying attention, or doing other things while at the computer were relatively infrequently selected overall and across demographic break downs. As for reasons related to technology, a very small number of students ( N = 6, 2% of students) reported that their webcam was not working, but a much larger number ( N = 61, 22%) reported having a weak internet connection.

Note

Each student that indicated they did not always have their camera on could select more than one reason. Reasons are broken down by underrepresented minorities (URM) in science and engineering status, gender, and Freshman or non‐Freshman (sophomores, juniors, and seniors) and are sorted in descending order according to all student respondents combined.

URMs more than non‐URMs selected "I was concerned about other people being seen behind me" (URM: N = 25/66; non‐URM: N = 45/187; p = 0.0376) and "I was concerned about my physical location being seen behind me" (URM: N = 17/66; non‐URM: N = 24/187; p = 0.0194). For the same two reasons, females more than males selected "I was concerned about other people being seen behind me" (Male: N = 20/99; Female: N = 52/164; p = 0.0465) and "I was concerned about my physical location being seen behind me" (Male: N = 9/99; Female: N = 35/164; p = 0.0104). However, URMs were not more likely to be females (Female URM: N = 45/161 [28%], Male URM: N = 21/91 [23%]; p = 0.4569). For "My internet connection was weak," females were significantly more likely than males to select this reason (Male: N = 15/99; Female: N = 44/164; p = 0.0326) and URMS only tended to select this reason more than non‐URMs (URM: N = 21/66; non‐URM: N = 37/187; p = 0.0603).

A sizeable number of students selected "Other" from the list of provided reasons ( N = 53, 19%) and could then type in a reason. One student did not state a reason, three gave two reasons each and the rest each gave only one. The open‐ended responses were emergently coded and placed into 15 categories summarized in Table 2. By far, the most common category was "It was the norm," with just over half of the typed reasons falling in this category ( N = 28, 53%). Representative statements from this category include: "Everyone else had their camera off," and, "[it] felt awkward having it on if no one else did." Although concern about appearance was an option to select in the provided list of reasons, four students used the "Other" option to elaborate, mentioning messy hair, wearing pajamas, not having showered, and even crying (unrelated to the course). Examples from "Not feeling a need to have the camera on" include: "I did not see a need to turn on the video...," and "...I felt like it wasn't necessary for my learning." An example of "Not wanting the camera to be on or to be seen, in general" is: "I just didn't want my video on."

Note

Reasons were categorized from typed responses after choosing "Other" from a provided list of reasons. Percentages are of those respondents choosing "Other."

Students also provided additional feedback regarding video cameras being on or off during synchronous class meetings when providing open‐ended answers to other survey questions. Select quotes are drawn into the discussion that follows.

4 DISCUSSION

4.1 Overview

By surveying our students to ask why they did not always turn on their video cameras during synchronous class meetings, we gained valuable information to help us to develop strategies for encouraging students to turn on their video during class. With this information, in combination with feedback from our course instructors as well as conversations with colleagues, published research, and suggestions from articles and social media, we developed the following strategies for instructors to implement in remote instruction moving forward, summarized in Table 3. In developing these strategies, we took a student‐centered approach, being mindful of equity, inclusion, and the diversity of our students and the situations they find themselves in while learning remotely. We encourage any instructor to gather information about their own students to better tailor these strategies.

Videoconferencing camera use strategies for instructors

Do NOT require video cameras to be turned on and do offer alternatives

Explicitly encourage camera use, explain why you are doing so, and establish the norm

Address potential distractions and give breaks to help maintain attention

Use active learning techniques to keep students engaged and promote equity

Survey your students to understand their challenges

4.2 Do not require video cameras to be turned on and do offer alternatives

By taking a student‐centered approach, we make pedagogical decisions based on what is best for the student's learning, not the instructor's teaching per se. While some instructors may feel a strong need to mandate that students turn on their video cameras during class, we strongly advise against this. While we surveyed students to find broad reasons why they chose not to turn on their cameras, there are many more specific and very sensitive, reasons for their not doing so. One of our surveyed students strongly captured this point when asked about any challenges they have faced with the transition to online learning: "I would like to mention that no one should assume the living conditions of students when not on campus. Some students live in some of the worst conditions possible." This concern is consistent with those of educators reported elsewhere (Reich et al., ). For example, one teacher told researchers that their students of working class families do not want to turn on their cameras because they do not want their wealthy peers to see inside their homes and another said they have students that lack private spaces and end up connecting to Zoom from inside a closet (Reich et al., ).

College student anxiety and depression have already been increased by the COVID‐19 pandemic (Huckins et al., ), and a mandate for camera use may add to that trauma (Costa, ). Furthermore, psychological distress due to the pandemic has disproportionately affected adults 18-29 years old, adults from low income homes, and Hispanic adults (McGinty et al., ). Thus, the negative effects of mandating that cameras be kept on may also be disproportional to some student populations, such as underrepresented minorities in STEM, and contribute to already high attrition rates (PCAST, ).

We will offer alternative means for students to participate and communicate with the instructor and the rest of the class, such as polling (Sarvary & Gifford, ), discussion boards (Suler, ), shared documents (e.g., Google Docs; Perron & Sellers, ), and cooperative annotations (Zhu et al., ). Additionally, our instructors have had great success using the chat feature within Zoom. Some of them reported that individuals that did not often speak when class was in‐person were suddenly more communicative when using the chat feature online. We also found that our undergraduate teaching assistants were helpful facilitating student participation in several ways including monitoring the chat window during class, creating polls, and managing discussion boards (Asgari & Sarvary, ). Having multiple avenues for participation should improve equity and likely benefit all students, not just those that do not turn on their camera. Our students appreciated this strategy. When asked, "What are some of the positive aspects about how your lab instructor taught specifically during the online Zoom meetings?" one surveyed student wrote, "Using different ways to engage us because many people were not comfortable with sharing their cameras." Another student wrote, "I thought [my instructor] did a good job allowing us to be a part of the class without forcing any of us to speak or turn on our videos when we were not comfortable."

By not requiring camera use, it is inevitable that at some point one or more students will turn off their video cameras, making it more challenging to identify who is speaking or even present. In this case, we have found it to be helpful to ask students to properly format their name as it appears to others in the videoconferencing program. The name displayed in Zoom, for example, is sometimes a student's obscure university ID, merely their initials, or their legal name instead of their preferred name. We also recommend that students be encouraged to add a static image of their face that will appear when their video is turned off. Furthermore, instructors could set a good example by following these suggestions themselves.

4.3 Explicitly encourage camera use, explain why you are doing so, and establish the norm

Instead of requiring video cameras to be turned on, we recommend encouraging it while fostering an inclusive classroom environment. We suspect that some students will not need much encouragement, especially in an age of social distancing to fight the pandemic. For example, one student wrote, "[My instructor] had her camera on [and it] was nice to see another face during times like this [sic]." However, others may need more encouragement.

An early step in encouraging students to use their cameras is to explicitly request it. One of our students wrote, "...if asked to turn my camera on I would have," and another student indicated that they left their camera off because that was the default setting when connecting with Zoom. We plan to include our camera use policies in the syllabus and have instructors communicate explicit encouragement of camera use on the first day of class, repeating later in the semester if necessary. In addition to communicating when cameras are encouraged to be on, it is also important to explicitly communicate when it would be appropriate to turn them off (and separately, the microphone), like when being interrupted by a family member or trying to improve a weak internet connection.

We also plan to explain to our students why we encourage camera usage, as such transparency should build student buy‐in (Seidel & Tanner, ). For example, our instructors could mention some of the many benefits for camera use in remote classes, as reviewed in the introduction section, such as the value of nonverbal cues in communication (Miller, ), improved instructor effectiveness (Mottet, ), and building instructor-student and student-student relationships (Falloon, ; Mottet, ). We also think our students would like to know that when we asked past students for suggestions for improving the online Zoom lab meetings, several suggested that cameras be turned on more often because it made class feel "more interactive" and "more like a normal class," for example. Similar sentiments were reported by students in chemistry classes (Kalman et al., ).

By explicitly encouraging camera usage and explaining why we are doing so from the first day of class, we plan to establish video sharing as the classroom norm. Our survey revealed how powerful setting the norm can be. The most frequent "Other" reason students provided for not having their video on was some form of if not being the norm set in the online classroom. For example, "no one else had it on so I shut mine off as well," "[our class] kept ours off," and "everyone else had theirs off and I felt awkward having mine on." This suggests that unspoken social norms are at play and that some portion of students experience the social pressure to follow what their classmates are doing. Classroom interaction norms implicitly set by student peers have been found to significantly shape participation, and it has been suggested that instructors have the power to shape such norms (Fassinger, , ).

We believe that the focus theory of normative conduct (Cialdini et al., , ) may help to explain our observations and form potential solutions. Applying the theory, students not turning on their cameras because of the perception that that is how most others are behaving would be a "descriptive norm." The more students that the instructor can encourage to turn on their cameras, the greater the student perception that having cameras on is the (descriptive) norm and the more likely students will comply. Another type of norm described by the theory is an "injunctive norm," which guides a student's behavior based on the perception of how most others ought to behave, that is, how most others would approve or disapprove of the behavior. Injunctive norms work even when most are not behaving as desired. Instructors can help set the injunctive norm by explicitly stating that turning cameras on is valued by the instructor and student peers. Theory also posits that a student's actions are more likely to conform to the type of norm that is salient, or in focus, at the time of behavior, so it is ideal if these norms are aligned. To avoid misalignment, we suggest that on the first day of class instructors do not describe the issue of cameras being turned off as unfortunately frequent while they encourage cameras to be on as this would set up contradictory descriptive and injunctive norms. Moreover, aligning norm types makes persuasive messages more likely to be effective (Cialdini, ).

We would also like to note that when influencing the injunctive norm, an instructor must be careful to not create the perception that having a camera off is disapproved so much as having a camera on is approved. Part of the classroom norms should be that it is okay to choose not to have your camera on (Stanford University, ). An analogy to this would be the injunctive norm that stopping to make a donation (e.g., at a Salvation Army charity kettle) is a behavior that most would approve of, but continuing to walk past is a behavior that most would not likely disapprove of.

Instructors can seek to set the norm of having cameras turned on early on so that students who are willing and able to turn their video on are more comfortable doing so. For example, on the first day of class instructors can devote time for students to introduce themselves to the rest of the class with icebreaker activities like show‐and‐tell. Subsequent classes could begin by checking‐in with each student, asking them to at least briefly turn on their cameras if they are comfortable doing so, and asking fun short questions like "what was your favorite cartoon growing up?" In larger classes where this is not practical, students could dress according to rotating themes like "funny hat day" or "show your school pride day." While setting the norms for the class, we will be mindful that no student should be made to feel uncomfortable for choosing to leave their video off. Offering alternative methods for participation and building an inclusive classroom should help with not causing any student to feel excluded.

Setting the norm that camera usage is encouraged should also help to address the most frequently cited reason our students gave for not turning on their camera: concern about their personal appearance. If students anticipate that they will likely want to have their camera on during class, they are probably more likely to prepare their appearance by, for example, brushing their hair and not wearing pajamas. It may be also helpful to tell them that a common tip from people whose careers involve working from home is to maintain a routine that often includes getting dressed and good personal hygiene (Knowlton, ; Limón, ; Rivkind, ). We should also note that the Zoom program currently offers a feature to "Touch up my appearance," which airbrushes a user's face in real time, although we do not promote its use as we suspect it contributes to the negative effects of unrealistic beauty ideals despite being an obvious manipulation (MacCallum & Widdows, ).

A state of public self‐awareness, when individuals focus their attention on aspects of the self that are able to be perceived by others, has been shown to be induced by the presence of an audience or even only a video camera (Davies, ; Froming et al., ; Govern & Marsch, ; Myllyneva & Hietanen, ). More similar to videoconferencing, the presence of a camera and seeing one's own video image was shown to heighten public self‐awareness in pairs of strangers that were engaged in video chatting (Miller et al., ). It stands to reason that a videoconference like those of a Zoom meeting would also increase public self‐awareness.

Increasing public self‐awareness may increase concern about one's personal appearance as that is one aspect of the self that is visible to the public. The level of concern that a student has for their appearance may be due to a number of different psychological and social factors that are beyond the control of the instructor, including aspects of personality (Johnson et al., ), culture, gender, and relationship status (Aune & Aune, ). As all these factors cannot possibly be addressed by an instructor, we speculate that if students are expecting to turn on their cameras, they will more likely prepare their appearance in a manner that assuages their individual concerns about being seen. While enhanced public self‐awareness is an antecedent to social anxiety, it does not necessarily lead to it (Fenigstein et al., ). Nevertheless, instructors should be aware that cameras may trigger such anxiety in students and so this is another reason not to mandate camera use.

To help maintain the norm of camera use throughout the semester and combat a potential decline in usage (e.g., Tonsmann, ), we plan to individually reach out to those students that regularly do not turn on their cameras. We will let them know that we have noticed their camera has been off and to ask whether there is anything we can do to help them feel more comfortable with turning it on. When doing so, we will be mindful of student-teacher power dynamics and seek to avoid pressuring a student into doing something they are not comfortable doing. We will also reiterate that camera use will not affect their grade and remind them of the alternative ways to participate in class and to communicate with instructors. Reaching out to students creates the opportunity to make them feel more welcomed and to gain a better understanding of the challenges they face while learning remotely. Knowledge of these challenges may allow us to provide solutions or direct students to helpful resources.

4.4 Address potential distractions and give breaks to help maintain attention

While a sizeable number of our students selected concerns about distracting their classmates and their instructor as reasons for not leaving on their video during class, we suggest ways to minimize these distractions while encouraging general camera use.

Students may be assuming that sharing their video feed while the instructor is presenting distracts from the instructor and is thus disrespectful. For example, one student wrote, "I left my video off when [my instructor] would present his slides out of respect so that all the attention would be on him." Instructors who actually prefer students' cameras to be on may not realize that some students assume their preference to be the opposite. Obviously, explicitly communicating camera polices that include when it is inappropriate to have cameras on would help.

If students find themselves distracted by the video feeds of their classmates while the instructor is presenting, they can likely alter their personal viewing settings in the videoconferencing program being used. For example, Zoom has a "speaker view" which automatically focuses on the person speaking and an option to pin the instructor's video so that it remains in focus (for an instructional video see Finio, ). If, as the results of our survey suggest, some students may be preoccupied by the thought that their classmates are "looking at them the whole time," it may be comforting to briefly inform students about the "spotlight effect," which is the tendency of people to overestimate how much they are watched and evaluated by others (Gilovich & Savitsky, ). If students are distracted by their own video feed, which is consistent with the findings that mirrors have been shown to increase self‐awareness (Froming et al., ; Govern & Marsch, ), they should look to see if the videoconferencing software being used has an option to hide it, as Zoom does (Zoom, ). Alternatively, students can place a sticky note on the portion of their screen that shows their own video.

The second most frequent reason given for not turning on their camera was concern about other people being seen in the background. There are several reasons why this may be concerning to students such as protecting the privacy of their family or roommates. Regardless of why, students may be distracted by the possibility of someone else coming into view. Similarly, students were concerned about their physical location being seen behind them. Students can be provided suggestions to deal with these concerns, including communicating with roommates and family members about when they have class and ask not to be disturbed, finding a private area of their home where they can connect with minimal distractions (Basile & Beauregard, ), staging their background to look more presentable, using a virtual background in the videoconferencing software if their computer allows it, or simply sitting with their back against a wall.

However, we must be mindful that not everyone will have access to a private space, as one of our students pointed out, "It has been difficult to stay focused for long periods of time because there is a lot of commotion in my house, and I have nowhere quiet to go work." Furthermore, our results suggest that URM students may be disproportionately more concerned about their physical location and other people being seen behind them than non‐URM students. Again, we recommend against requiring cameras be turned on and instead to look for other ways to promote inclusion.

To help maintain attention, we also encourage giving students breaks, especially with longer classes. Students can use that time to go to the bathroom, get something to eat, and relax while fighting off "Zoom fatigue" (Jiang, ; Morris, ). They will then also be less likely to turn off their video and take a break during class anyway. When students return from break, it is potentially a good time to encourage cameras to be turned on again by facilitating an activity that makes use of them.

4.5 Use active learning techniques to keep students engaged and promote equity

Several of our colleagues at Cornell and other institutions have expressed concern that students sometimes leave their video turned off in order to not be seen being inattentive or doing other things. Indeed, this does seem possible based on our students having selected as reasons for leaving their video off: not wanting to be seen not paying attention, walking away from the computer, and doing other things on their computer. Students may be bored or falling victim to the perils of multitasking (Klemm, ; Mokhtari et al., ). To capture student attention, while also improving student learning, we suggest regularly employing active learning techniques which have been shown to increase persistence in STEM, improve academic performance, and lower failure rates (Braxton et al., ; Freeman et al., ). Furthermore, active learning was found to narrow achievement gaps between students from overrepresented and underrepresented groups by improving examination scores and passing rates for all student groups, but disproportionately so for those from underrepresented minorities (Theobald et al., ). However, it should be noted that active learning does not guaranty equity and instructors should be vigilant of inequity due to a number of factors including small group dynamics (e.g., Reinholz & Shah, ) or potential hidden biases (e.g., Ernest et al., ).

By establishing engaging activities such as polling or typing into the chat window as a regular part of class, students should be less tempted to do other things during class and thus less likely to turn off their video in order to conceal themselves. Using the think‐pair‐share/listen‐think‐pair‐share technique (Lyman, ; Tanner, ) along with Zoom's breakout room feature may be a particularly helpful in this regard. Based on feedback from our instructors and students, some students seem to be more willing to turn on their video when the class is split up into smaller breakout rooms within Zoom. This pattern has also been reported by our colleagues at Cornell and other universities. We also recommend incentivizing students with a participation grade while promoting equity by providing multiple ways to participate in active learning that does not require sharing video, mentioned above. Keeping students actively engaged may also have the added bonus of decreasing the likelihood that they feel like everyone is looking at them the whole time.

4.6 Survey your students to understand their challenges

Our end‐of‐semester survey has given us information we have used to plan for the fall semester as the COVID‐19 pandemic continues. We have shared our data‐driven recommendations for encouraging camera use here but caution other instructors to consider that the challenges facing their student population may differ and require different solutions.

In addition to an end‐of‐semester survey, we surveyed our students multiple times to better understand the challenges they were facing in the switch to emergency remote instruction, and what we learned influenced our teaching practices. For example, we were initially concerned about the "digital divide" (Cullen, ) in that many of our students would not have access to a reliable internet connection or to a computer with a working webcam and microphone. However, only a small percentage of students indicated these problems (webcam: 2%; internet: 5%; N = 301) in a survey we gave during a break in classes before remote instruction began. This partly informed our conclusion that it was not unreasonable to hold live synchronous class meetings that encouraged the use of webcams while also offering asynchronous learning opportunities to those that could not attend. Those students without reliable access to the necessary technologies were also referred to university resources set up in response to the pandemic.

5 CONCLUSIONS

Our end‐of‐semester survey of students revealed insights into why students might have chosen not to turn on their video cameras during online synchronous class meetings held via Zoom. This information has helped us to develop a plan for encouraging-but not requiring-camera use as we continue remote instruction during the COVID‐19 pandemic. While the demographics and needs of students vary by course and institution, we believe that these strategies are likely to be helpful to many instructors. Our data‐driven plan also provides a model for other instructors to gather information about their own student population to develop more tailored strategies that also promote equity and inclusion.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work was considered exempt from review by the institutional review board of Cornell University and was supported by Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Active Learning Initiative Grants Program. We thank the students and laboratory instructors for providing information on this important topic. We also thank colleagues at Cornell and attendees of the Summer Institutes on Scientific Teaching remote happy hours for discussing this topic and sharing ideas. Lastly, we thank Robert Castelli, BOCP, BOCO, and Stephanie J. Kleine, CPA for their input while developing survey questions.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

None declared.

AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

Frank R. Castelli: Conceptualization (lead); data curation (lead); formal analysis (lead); investigation (equal); methodology (lead); visualization (lead); writing - original draft (lead); writing - review and editing (equal). Mark A. Sarvary: Funding acquisition (lead); investigation (equal); methodology (supporting); writing - review and editing (equal).

In order to best protect student privacy, we decline to share data beyond what is reported in the manuscript.

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Why students do not turn on their video cameras during online classes and an equitable and inclusive plan to encourage them to do so

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ACADEMIC PRACTICE IN ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTION Corresponding Author Investigative Biology Teaching Laboratories, Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA Correspondence Investigative Biology Teaching Laboratories, Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA.

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Humanizing Infographic 2.0 - MICHELLE PACANSKY-BROCK

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Humanizing Infographic 2.0 - MICHELLE PACANSKY-BROCK

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Get creative with your use of breakout rooms

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Get creative with your use of breakout rooms

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An adjunct faculty of Positive Psychology and Mathematics at IE University in Madrid, Spain, I've always worked to make my classes interactive and fun through gamification. If I have a math class of 16 in-person students, for example, I'll engage them in a multi-round game; in each round, four students-one from each team-go up the whiteboard to simultaneously solve a math problem and win points for their respective teams by being the first to answer correctly. The move to online and hybrid teaching, however, forced me to rethink this and other in-class activities.

I had to adapt to a mode in which instructors can no longer hand out paper or physical materials and where students coexist in multiple spaces-both physical and virtual. I quickly learned that breakout rooms would play an important role in transforming old face-to-face group practices to the new era of education.

Here, I share some examples of specific breakout room activities I implemented in my classes last semester and why they were so successful.

Breakout Room Activities Across Disciplines: 5 Use Cases

I taught four different undergraduate classes last fall-a core calculus class; an optional remedial math class; an elective course on positive organizational behavior; and a seminar on kindness, empathy, and compassion-in a variety of formats. One of my classes was fully online, 60 percent synchronous and 40 percent asynchronous, while another was a 100-percent synchronous hybrid class, with some students physically in the classroom and others joining online.

You can imagine my mental mess preparing for class-you cannot teach and design a remedial math class the same way you deliver a seminar on kindness, and you cannot plan for a 100-percent online class the same way you approach a synchronous hybrid class.

I did a lot of brainstorming around the idea of using breakout rooms, and I was able to easily plan lessons for my varied course load across multiple subjects and formats. Here are just a few breakout room activities I implemented.

1. Digital gaming and competition. In my remedial online math class, I had students solve problems collaboratively in breakout rooms. Then, when we reconvened, we played a digital memory game; students matched the problem statements they had just solved with the solutions to check the answers.

Working on math problems in isolation is not something students particularly enjoy. Adding elements of teamwork and gamification can make this kind of learning more attractive. Students had an incentive to solve problems correctly because they knew they would need the right answers to win the competition. They didn't even realize the matching game was a formative assessment. It was a fun way for both me and the students to check if they had arrived at the correct solution.

"You can imagine my mental mess preparing for class-you cannot teach and design a remedial math class the same way you deliver a seminar on kindness, and you cannot plan for a 100-percent online class the same way you approach a synchronous hybrid class."

Stephanie Reina

2. Research and peer learning. In my organizational behavior class, I assigned students to one of three different groups. Each group had a specific topic to research. The first group had to discover policies to promote physical wellbeing at work; the second, mental wellbeing; and the third, social wellbeing. I required students to turn in their findings as homework the day before our session. This way, I ensured that everyone had prepared the appropriate material we would then use in class.

When we met, I first put students into homogeneous breakout groups in which everyone had researched the same topic. This allowed them to share their findings and close any gaps they faced in their individual projects. Next, I put students in mixed breakout groups, with two people from physical wellbeing, two from mental, and two from social. I then asked them to teach each other their individual conclusions.

This format worked very well, as in-class peer learning saves students from listening to the professor talk for an extended period of time. To conclude the exercise and to hold students accountable for their work, I asked each group to produce a visual summary of their learnings as a graded component of the activity. They came up with comprehensive and professional designs (see Figure 1).

Students walked away with solid knowledge of policies that can foster physical, mental, and social wellbeing at work, as well as the feeling that they spent their time effortlessly conversing with their classmates. This was the first time I had designed a lesson where peer learning took center stage, and I merely orchestrated the process. I was happy to see this activity could be delivered successfully-even in a virtual environment.

3. Draw and compare. In my hybrid calculus for economics class, I first had students complete a worksheet on their own, with their purchase intentions for certain goods given different budgets. Then, I put students in breakout rooms, which represented "the market." Using their aggregate individual quantities under the different budget situations, I asked them to perform various tasks: calculate the linear demand function given two points, find the elasticity of demand with respect to price and income, and draw and compare the different budget curves.

The beauty of this activity is that it needs to be done in teams; each group simulates a market, and only by adding the individual quantities can students obtain the total market quantities required for the calculations. When I graded their worksheets, I confirmed that students had grasped the concepts and benefited from working together because most of their answers were correct. I was pleased to see that this activity worked as well in the hybrid format as it used to work in the physical classroom.

4. Brainstorming ideas. In the kindness seminar, I put students in groups and had them come up with examples of acts of kindness they've observed during the pandemic. Afterward, they put their ideas on Mentimeter, a software program that then created a word cloud summarizing their collective thoughts (see Figure 2).

Seminars typically bring together students who may not otherwise know each other. When participants gather online, it's especially difficult for them to connect with new people. If they don't interact during class, they never will. This group activity provided my students an outlet to discuss not only class-related concepts, but also deep feelings. Thanks to this regular practice, students were able to create meaningful connections as the seminar progressed. At the end of the semester, students commented that they made new friends while sharing in the breakout rooms-an unexpected, positive side effect of a learning activity.

5. Integrals Bingo. In my remedial math course, we played an adapted version of my in-class Integrals Bingo game. Each group picked a bingo card by taking a picture with their phones as I showed each card through the video screen (see Figure 3). Then they went into breakout rooms to solve the math problems in each bingo square. I began drawing the solutions and broadcasting them one at a time through the messaging utility. If a group got bingo, they had to come out of the breakout room and check their answers with me.

This activity worked well because, again, students had an incentive to solve their assigned math problems quickly and correctly. They collaborated and checked each other's answers. The only downside was that, for me, this activity was a bit isolating. While the students were working in the breakout rooms, I was left alone in the main room broadcasting solutions through the chat. Nevertheless, it was worth it because I knew that active learning was happening on the other side. Students enjoyed solving integrals in this way-each time they thought they had bingo, their reaction was always positive. Even if their answer was wrong, they were motivated to go back and fix it before another team beat them to it.

Why Breakout Rooms Have Been Such a Pleasant Surprise

I've found that using a variety of breakout room activities has given my students a reason to actually come to class rather than just watch the recording. Other reasons why I organize activities in breakout rooms include the following:

Breakout rooms give everyone a chance to make their voices heard. Many introverted students struggle to participate in large-group settings. Quiet students often have valuable insights, but they are too shy to share. Breakout rooms give them an intimate setting and remove the pressure of being in the instructor's spotlight. Discussing ideas in the comfort of a small, virtual group allows diverse contributions to surface in the voice of the breakout room's spokesperson when the class reconvenes.

Breakout activities make the class more interactive by breaking up the monotony of lectures. Plus, students typically learn more in classes that are interactive, so it's always a good idea to break up lectures with activities-especially when teaching through a computer screen.

Students in small groups hold one another accountable. They will go around and make sure each person gives their opinion, or, in the example of solving math problems together, they will check their answers with one another.

Students crave and need connection -especially this year. Breakout rooms give people permission to talk, not just to the authority figure in the classroom, but to their peers. If they can do that while they discuss and learn the material, all the better.

Look Beyond the Obvious Use Cases for Breakout Rooms

Breakout rooms give students the opportunity to collaborate, experiment, analyze, discuss, and dissect. Instructors can incorporate these activities in almost any class by putting a spin on traditional classroom practices. Class debate? Use breakout rooms. Brainstorm ideas? Use breakout rooms. Math problems? Use breakout rooms. Critique essays? Use breakout rooms. Internet research? Use breakout rooms. As always, just keep the learning objectives in mind and envision how the goal can be realized by having students work together, albeit virtually.

As educators, it is our responsibility to give students the best possible learning experience no matter the circumstances. Luckily, the online tools at our disposal-breakout rooms in particular-can nicely emulate small, in-person work groups. While the experience will not be exactly the same, many of our in-person classroom activities can be adapted to achieve our learning objectives online.

And while I've found success with breakout rooms, there is still a long way to go to tap into all that digital learning has to offer. I certainly continue to experiment with different tools in my quest to master leveraging technology to better serve my students. After considering my experience and my students' feedback, I plan to continue using breakout rooms, as they constitute the closest possible substitute to the good old peer and group learning techniques we know are so effective.

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Get Creative with Your Use of Breakout Rooms

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An adjunct faculty of Positive Psychology and Mathematics at IE University in Madrid, Spain, I've always worked to make my classes interactive and fun through gamification.

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BREAKOUT ROOMS – expectations, EXPECTATIONS, EXPECTATIONs – LEARNING DESIGN by Paul G Moss

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Group discussion can be a very useful pedagogy if implemented well. I've written about asynchronous discussions here, but the same theory applies to synchronous too. Group work is another beast altogether. There are a number of ways that the positive intention of getting peers to cooperate and collaborate on a task can be thwarted, but of most concern is the inability to ensure equal participation of all members.

There are two ways of looking at this (of course there are more, but ...). The Ringelmann effect suggests that an individual's participation or output decreases proportionally with a group's size. This is likely because every one thinks every one else is doing the work and so can relax a little. This may suggest why you can't expect a group of 3 to produce 3 times the work of an individual.

The other way to consider this is to think of the advantage of drafting, the strategy of riding behind another cyclist.
In road racing, bicyclists group together in a pack known as the "peloton" or a pace line called an "echelon." Cyclists who are part of the group can save up to 40 percent in energy expeditures over a cyclist who is not drafting with the group.
Of course the analogy is a bit of a stretch, more about physics than psychology, but it certainly rings true from my experience of employing group work in classes. To add weight to the entanglement, David Didau exhorts us to consider the opportunity vs the cost of group work, cautioning about rushing into the pedagogy to satisfy ideology: 'Bad groupwork is worse than almost any other classroom sin, ending in the tyranny of the strong and the persecution of the weak'. To mitigate against this, I propose the learning design utilises two strategies, and both are about setting clear expectations.

1. Make sure individuals know what to do in the group task

We've all done it - sent everyone off to the group and then when you've wandered into the space found that students didn't know what to do - and hence haven't started. Often we fall into the trap of the Curse of Knowledge and assume that what we have said or instructed is clear to students. Providing explicit instructions of what to do when the group work begins is absolutely crucial. A detailed breakdown of each step of the task, despite how blatantly obvious it may seem, will prevent students genuinely not knowing what to do or using unclear instructions as an excuse to not participate (which we all know happens).

In the remote setting, perhaps even better is to get groups actually working before they go into the breakout room. Present the instructions, ask if they are clear to students and suggest to them the onus of responsibility to ask now before they go into the room if there is any confusion. Make the first task in the group something that can be done as an individual. This will get the ball rolling with everyone in the group and prevent inertia when the group actually breaks out because no one wants to make the first move. Provide a question as part of the task to begin discussion about the first activity and assign it to a member of the group as you begin to set the groups up. That is, as you are about to send a group off, assign a role to one of the team.

This assignment of roles is certainly worth considering, but perhaps more useful is to explain to students the purpose and possible benefits of participation in the task and provide a model for them to see 'what a good one looks like'. Providing resources that show students what to do in certain situations and how to handle particular behaviours, adding to their schema of group work, is far more likely to help than just hoping students will be able to work out what to do when they are left to their own devices.

2. Make sure students know what the output of the group work entails

Clear expectations about what group output looks like is also crucial. Setting up what the learning outcomes are and how will they be demonstrated are an essential part of the learning design. Crucially though, detailing what the various stages of success are provide small goal posts for students and ensures they are working towards the outcome/s. When you eventually get into the breakout room to check on progress, you can address what you see against the expectations you set. The explicit break down of what success looks like empowers you with assertiveness when the group hasn't produced a sufficient amount of work. The number of times I've gone into a group and excused a lack of progress with the statement: 'Ok, now you know what to do so when I return I am expecting this...' - arrgghhhh.

Group work may well be one of the most difficult pedagogies to get right, but when it works it can be a very powerful and satisfying strategy. Try these approaches and see if they reduce some of the barriers to making group work a productive and student active learning experience.

I'm Paul Moss. I'm a learning designer at the University of Adelaide. Follow me on Twitter @edmerger

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BREAKOUT ROOMS - expectations, EXPECTATIONS, EXPECTATIONs

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Group discussion can be a very useful pedagogy if implemented well. I've written about asynchronous discussions here, but the same theory applies to synchronous too. Group work is another beast altogether. There are a number of ways that the positive intention of getting peers to cooperate and collaborate on a task can be thwarted, but...

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“I want to break free”: How online breakout rooms have become a modern educational curse - Chartered Association of Business Schools

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Chartered Association of Business Schools

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You get in the car, start the engine, press down on the clutch and engage reverse gear. The routine is well established, deeply engrained in your brain and requires only a bare minimum of thought. In the classroom, these routines are set very early on in our career; check for learning, identify miscreants who are wandering off task, keep an eye on the time... again, they help us in our day to days lives as lecturers.

Since the start of the current pandemic, a new routine has become apparent in UK business schools. The rush to remote learning has caused a tidal wave of advice and 'good practice' for lecturers. Whilst in many ways this has shown the sector at its best - helping each other, supporting and attempting to put the student experience at the forefront of everything it does - the reality for many students is somewhat different. A typical routine goes something like this: the online class starts, the lecturer imparts knowledge to the group and then, students are dispersed to breakout rooms to interact with their peers, and it is at this moment that there is increasing evidence that things are going wrong.

A recent blog by a student experiencing this new routine raised the point that many students, at best, dislike the idea of being herded into forced interaction in these rooms, and at worst, dread it ( Whear, 2020). Their experience has been mirrored by ours when we have researched the views of students on both undergraduate and postgraduate courses. What has not always been reported though, has been a growing resistance amongst business lecturers to the all-pervading view that any session remains incomplete without the presence of a breakout room.

From a lecturer's perspective it is easy to see why breakout rooms are initially an attractive option with multiple teaching theories stressing the importance of interaction and getting students to indulge in peer learning. As Keith Pond (2020) described in his recent blog, an online community with the interaction that it entails, can be a useful stress-reducing tool. But, what we have found is that once breakout rooms become part of a routine, their limitations become apparent. For lecturers, the ability to continuously scan around the room, checking groups are engaged with the task is lost as you can only be with one group at a time (this is particularly difficult when working with the large cohorts many business schools have reported). We have witnessed colleagues becoming increasingly anxious when they feel students are not engaging in the rooms which leads to a breakdown of the session and of course, it is very difficult to get the students "back in the room," in all senses, if that happens.

Whilst lecturers have grown increasingly aware of the problems of using breakout rooms, students' complaints have become increasingly vociferous. In common with Whear (2020), many have complained about the forced interaction that breakout rooms assume and a feeling of how being placed into a group with random others can lead to anxiety, a feeling exacerbated in Level 4 and 7 study where students might never have physically met their peers. Many students we surveyed described the rooms as 'awkward' (often abbreviated just to 'awks') with little interaction and cameras (and sometimes mics) switched firmly to off.

So, what is the solution for business schools?

With very limited alternatives, many of us promoted the use of breakout rooms, perceiving them as the best virtual replication of working in small groups in the classroom. Quickly however, the limitations became apparent, so much so that on many Level 4 (and some Level 7) programmes here at Liverpool Business School, they have now been completely abandoned. Given that making peer to peer connections at the very outset of your university studies is seen as a key foundation of helping students progress in their studies, we have been keen to encourage this whilst not making the mistake of only using breakout rooms. After all,if teaching were face-to-face, we would use lots of different approaches to promote a community for learners.

A number of techniques have worked well in helping foster an organic community amongst students, not the forced engagement created by breakout rooms. We are keeping the students together far more and helping them to get to know each other by saying names frequently - 'Hello Amy, Hello Sultan' has become a mantra - and we have also been going round the "room" again at the end saying goodbye. Whilst not putting undue pressure on, we have encouraged students to unmute and requesting cameras on to say hello and goodbye. This acts as a gentle, non-threatening introduction for students and when they feel comfortable with this, we have been encouraging interaction on the Zoom chat with each other, talking students through how to set up Teams study groups, as well as promoting student led social media groups. With no on campus face to face teaching here yet, we have not set any "group" tasks for Level 4 - it feels too early. Switching cameras on still remains a step too far for some - smaller groups with gregarious individuals do influence the less confident which can result in all cameras on but we are also still experiencing groups with no cameras on .

The message has been that small steps are needed to build a community amongst students. Instead of forcing interaction through breakout rooms, students have been encouraged to interact on their own terms. Saying hello and goodbye might sound like a very small step forward, but the significance of turning on cameras and mics should not be underestimated. Lecturers have been encouraged to act as the facilitator of this process so they signpost to events such as regular 'Town Hall' gatherings where students can attend and interact. Interaction is strongly encouraged but unlike the forced interaction inherent in the use of breakout rooms, interaction has been done in a positive, student-centred manner that means that it is not seen as a threat, instead it is seen as a support.
References:
Pond, K. (2020) We are all in IT Together, CABS Blog, available at: https://charteredabs.org/were-all-in-it-together/ (accessed 28 th October 2020)

Whear, L. (2020) Breakout Rooms are the Actual Worst part about being a Student in 2020, The Tab Blog, available at: https://thetab.com/uk/2020/10/16/break-out-rooms-are-the-actual-worst-part-of-being-a-student-in-2020-178590 (accessed 25th October 2020)
Lucy McGrath CMBE and Peter Wolstencroft CMBE are Programme Leaders at Liverpool Business School, Liverpool John Moores University.

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"I want to break free": How online breakout rooms have become a modern educational curse - Chartered Association of Business Schools

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You get in the car, start the engine, press down on the clutch and engage reverse gear. The routine is well established, deeply engrained in your brain and requires only a bare minimum of thought. In the classroom, these routines are set very early on in our career; check for learning, identify miscreants who are wandering off task, keep an eye on the time...

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Suggestions to help prepare for using online breakout rooms as learning activities – Social Media for Learning

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Groupwork is a valuable part of a student's experience as it gives them the opportunity to work with peers and develop more confident teamwork and communication skills (amongst many other skills). In the classroom this activity can take place by asking the students to sit together in groups or if in a lecture theatre type classroom form groups of pairs by row and then one pair turn around to form a four with the pair behind. You might ask the groups to find a space of their own and return to the classroom after a set time. In these smaller groups students can be asked to work on a problem, engage in discussions, or any other activity they can work on collaboratively.

However when teaching online the use of video conferencing at first glance may not appear to be conducive of groupwork. It will depend on the space you are using but there are some that offer breakout rooms. The two examples I have experienced are Blackboard Collaborate and Zoom. At the time of writing I understand MS Teams are also developing this feature. For now there are some workarounds using other approaches like adding additional channels within a team. There could be others too.

Within Collaborate and Zoom the tutor leading the online class can choose to self select or randomly select groups of students. The feature allows them to send each group of students to a separate online room. The tutor can also visit those rooms to check on progress, and can bring the students back to the main room when they wish to. Once in the breakout room, participants have full audio, video, and screen share capabilities.

It is a different experience to being in the physical classroom and the aim of this post is to provide a number of tips that can help both tutors and students prepare for this activity.

1. Provide clear instructions for the breakout activity that students can access prior to and during the activity. Once in the breakout room they will need to refer back to these! This will avoid the "What are we supposed to be doing" once in the breakout room.

2. Have a practice run using this feature for the first time with your students. It may also be the first time for you, so let the students know this.

3. Tell the students how long they will expect to be in the breakout room to work on the activity you are setting. You may also want to consider adding an additional bonus task to stretch those students who might finish before other groups. It's helpful to give them a 2-5 minute warning so they can wrap things up.

4. You can monitor progress by visiting each of the breakout rooms and checking on the students, but this can become time consuming where you have larger numbers of groups. One solution might be to assign a Google Doc to each group which students are asked to add notes/solutions to, and then have these open in different tabs on a different screen/device for you to view. It will highlight how they are doing and you can focus on visiting the groups that may need support.

5. Once the allocated time for the activity is up, it can be useful to ask for each group to feedback what they have done. Warning the groups in advance and either asking for or assigning a notetaker and spokesperson, can help prepare the students.

6. By asking the students to make notes in a collaborative document, they will have a record they can refer back to later. This may be helpful to feed into other activities or even assignments further down the line.

Prior to the online class

Create the detailed instructions for the activity that you will go through in the class and make this accessible to the students to refer back to.

Set up a Google Doc for each group, transferring the key requirements / questions to this working document and title by group number. This will form the working collaborative document the students can use to gather notes whilst in the breakout room. Having these as bullet points will help the students keep on task.

Provide the students a link to the Google Doc and make sure you adjust the settings so that it is set to editable, so that they can add information.

You will need to decide if you plan to manually create groups or opt for randomly create based on the number per group you wish them to work in.

During the online class

Go through the breakout activity brief and respond to any questions.

Ensure all students can access the master brief and the group Google Doc (GD) they will use in the breakout room.

It can be useful to assign or establish a volunteer note taker and person to feedback for each group, prior to sending them to the breakout room. If you plan to use this feature for future activities these roles could be rotated so all students experience.

Be clear everyone needs to contribute to the activity.

Where students will continue to work in the same groups, the working group GD could be used for future connected breakout activities, thus keeping the notes in one place.

In addition to sending students to breakout groups for groupwork activities, you can also use this function to send individual students. This can be useful if they are working independently on an activity and need some help, as they can share their screen with a tutor once in the breakout room.

The example of the collaborative working space given is a Google Doc. You could replace this with a link to a Padlet board, collaborative mind map or whiteboard tool, Google Slides, shared Trello board and more. I'd love to hear how you have developed activities for your students.

The infographic below is a summary of the points discussed. This was created using Piktochart.

About Sue Beckingham

A National Teaching Fellow, Educational Developer and Principal Lecturer in Computing with a research interest in the use of social media in higher education.

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Suggestions to help prepare for using online breakout rooms as learning activities

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Groupwork is a valuable part of a student's experience as it gives them the opportunity to work with peers and develop more confident teamwork and communication skills (amongst many other skills). In the classroom this activity can take place by asking the students to sit together in groups or if in a lecture theatre type...

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5 Ways That Teachers Are Using Breakout Rooms to Create More Learner-Centered Experiences in Distance Learning – KATIE MARTIN

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Katie Martin | Informed by Research, Inspired by Practice

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5 Ways That Teachers Are Using Breakout Rooms to Create More Learner-Centered Experiences in Distance Learning

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I have talked with many educators who are anxious about creating breakout rooms for fear of inappropriate interactions, bullying, and being off task in breakout

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Effective Educational Videos: Principles and Guidelines for Maximizing Student Learning from Video Content

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Kathryn E. Perez, Monitoring Editor

Educational videos provide an important content-delivery tool in many classes. Effective use of video is enhanced when instructors consider cognitive load, student engagement, and active learning. This essay reviews literature relevant to these elements and suggests practical ways instructors can use these principles when using video as an educational tool.

Abstract

Educational videos have become an important part of higher education, providing an important content-delivery tool in many flipped, blended, and online classes. Effective use of video as an educational tool is enhanced when instructors consider three elements: how to manage cognitive load of the video; how to maximize student engagement with the video; and how to promote active learning from the video. This essay reviews literature relevant to each of these principles and suggests practical ways instructors can use these principles when using video as an educational tool.

Video has become an important part of higher education. It is integrated as part of traditional courses, serves as a cornerstone of many blended courses, and is often the main information-delivery mechanism in online courses. Several meta-analyses have shown that technology can enhance learning (e.g., Means et al., 2010; Schmid et al., 2014), and multiple studies have shown that video, specifically, can be a highly effective educational tool (e.g., Allen and Smith, 2012; Kay, 2012; Lloyd and Robertson, 2012; Rackaway, 2012; Hsin and Cigas, 2013; Stockwell et al., 2015). Video may have particular value for student preparation in biology classes, in part because students may find it more engaging ( Stockwell et al., 2015) and because it can be well suited to illuminating the abstract or hard-to-visualize phenomena that are the focus of so many biology classes (e.g., Dash et al., 2016; see Video Views and Reviews features in CBE-Life Sciences Education for other examples). The medium is not inherently effective, however; Guo et al. (2014) have shown that students often disregard large segments of educational videos, while MacHardy and Pardos (2015) demonstrate that some videos contribute little to student performance. What, then, are the principles that allow instructors to choose or develop videos that are effective in moving students toward the desired learning outcomes? Consideration of three elements for video design and implementation can help instructors maximize video's utility in the biology classroom:

Together, these elements provide a solid base for the development and use of video as an effective educational tool.

COGNITIVE LOAD

One of the primary considerations when constructing educational materials, including video, is cognitive load. Cognitive load theory, initially articulated by Sweller (1988, 1989, 1994), suggests that memory has several components. Sensory memory is transient, collecting information from the environment. Information from sensory memory may be selected for temporary storage and processing in working memory, which has very limited capacity. This processing is a prerequisite for encoding into long-term memory, which has virtually unlimited capacity. Because working memory is very limited, the learner must be selective about what information from sensory memory to pay attention to during the learning process, an observation that has important implications for creating educational materials.

Based on this model of memory, cognitive load theory suggests that any learning experience has three components. The first of these is intrinsic load, which is inherent to the subject under study and is determined in part by the degrees of connectivity within the subject. The common example given to illustrate a subject with low intrinsic load is a word pair (e.g., blue = azul); grammar, on the other hand, is a subject with a high intrinsic load due to its many levels of connectivity and conditional relationships. In an example from biology, learning the names of the stages of mitosis would have lower intrinsic load than understanding the process of cell cycle control. The second component of any learning experience is germane load, which is the level of cognitive activity necessary to reach the desired learning outcome-for example, to make the comparisons, do the analysis, and elucidate the steps necessary to master the lesson. The ultimate goal of these activities is for the learner to incorporate the subject under study into a schema of richly connected ideas. The third component of a learning experience is extraneous load, which is cognitive effort that does not help the learner toward the desired learning outcome. It is often characterized as load that arises from a poorly designed lesson (e.g., confusing instructions, extra information) but may also be load that arises due to stereotype threat or imposter syndrome. These concepts are more fully articulated and to some extent critiqued in an excellent review by deJong (2010).

These definitions have implications for design of educational materials and experiences. Specifically, instructors should seek to minimize extraneous cognitive load and should consider the intrinsic cognitive load of the subject when constructing learning experiences, carefully structuring them when the material has high intrinsic load. Because working memory has a limited capacity, and information must be processed by working memory to be encoded in long-term memory, it is important to prompt working memory to accept, process, and send to long-term memory only the most crucial information ( Ibrahim et al., 2012).

The cognitive theory of multimedia learning builds on the cognitive load theory, noting that working memory has two channels for information acquisition and processing: a visual/pictorial channel and an auditory/verbal-processing channel ( Mayer, 2001; Mayer and Moreno, 2003). Although each channel has limited capacity, the use of the two channels can facilitate the integration of new information into existing cognitive structures. Using both channels maximizes working memory's capacity-but either channel can be overwhelmed by high cognitive load. Thus, design strategies that manage the cognitive load for both channels in multimedia learning materials promise to enhance learning.

These theories give rise to several recommendations about educational videos (see Table 1 ). Based on the premise that effective learning experiences minimize extraneous cognitive load, optimize germane cognitive load, and manage intrinsic cognitive lead, four effective practices emerge.

TABLE 1.

Element to consider

Recommendation

Rationale

Examples

Packaging video with interactive questions.

May increase germane cognitive load, improve memory via the testing effect, and improve student self-assessment.

Integrate questions into videos with HapYak or Zaption, as described by Obodo and Baskauf (2015)

Follow short videos with interactive questions within an LMS, as done by Keithly and colleagues (2015), or within Google Forms, as done by Caudel and colleagues (2015)

Use guiding questions.

May increase germane cognitive load, reduce extraneous cognitive load, and improve student self-assessment.

Senchina (2011) provides guiding questions for videos designed to introduce physiology students to professional ethics related to experimenter-subject interactions, such as the following: "Observe the subject's behavior and responsiveness during the dehydration period. What changes as the subject becomes dehydrated? What problems does he have? Observe the experimenters' behavior and responsiveness as dehydration progresses. What do they do differently? Why?"

Make video part of a larger homework assignment.

May increase student motivation, germane cognitive load, and student self-assessment.

Package videos with a series of questions or problems that ask students to apply the concepts from the videos. iBiology Education videos (e.g., What Can You Learn with a Light Microscope?) provide one example ( iBiology, 2016)

Signaling, which is also known as cueing ( deKoning et al., 2009), is the use of on-screen text or symbols to highlight important information. For example, signaling may be provided by the appearance of two or three key words ( Mayer and Johnson, 2008; Ibrahim et al., 2012), a change in color or contrast ( deKoning et al., 2009), or a symbol that draws attention to a region of a screen (e.g., an arrow; deKoning et al., 2009). By highlighting the key information, signaling helps direct learner attention, thus targeting particular elements of the video for processing in the working memory. This can reduce extraneous load by helping novice learners with the task of determining which elements within a complex tool are important, and it can also increase germane load by emphasizing the organization of and connections within the information. Mayer and Moreno (2003) and deKoning et al. (2009) have shown that this approach improves students' ability to retain and transfer new knowledge from animations, and Ibrahim et al. (2012) have shown that these effects extend to video.

The benefits of signaling are complemented by segmenting, or the chunking of information in a video lesson. Segmenting allows learners to engage with small pieces of new information and gives them control over the flow of new information. As such, it manages intrinsic load and can also increase germane load by emphasizing the structure of the information. Segmenting can be accomplished both by making shorter videos and by including "click forward" pauses within a video, such as using YouTube Annotate or HapYak to provide students with a question and prompting them to click forward after completion. Both types of segmenting have been shown to be important for student engagement with videos ( Zhang et al., 2006; Guo et al., 2014) and learning from video ( Zhang et al., 2006; Ibrahim et al., 2012).

Weeding, or the elimination of interesting but extraneous information that does not contribute to the learning goal, can provide further benefits. For example, music, complex backgrounds, or extra features within an animation require the learner to judge whether he or she should be paying attention to them, which increases extraneous load and can reduce learning. Importantly, information that increases extraneous load changes as the learner moves from novice toward expert status. That is, information that may be extraneous for a novice learner may actually be helpful for a more expert-like learner, while information that is essential for a novice may serve as an already known distraction for an expert. Thus, it is important that the instructor consider his or her learners when weeding educational videos, including information that is necessary for their processing but eliminating information that they do not need to reach the learning goal and that may overload their working memory. Ibrahim et al. (2012) has shown that this treatment can improve retention and transfer of new information from video.

Finally, the utility of video lessons can be maximized by matching modality to content. By using both the audio/verbal channel and the visual/pictorial channel to convey new information, and by fitting the particular type of information to the most appropriate channel, instructors can enhance the germane cognitive load of a learning experience. For example, showing an animation of a process on screen while narrating it uses both channels to elucidate the process, thus giving the learner dual and complementary streams of information to highlight features that should be processed in working memory. In contrast, showing the animation while also showing printed text uses only the visual channel and thus overloads this channel and impedes learning ( Mayer and Moreno, 2003). In another example, using a "talking head" video to explain a complex process makes productive use only of the verbal channel (because watching the speaker does not convey additional information), whereas a Khan Academy-style tutorial that provides symbolic sketches to illustrate the verbal explanation uses both channels to give complementary information. Using both channels to convey appropriate and complementary information has been shown to increase students' retention and ability to transfer information ( Mayer and Moreno, 2003) and to increase student engagement with videos ( Guo et al., 2014; Thomson et al., 2014).

STUDENT ENGAGEMENT

Another lens through which to consider educational video is student engagement. The idea is simple: if students do not watch videos, they cannot learn from them. Lessons on promoting student engagement derive from earlier research on multimedia instruction and more recent work on videos used within MOOCs (massive open online courses; see Table 1 ).

The first and most important guideline for maximizing student attention to educational video is to keep it short. Guo and colleagues examined the length of time students watched streaming videos within four edX MOOCs, analyzing results from 6.9 million video-watching sessions ( Guo et al., 2014). They observed that the median engagement time for videos less than 6 minutes long was close to 100%-that is, students tended to watch the whole video (although there are significant outliers; see the paper for more complete information). As videos lengthened, however, student engagement dropped, such that the median engagement time with 9- to 12-minute videos was ∼50%, and the median engagement time with 12- to 40-minute videos was ∼20%. In fact, the maximum median engagement time for a video of any length was 6 minutes. Making videos longer than 6-9 minutes is therefore likely to be wasted effort. In complementary work, Risko et al. (2012) showed 1-hour videos to students in a lab setting, probing student self-reports of mind wandering four times in each lecture and testing student retention of lecture material after the lecture. They found that student report of mind wandering increased and retention of material decreased across the video lecture ( Risko et al., 2012).

Another method to keep students engaged is to use a conversational style. Called the personalization principle by Mayer, the use of conversational rather than formal language during multimedia instruction has been shown to have a large effect on students' learning, perhaps because a conversational style encourages students to develop a sense of social partnership with the narrator that leads to greater engagement and effort ( Mayer, 2008). In addition, some research suggests that it can be important for video narrators to speak relatively quickly and with enthusiasm. In their study examining student engagement with MOOC videos, Guo and colleagues observed that student engagement was dependent on the narrator's speaking rate, with student engagement increasing as speaking rate increased ( Guo et al., 2014). It can be tempting for video narrators to speak slowly to help ensure that students grasp important ideas, but including in-video questions, "chapters," and speed control can give students control over this feature-and increasing narrator speed appears to promote student interest.

Instructors can also promote student engagement with educational videos by creating or packaging them in a way that conveys that the material is for these students in this class. One of the benefits for instructors in using educational videos can be the ability to reuse them for other classes and other semesters. When creating or choosing videos, however, it is important to consider whether they were created for the type of environment in which they will be used. For example, a face-to-face classroom session that is videotaped and presented within an online class may feel less engaging than a video that is created with an online environment as the initial target ( Guo et al., 2014). A video's adaptability can be enhanced, however: when reusing videos, instructors can package them for a particular class using text outside the video to contextualize the relevance for that particular class and lesson.

ACTIVE LEARNING

As biology educators, we have abundant evidence that active learning in the classroom provides clear advantages over passive encounters with course material through lecture (e.g., Knight and Wood, 2005; Haak et al., 2011; Freeman et al., 2014). Similarly, elements that promote cognitive activity during video viewing can enhance student learning from this medium (see Table 1 ).

Schacter and Szpunar (2015) propose a conceptual framework for enhancing learning from educational videos that identifies online learning as a type of self-regulated learning. Self-regulation of learning requires students to monitor their own learning, to identify learning difficulties, and to respond to these judgments; in other words, it requires students to actively build and interrogate mental models, practicing metacognition about the learning process. Novices within a field, however, have difficulty accurately judging their understanding, often overestimating their learning ( Bjork et al., 2013). This problem may be enhanced when new information is delivered via video, which students report as easier to learn and more memorable than text ( Salomon, 1994; Choi and Johnson, 2005). Incorporating prompts for students to engage in the type of cognitive activity necessary to process information-to engage in active learning-can help them build and test mental models, explicitly converting video watching from a passive to an active-learning event. The means to do this can vary, but the following strategies have demonstrated success in some contexts.

Package Video with Interactive Questions

Szpunar et al. compared the test performance of students who answered questions interpolated between ∼5 min video lectures and students who did unrelated arithmetic problems between the videos, finding that the students in the interpolated question group performed significantly better on subsequent tests of the material and reported less mind wandering ( Szpunar et al., 2013). Students who received the interpolated questions also exhibited increased note taking, reported the learning event as less "mentally taxing," and reported less anxiety about the final test. These results suggest that interpolated questions may improve student learning from video through several mechanisms. First, they may help to optimize cognitive load by decreasing extraneous load (i.e., anxiety about an upcoming test) and increasing germane load (i.e., note taking, reduced mind wandering). Further, interpolated questions may produce some of their benefit by tapping into the "testing effect," in which recall of important information strengthens students' memory of and ability to use the recalled information ( Roediger and Karpicke, 2006; Brame and Biel, 2015). Finally, interpolated questions may help students engage in more accurate self-assessment ( Szpunar et al., 2014), an important benefit for a medium that students may perceive as "easier" than text. Tools like HapYak and Zaption can also allow instructors to embed questions directly into video and to give specific feedback based on student response. This approach has similar benefits to interpolated questions in increasing student performance on subsequent assessments ( Vural, 2013) and has the additional benefit of making the video interactive (see following section).

Use Interactive Features That Give Students Control

Zhang and colleagues compared the impact of interactive and noninteractive video on students' learning in a computer science course ( Zhang et al., 2006). Students who were able to control movement through the video, selecting important sections to review and moving backward when desired, demonstrated better achievement of learning outcomes and greater satisfaction. One simple way to achieve this level of interactivity is by using YouTube Annotate, HapYak, or another tool to introduce labeled "chapters" into a video. This not only has the benefit of giving students control but also can demonstrate the organization, increasing the germane load of the lesson.

Use Guiding Questions

Lawson and colleagues examined the impact of guiding questions on students' learning from a video about social psychology in an introductory psychology class ( Lawson et al., 2006). Building on work from Kreiner (1997), they had students in some sections of the course watch the video with no special instructions, while students in other sections of the course were provided with eight guiding questions to consider while watching. The students who answered the guiding questions while watching the video scored significantly higher on a later test. Guiding questions may serve as an implicit means to share learning objectives with students, thus increasing the germane load of the learning task and reducing the extraneous load by focusing student attention on important elements. This strategy is often used to increase student learning from reading assignments (e.g., Tanner, 2012; Round and Campbell, 2013), and it can translate effectively to helping students learn from video.

Make Video Part of a Larger Homework Assignment

MacHardy and Pardos (2015) have developed a model relating educational video characteristics to students' performance on subsequent assessments. One observation from their analysis of Khan Academy videos was that videos that offered the greatest benefits to students were highly relevant to associated exercises. This result is supported by results observed in a "teaching-as-research" project at Vanderbilt University (for background on teaching as research, see www.cirtl.net). Specifically, Faizan Zubair participated in the BOLD Fellows program, in which graduate students develop online learning materials for incorporation into a faculty mentor's course and then investigate their impact in teaching-as-research projects. Zubair developed videos on that were embedded in a larger homework assignment in Paul Laibinis's chemical engineering class and found that students valued the videos and that the videos improved students' understanding of difficult concepts when compared with a semester when the videos were not used in conjunction with the homework ( Zubair and Laibinis, 2015; see also Summary).

The important thing to keep in mind is that watching a video can be a passive experience, much as reading can be. To make the most of our educational videos, we need to help students do the processing and self-evaluation that will lead to the learning we want to see.

SUMMARY

Video may provide a significant means to improve student learning and enhance student engagement in biology courses ( Allen and Smith, 2012; Kay, 2012; Lloyd and Robertson, 2012; Rackaway, 2012; Hsin and Cigas, 2013; Stockwell et al., 2015). To maximize the benefit from educational videos, however, it is important to keep in mind the three key components of cognitive load, elements that impact engagement, and elements that promote active learning. Luckily, consideration of these elements converges on a few recommendations:

Keep videos brief and targeted on learning goals.

Use audio and visual elements to convey appropriate parts of an explanation; consider how to make these elements complementary rather than redundant.

Use signaling to highlight important ideas or concepts.

Use a conversational, enthusiastic style to enhance engagement.

Embed videos in a context of active learning by using guiding questions, interactive elements, or associated homework assignments.

REFERENCES

Caudel D, Grundstrom E, Stewart S. AstroNavigation. 2015. my.vanderbilt.edu/astronav/overview/coordinates (accessed 16 May 2016)

Guo PJ, Kim J, Robin R. L@S'14 Proceedings of the First ACM Conference on Learning at Scale. New York: ACM; 2014. How video production affects student engagement: an empirical study of MOOC videos; pp. 41-50. [Google Scholar]

iBiology. iBioEducation: iBiology Courses. 2016. [www.ibiology.org/ibioeducation.html (accessed 16 May 2016) Google Scholar]

Keithly M, Sebastian T, Woelfle M, Friedman K. Blending it up: active learning in a STEM classroom through the use of online materials, BOLD Fellows Project Gallery. 2015. https://vanderbilt.edu/bold/docs/bsci-2210-principles-of-genetics (accessed 15 October 2016)

MacHardy Z, Pardos ZA. Evaluating the relevance of educational videos using BKT and big data. In: Santos OC, Boticario JG, Romero C, Pechenizkiy M, Merceron A, Mitros P, Luna JM, Mihaescu C, Moreno P, Hershkovitz A, Ventura S, Desmarais M, editors. Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Educational Data Mining, Madrid, Spain. 2015. [http://educationaldatamining.org/EDM2015/index.php?page=proceedings (accessed 15 October 2016) Google Scholar]

Mayer RE. Multimedia Learning. New York: Cambridge University Press; 2001. [Google Scholar]

Means B, Toyama Y, Murphy R, Bakia M, Jones K. Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies. Washington, DC: US Department of Education; 2010. [Google Scholar]

Obodo U, Baskauf S. BSCI 111b: Introduction to Biological Sciences Laboratory, BOLD Fellows Project Gallery. 2015. https://vanderbilt.edu/bold/docs/bsci-111b-introduction-to-biological-sciences-laboratory (accessed 16 May 2016)

Salomon G. Hillsdale, NJ: 1994. Interaction of media, cognition, and learning. [Google Scholar]

Zubair F, Laibinis P. Interactive videos to enhance student understanding of thermodynamic efficiency. 2015. Presentation at the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, held 11 November 2015 in Salt Lake City, UT.

Articles from CBE Life Sciences Education are provided here courtesy of American Society for Cell Biology

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Effective Educational Videos: Principles and Guidelines for Maximizing Student Learning from Video Content

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Educational videos provide an important content-delivery tool in many classes. Effective use of video is enhanced when instructors consider cognitive load, student engagement, and active learning. This essay reviews literature relevant to these elements ...

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5 Secrets to Creating Engaging Video for Learning - YouTube

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5 Secrets to Creating Engaging Video for Learning

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Non-Verbal Skills for Virtual Team Leaders - RapidStart Leadership

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OK, I know this title may sound a little odd - what's the point of non-verbal communication on virtual teams? But there are actually several ways that this is important, and by the end of this post, we'll cover eight techniques to improve your ability to communicate effectively without saying a word, even when our teammates are miles away.

[Watch the video above or read the transcript below]

Non-Verbals for Virtual Leaders

In the real world, experts tell us that non-verbal communication accounts for the great majority of the total content of our communication. It stands to reason, then, that the more important the message, the more visual and auditory clues we want to be able to include in the conversation.

That's a big reason for why, when it comes to important, sensitive, or complex topics like performance evaluation, bringing change, or soliciting feedback , we want to address them in person if we can. We want all possible non-verbal cues available to help us get the message across.

When that's not possible, we want to pick the most robust tool we can find, and high-quality video becomes the medium of choice. But the moment we switch to a virtual system a few things change that are worth keeping in mind.

Changes in the Virtual World

First, the camera lens doesn't typically move around, so some of the signals we are naturally sending suddenly become unavailable. The things we do with our feet, body, or sometimes even hands can no longer help us deliver the message. And as more and more of those information sources disappear, we tend to place greater importance on the few non-verbal clues that remain. That means we should pay even more attention to what does make it through to the other side of the camera.

And second, it can help to think of the world of non-verbals as more than just about us. Everything else that's on screen is communicating, too. If we're paying attention, we can use that fact to help us be clear. If we aren't, it may make things harder.

So with that as background, lets talk about eight ways to consider the importance of non-verbal communication in our virtual conversations.

8 Non-Verbal Techniques

1. Shape the Surroundings. To begin with, we're not the only thing that will be on camera when the lights come on. What's in the background conveys a lot of information, too. Rather than a dirty kitchen, dark living room, or messy office, we can set a better tone if we position things so we are well-lit in front of a background that we stand out against. Consider a simple wall, or bookshelf. We want the focus on us, not on distractions behind us.

2. Set the lens. The distance from the camera lens to us is important. Too close and we look like a giant head on the screen, kind of like the ones in the opening sequence of the Brady Bunch. Not only is that a little awkward, it deprives us of the opportunity to use our upper body to help convey our message. On the other hand, too far away, and we appear distant, uninterested, audio quality is likely to drop off, and while our teammates may be able to see all of us, if they can't see our eyes and read our face, we're going to lose them.

Aim for something in the middle. Ideally, if they can see the top third of our bodies we'll have the best chance of making that virtual connection and sharing the most non-verbal clues possible. Set the lens so that the top of your head is close to the top of the frame, and your upper arms are visible.

3. Suit up. It's a good idea to dress for the occasion. Even if we're tuning in from home, if we are hoping for a professional discussion then a way to get that feeling going is to dress like we are expecting it. We might feel more comfortable in our favorite seasonal socks, but it's better to make sure that what's on camera reflects the kind of discussion we want to have.

4. Speak to the camera. Eye contact with the camera is critical. We wouldn't stare at our notes when engaging someone in normal conversation, so we shouldn't do it when on video either. One Forbes article concluded that effective business conversations require us to hold eye contact 30-60 percent of the time.

If it helps, mount a photo of the team right above the camera to help visualize who you're talking with. If possible, co-locate the camera with the screen that shows our audience, but if we have to choose, when talking, speak to the camera, not to the screen.

5. Sit up. Whether you're on video or not, watch that posture. Slumping in our chairs, or kicking back signals a lack of interest or focus. Sitting up and leaning forward tells people we're engaged and involved mentally and physically. This is a good practice even when the cameras are off because our body posture will be reflected in our speaking patterns. When our bodies are engaged, our minds are more likely to be energized, and our teams will be able to sense that.

6. Show your arms. We can do ourselves a favor if our arms are visible. Aside from our face, they may be the best tools we have for helping to express what we have to say, so it pays to be conscious of what they are telling others.

Our folded or crossed arms may be telling the team that we are not receptive or interested. Open and visible shows a willingness to listen. Palms up is a way of inviting input from others. There's lots more to this, but the key takeaway here is that if hide our arms, they can't help us speak.

7. Smile. Our faces convey a lot of information even when we are not speaking. So we have to be conscious about what message we are sending. An eye roll, a frown, or even a slight eyebrow raise may carry more weight than we think it does.

On top of that, we might be in a small office with our laptop, but others may be watching us on a large monitor, or even projected on a large screen in a conference room somewhere. That smirk may be two or three times as big to some of our teammates.

8. Slow down. I'm not talking about dragging things out here, but especially if this is a first-time event, nerves may be a little jittery, and when we're nervous we tend to want to rush things. Of course, we do want to make efficient use of our time, but it's not a race to the finish. Take a deep breath, focus on the topic of discussion, and think of it as a normal conversation.

Non-Verbal Virtual Communication - The Takeaway

When we are constrained by technology to lead our teams, there is a big impact on our ability to communicate effectively. An often-overlooked aspect of that communication is what we are saying non-verbally.

But if we pay attention to what we look like on screen, and think a little bit about the non-verbal signals that we are sending, we stand a much better chance of getting across that message we hoped to.
NOTE: This video is part of the online course I've developed called Leading Virtual Teams - Keys to Leadership Success in the Virtual World. Click for more free videos and information about the course, or share with someone you think might benefit from this.

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Non-Verbal Skills for Virtual Team Leaders - RapidStart Leadership

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OK, I know this title may sound a little odd - what's the point of non-verbal communication on virtual teams? But there are actually several ways that this is important, and by the end of this post, we'll cover eight techniques to improve your ability to communicate effectively without saying a word, even when our teammates are miles away.

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Literature review of online course design

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Literature review of online course design

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Castro, M. D. B., & Tumibay, G. M. (2019). A literature review: efficacy of online learning courses for higher education institution using meta-analysis. Education and Information Technologies, 1-19.

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Humanizing Online Learning: the Secret Sauce for Student Success

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Pencast videos can be a useful way of providing demonstrations for students. This resource explains physical and digital approaches for recording pencast videos. One challenge with DIY educational video can be explaining complex topics, and sometimes a standard screen recording or piece-to-camera won't be enough.

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6 Strategies for Building Community in Online Courses - The K. Patricia Cross Academy

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Sometimes, a group of students in a given class just seems to gel. They connect, work well together, and encourage and support each other. Sometimes a group of students does not gel. They barely interact, they don't work together, and while they may not actively discourage each other, encouragement is not exactly forthcoming either. It can be difficult to determine what causes a group to respond one way or the other, but at least some of it can be attributed to the concept of community. Establishing community helps a group of learners bond and work well together. Community is particularly important in online courses given the potential for students to feel isolated and alone.

When we teach online, community forms and happens differently than when we teach onsite because the connection is mediated by technology. For example, interactions happen predominantly by text rather than physical presence and there are different markers of who has more or less influence in the group. Online, community is not worse than onsite - indeed, some educators argue that connections can be deeper online than onsite - but it is different. The manner in which online community develops, however, has implications for our roles and responsibilities as teachers.

It can be challenging to achieve community in an online course and to know whether it has developed, in part because we do not yet have a good sense of what a strong group dynamic looks like in online courses. After all, it can happen under the radar of the course, through private texting and email, for example. If we are not included in the communication loop, we can feel that an online course does not have the same level of community as an onsite one does, even though there may be a vibrant one forming in backchannels.

Community is more than participation; it requires moving from participation to engagement, involvement, and action. Thinking through what appeals to us about other communities, whether onsite or online, can provide us with important clues about how to establish community online. There are several strategies we can use to promote community in an online course.

1. Create a Plan for Communication

Communication is essential to community, and it is a good idea to model effective communication from the very start of the course. Create a calendar of when you will contact students, individually or as a group. Communicating at the start of each module with announcements or texts can also be beneficial. Touching base before high stakes assignments is also important. A framework of frequent and effective communication is the first step in encouraging community.

2. Establish Social Presence

Social presence, or the sense that individuals have that they are interacting with real people, is an important concept for developing community. Several related factors influence social presence. These include immediacy - the psychological distance between communicators; interaction - when actions affect each other; and intimacy - the notion that individuals will adjust their behaviors to maintain equilibrium. To develop and foster social presence, consider the following:

Creating an introductory video and having students do the same; these can be simple smartphone videos where everyone introduces themselves and shares 2-3 facts about themselves.

Giving students reason to come to the course site often.

Letting them share work that represents them.

It's not always possible (or even desirable) to schedule synchronous meetings, but interacting at the same time can encourage community. Students get to know each other, recognize faces and names, and share information. Consider having several synchronous sessions on the same topic, all at different times of the day and week so everyone can schedule one. Alternatively, make the sessions optional.

4. Create Opportunities for Information and Expertise Sharing

One thing that draws us to communities is the rich resources that individuals provide. Providing opportunities for students to share information is a useful strategy for helping to develop community. A few options include:

Create study groups for the course. Assign students to small groups. Suggest that they use the learning management system to work together. Doing so can help them learn to work in groups and to make connections with their fellow students.

Include a "relevant resource" section for the course. Ask students to post information that's happening in the world that is related to the course content. If students see the importance of the content, they will be more engaged with it. Online articles, essays, YouTube clips, and so forth can add additional value. You can post in this section as well. Consider trying out Contemporary Issues Journals. In Contemporary Issues Journals,students look for recent events or developments in the real world that are related to their coursework, then analyze these current affairs to identify the connections to course material in entries that they write in a journal. Ask students to share their ideas in a central forum.

Create a common space. Instructors can encourage informal interactions by creating a common space such as a student lounge for discussion.

5. Use Collaborative Learning Techniques

Collaborative learning requires students to work with each other, which can help reduce feelings of isolation. In addition to simply being glad to know that others are in the same boat, many online students appear to value interacting and forming relationships with peers. Getting to know their peers in an online environment can improve students' overall experience. Online collaborative learning provides a solid foundation on which such relationships may be founded. Consider collaborative learning techniques such as the following:

In Jigsaw, students work in small groups to develop knowledge about a given topic before teaching what they have learned to another group.

View main video here: View Technique →

View online adaptation here:

Paper Seminar
Paper Seminar provides a framework for meaningful discussion centered on student work.

View main video here: View Technique →

View online adaptation here:

In Think Aloud Pair Problem Solving, students solve problems aloud to try out their reasoning on a listening peer.

View main video here: View Technique →

View online adaptation here:

6. Develop Sub-Communities

Some online learners may be hesitant to participate or share if there are too many members. Developing sub-communities can help. These smaller groups can provide a more personal experience and connect individuals with similar interests. Separate discussion forums or small groups meeting in break out rooms within videoconference sessions can help.

In conclusion, community can be critical to student success and satisfaction in online courses. Instructors can create opportunities for community in the design of the course, the communication, and the activities they include. Creating these opportunities is likely to prove well worth the effort.

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Reference:

Major, C. H. (2015). Teaching online and instructional change: A guide to theory, research, and practice. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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6 Strategies for Building Community in Online Courses - The K. Patricia Cross Academy

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Sometimes, a group of students in a given class just seems to gel. They connect, work well together, and encourage and support each other. Sometimes a group of students does not gel. They barely interact, they don't work together, and while they may not actively discourage each other, encouragement is not exactly forthcoming either.

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Creating an online leadership programme 

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Creating an online leadership programme 

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How to Engage Students in a Hybrid Classroom - The Chronicle of Higher Education

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GUEST POST: Instructional Design on Lockdown — The Learning Scientists

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would look like

Video1 + Quiz1

Video2 + Quiz2

Video3 + Quiz3

or, perhaps

Video1a + Video1b + Video1c + Quiz1

Video2a + Video2b + Video2c + Quiz2

Video3a + Video3b + Video3c + Quiz3

Coupling each video with a quiz helps, your learners to take an active role towards their learning, and you have a clearer picture of both their engagement and understanding.

Quizzes tend to enhance learners' focus on the videos. Researchers have found that when videos were interspersed with designated review quizzes, tested students reported fewer instances of mind wandering (19%) than those who did not have tests (41%) and those who used the time for restudy (39%) and showed improved learning on a test of the final section of the lecture (89% vs 65% for restudy and 70% for non-tested), indicating a learned habit of increased focus on the videos (5).

Quizzes likewise tend to be viewed positively by students and have a high engagement rate. In a case study from an Abnormal Psychology module, Jennifer Hillman found students to have a positive view of pre-class test questions giving a 4.4 to the question "How helpful do you think the online quizzes were...to your learning of material in the course?" and a 4.7 to the question "If you used the online quizzes to study for exams, how helpful were they?" (6). At Cass Business School, our videos coupled with quizzes have the highest completion rate of all our non-required activities. This correlates with what experts in online behaviour have observed about online behaviour - that users tend to commit their time and energy based on immediate cost/benefit analyses. Jakob Nielsen calls this 'interaction elasticity' (after price elasticity) usage increases as difficulty decreases and vice versa. Quizzes tend to not be difficult as they require little effort (often the click of a radio button) as well as little risk (they are not marked and not seen by other students) yet offer something immediate in return (feedback and completion). For automated questions, the feedback is usually unambiguous - as is the sense of completion.

An immediate quiz this way, does not bring the student a tremendously 'desirable difficulty' as Robert Bjork would call it: it is not difficult for a student to remember and therefore does not do as much to reinforce long-term learning as one that might appear a day or two later (7).

What a coupled or adjacent quiz like this does do, however, is more fundamental in that it checks students understood the content. Here, the quiz provides an ideal level of clarity, as it can provide questions allow for more precise diagnosis later. Also, with the results showing in a table in most VLEs, the teacher can easily scan the results for patterns.

I recommend here a quiz where the answers can be automatically graded and given feedback and therefor avoiding short essay questions with model answers. Automated questions can be, for example, true/false, multiple choice, quantitative, fill-in-the-blank, and hotspot questions.

You can use automated questions for simple, factual learning, but it can also be used for deeper learning. It can be used for procedural learning such as in formulas. You can ask scenario-based questions, which can have a stronger correspondence with real-life situations. You can also use multiple choice to ask elaborative questions (e.g. why, how).

Here I would couple a quiz with each video. For example, if you break your lesson into four videos, you have also four accompanying quizzes. The way I do this in a VLE is I build the quiz and embed this video in the introductory body of the quiz activity. I also turn on activity completion in the VLE so that when the student completes the quiz, the activity is marked as complete. This gives allows for that 'accountability loop' Lemov mentions, and in a more meaningful way than if just a video had been uploaded.

Forum discussion

A forum allows you to do a more open-ended, elaborative activity where students can connect the lesson with their prior knowledge and compare their ideas with other students.

I should say that I am suggesting you use a discussion forum with some strong concerns. I have seen that too often engagement is not a good as it should be. Many students find discussion forums difficult and spend a surprising amount of time preparing their responses, many more do not post at all, feeling intimidated or saying that they don't see the point. And academics new to online learning, may actually not notice limited participation as the forum is populated with interesting posts from the brighter students. They fail to notice that other students are not participating and thereby benefitting from elaborating their learning in their own words.

Likewise, many academics struggle to write questions that are open-ended enough to sustain a group discussion, but offer enough structure enough to be engaging and productive. Instead, they ask the equivalent of an essay question. The strong students, who usually post first anyway, exhaust the question in the first three posts. The weaker students, who usually post later, are left paraphrasing what has been said or simply "I agree with what she said".

It should not be surprising, therefore that, in their literature review of online discussions, Laura Schindler and Gary Burkholder find that "recent research suggests that levels of critical thinking in discussions remain low." (8) Too many teachers seem to treat discussion forums like a social constructivist Field of Dreams: build it and they will come. Sadly, the only activity that field will see will be students pressing the back button so they can find something more interesting to do.

That said, a well-designed forum activity can still do a lot. It can allow students to compare responses, to voice concerns, to see that other students and their teachers are out there, to articulate their learning in their own words and thereby integrate the lesson with their existing knowledge, to navigate meanings and interpretations.

Schindler and Burkholder recommend keeping discussion prompts structured. That is "clear, detailed, [and] specify instructions for participation and time parameters". They also recommend providing "initial and response posts exemplars".

What can be effective is asking students to provide a concrete example of something (give an example of foreshadowing, give an example of a disappointing IPO). Here students can tie concepts to their own experience and benefit from others examples. Even better, you can ask students elaborative "why" and "how" questions to get them to connect the content to prior learning.

One way to overcome the "she already said it" problem is to set the discussion (if you can) so that students cannot see others' posts until they have posted. This way, their answer will not be influence by other posts they see and they do not need to worry about their post being original. In this case, a good prompt might be an elaborative question, for example, "why would Shakespeare have Macbeth say that he thought he heard a voice cry out 'Sleep no more!'?" You can also ask students to diagram what they are learning on paper and upload images of their work, for example, "draw a fishbone diagram mapping the causes for Kodak's downfall as a business".

Lastly, you can use a forum to allow students to ask you questions. What do they feel they do not understand? What do they want to know more about?

Follow-up email

A follow-up email gives you the chance to give students some responsive teaching. You can review students' participation and performance in the quiz and discussion and try to correct gaps and misunderstandings. Sending a follow up email also provides a recognition for students that you are there with them, supporting them. It also gives them a prompt to keep up with the lessons.

I recommend doing this through the VLE, if possible, through an announcement forum. This way, they are pointed back to the VLE and students have a record of your message in the online course your message is associated with.

Non-automated quiz

This is where you can ask question in short essay form. Studies have shown that students learn more from essay questions that essay questions and these will have a stronger correlation to any later essay writing work they might have to do for their summative assessments.

On the other hand, essay questions can be riskier in the sense that they only work when students have a higher level of understanding. Students have a more difficult time using the feedback from model answers. Likewise, there is a risk that they give empty or circular answers. This is why it is advisable to have the automated CFU questions in place first.

That said, again, essay questions do benefit students more as students have to express the answers in their own words and thereby integrate the lesson better with their prior knowledge.

Likewise, there is more of a chance here to dig deeper: to ask fuller elaborative questions about where and how and open further questions for students that you can discuss in a webinar.

Webinar

Finally, we finally add the webinar. The webinar is a great tool, but as we have seen, it is not as good for giving learners control over content, breaking into parts, or accessibility.

However, used well, the webinar can be incredibly powerful as it can uniquely incorporate all six of the Learning Scientists strategies for effective learning and, with our other activities in place, it can use these capabilities to tie the lesson together to keep students on track and deliver rich, multi-layered, responsive teaching.

How can webinars use all six of the Learning Scientists' strategies?

· Dual coding: use multimedia - using slides with visuals and worked examples with narration.

· Concrete examples: include examples in your webinar, as well as in discussion and questions.

· Retrieval practice: webinarsoftware like Zoom and Adobe Connectprovidesurvey and/or quiz tools; which also help increase student engagement.

· Interleaving: questionscan and should be interleaved.

· Spaced practice: by interleaving and testing students in a regular webinar, you are allowing students space between practice.

· Elaboration: in the webinar, you can elaborate on questions that students asked during the week and you can build on activity within the webinar. After a quiz or survey question, you can ask students to answer elaborative questions for example "those who answered b: why did you choose that?" This also helps you to build engagement and keep the conversation on track.

This is all the more powerful because, in this sequence, you have seen how students have handled the activities and can do some real responsive teaching. That is, your webinar is, as so many students complain of, just a lecture transferred to online, rather it is given in response to all the work so far. It is feedback. But it is not just feedback, but rather interactive feedback. As Dylan William has said in interview "as a general principle, don't ever give feedback to students unless you make the time... for them to respond to the feedback" (9). The webinar here gives a perfect opportunity for this.

Lastly, the webinar takes these capabilities and adds a sense of timing and urgency to your lesson. Unlike the other, asynchronous, activities, the limited availability, the scarcity, of the webinar is one of its greatest strengths. It is a great strength because its scarcity increases the students' sense of urgency to participate - and to meaningfully participate in the webinar, the need to complete the week's activities. In social psychology, this influencing power is called the 'scarcity principle'. (10) But, in so doing, the webinar doesn't just motivate students to participate in the webinar, but all the activities, since the webinar gives feedback on them.

This kind of shepherding is critical online. With the flexibility that online learning offers, it can be easy for students to imagine that timing doesn't matter and they can just do the activities in any order and at the last minute. Students are not always the best judges of how to sequence and time their learning. Keeping at least one activity pinned down in time can help keep them on track (11).

Conclusion

In conclusion, what I have shown is a design, so there are a lot of trade-offs involved. There are also a lot of ways - not all of them being equal - that it can be done. Perhaps you might want to add a collaborative assignment, or you have some VR simulation and your students all have headsets. But if, perhaps, you are a teacher who is contemplating how to move beyond emergency teaching online, this could be a good place to start.

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With many universities still physically closed and planning for a continued foray into online course delivery, numerous experts have published pieces advising teachers on how to teach online. There are some deeply thoughtful and indeed helpful pieces out there, yet...

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Synchronous and asynchronous learning - Concordia University

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An overview of the difference between synchronous and asynchronous learning and a discussion of when and how to use it.

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Practical strategies for online teaching – What teachers need now! | DTeach

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With things moving at such a frantic pace, it's easy to feel overwhelmed and not know where to begin as our on-campus teaching moves online next week.

We have developed the following checklist of practical strategies that you can implement immediately to prepare students for success and guide their learning over the short term as you become more comfortable teaching online.

The checklist has been aligned to Deakin's CloudFirst Learning Design Principles, but specifically provides practical strategies for teaching online in the given COVID-19 context where temporary remote delivery of on-campus teaching is required at short notice.

For those new to teaching online we also have a range of workshops available to assist with this transition and if you have any queries please email learningfutures@deakin.edu.au.

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Practical strategies for online teaching - What teachers need now! | DTeach

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With things moving at such a frantic pace, it's easy to feel overwhelmed and not know where to begin as our on-campus teaching moves online next week. We have developed the following checklist of practical strategies that you can implement immediately to prepare students for success and guide their learning over the short term as you become more comfortable teaching online.

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Choose your own assessment – assessment choice for students in online higher education: Teaching in Higher Education: Vol 0, No 0

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Learning online student experience 
New book: Learning Online and The Student Experience (now available for free)

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Beyond busy work: rethinking the measurement of online student engagement: Higher Education Research 

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To combat high failure and student drop-out rates, universities have developed strategies to monitor online student engagement through measurable activities. In this study, we explore if and how these monitoring activities accurately measure online engagement. We interviewed nine highly engaged online third-year students throughout a semester to find out more about what engagement meant for them and how they enacted it in the online space, both visibly and invisibly. According to students in this study, traditional measures of online engagement were not perceived as valuable to their learning. The students complained about the 'busy work' - tasks that kept them busy or that monitored their engagement through a metrics-based tool. The students reported a number of other activities that prompted their engagement in learning; many of these would not be picked up by the usual ways of measuring engagement. These findings invite educators to move away from having fixed ideas about where and how and when online students should be engaging. They invite critique of the superficial, descriptive, tick-the-box exercises that are usually designed to monitor engagement by computer rather than through human interaction. They offer educators an opportunity to explore other ways of understanding student engagement in the online space.

Additional information

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Beyond busy work: rethinking the measurement of online student engagement

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To combat high failure and student drop-out rates, universities have developed strategies to monitor online student engagement through measurable activities. In this study, we explore if and how these monitoring activities accurately measure online engagement.

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Switching to teaching, learning and researching online - what does it mean for research methods?

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We at NCRM are busy tracking Twitter and other online communities for great ideas on how people are managing to switch to teaching and learning other than face-to-face. We think there is a real energy out there - born of necessity - for thinking creatively about how we teach and learn. But what does this mean for research methods in particular? Please retweet useful material with a shout out to @NCRMUK and @m_nind or email info@ncrm.ac.uk and we will collate what we can for another of our NCRM Quick Start Guides.

Meanwhile, we had to postpone some of our upcoming face-to-face training courses and we are working on moving more of our training online. Please keep an eye on our training calendar which lists both NCRM and non-NCRM courses.
Useful links:
Teaching research methods online

Learning and researching methods online

NCRM research methods online resources - publications, audio and video podcast, online modules and links to external resources

Restore - web repository for research methods. Restore preserves, sustains and actively maintains selected online research methods resources beyond the initial funding award

Big Qual Analysis Resource Hub - wide range of materials designed to help researchers think about, handle and analyse large volumes of complex qualitative and qualitative longitudinal data, including working with multiple archived data sets. COVID specific bolg post: COVID 19 and "Big Qual" research

Somatics toolkit - set of resources for those who want to bring their bodies more deeply into their research

SAGE methods - online resources

SAGE methods blog - resources for online instruction & research - including posts on "qualitative research during COVID - 19", "Doing fieldwork in pandemic", "Active online learning"

Online Research Methods, Qualitative - book chapter

Online Research Methods, Quantitative - book chapter

Online research: Methods, benefits and issues Part 1, Part 2 - journal articles

The value of internet video calling and desktop sharing (VCDS) as a research method - presentation by Elizabeth Hidson, Elizabeth

COVID society - resources from Deborah Lupton

Discovering statistics - blog by Professor Andy Field

Online international program in survey data science - JPSM Online Summer 2020 courses

How to conduct an ethnography during social isolation - video by Daniel Miller

Research methods to consider in a pandemic - blog post by Helen Kara

A manifesto for patchwork ethnography - blog post by Gökçe Günel, Saiba Varma, and Chika Watanabe

Doing Arts Research in a Pandemic: a crowd-sourced document responding to the challenges arising from Covid-19 (The Culture Capital)

IJSRM notebook on methods in pandemic

Library of methods for remote collection of data from children and families

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Switching to teaching, learning and researching online - what does it mean for research methods?

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We at NCRM are busy tracking Twitter and other online communities for great ideas on how people are managing to switch to teaching and learning other than face-to-face. We think there is a real energy out there - born of necessity - for thinking creatively about how we teach and learn.

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Learning blocks template - Google Drawings

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Choice in online assessment
Choose your own assessment – assessment choice for students in online higher education

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Synchronous and asynchronous learning - Concordia University

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An overview of the difference between synchronous and asynchronous learning and a discussion of when and how to use it.

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Blog: Is there anybody out there? Online courses and the need for connecting to students - Educational Development Centre

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By Ali Arya, Associate Dean (Planning and Awards), Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs & Associate Professor, School of Information Technology

Working from home and taking online courses are not new phenomena, but the COVID-19 global crisis made them household topics for all of us. Online courses saved our winter term (thanks to the great collaboration between instructors and students, and support from the university), and they are going to stick around for the summer and possibly fall terms. They might even become a more significant and permanent part of our educational system. As we try to solve all logistic issues to move our courses online (and turn off our video streams to hide our messy hair and pyjamas), we might overlook something essential: the need for human connections and interactions.

The university community is planning and sharing experiences on how to run our courses online. Among many suggestions, one being raised increasingly is to avoid synchronous sessions. It is a good one that I have advocated myself. We should not assume that students are physically and mentally available on fixed schedules during the pandemic times. Even beyond the pandemic, one of the main points of online education is to be self-paced. This becomes more important if we consider the issue of time zones and students who register in courses while not living here.

One thing that is not being emphasized as much, though, is the fact that students need interaction, even in an online course, and particularly during hard times such as a pandemic. A class is not just about available content; it is a social experience. And for new online course instructors, it is easy to forget about the "people" who are taking the course. When we don't see them, students can turn into a file submitted for an assignment or a set of answers to a quiz. We might forget that beyond the screens of our computers, there are real people with real social and emotional needs. These people frequently seek interaction, both for their academic and social challenges. Sometimes they want to ask a question that is too hard to explain through back and forth emails or present their work to a live audience instead of a black void; and some other times, they just need to chat, hear another person's voice, or see a friendly face.

A successful educational experience is the result of a relationship of trust between two people: student and instructor. For this to happen, both need to see the other as a real person and have the ability to interact with them. While synchronous interaction, especially running full lectures online, should be limited, the personal connections should not get lost. Without any doubt, designing and running online are difficult tasks and courses require significant institutional support, but here are some suggestions for individual instructors to consider to achieve a better connection to students:

Limited synchronous sessions (such as office hours, group meetings and short introductions to topics)

Revising the course content and tasks to show you are being responsive to what happens and how things are progressing

Customizing assignments and projects based on each student's strengths and needs

Discussion boards with timely responses

Meaningful and fast feedback for submissions

Group work

Regular (e.g. weekly) announcements that are not generic and reflect on what happened and what is coming up

Reflective assignments where students get to talk about how they feel and think about their experience

Anonymous surveys followed by the discussion of results and plans to address the concerns

Short social online activities (synchronous and asynchronous)

The internet is supposed to be a means of connecting to people, not a wall hiding them. There are human beings out there, even if we don't see them. And we all need each other. Now more than before.

Tuesday, May 5, 2020
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Blog: Is there anybody out there? Online courses and the need for connecting to students

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By Ali Arya, Associate Dean (Planning and Awards), Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs & Associate Professor, School of Information Technology Working from home and taking online courses are not new phenomena, but the COVID-19 global crisis made them household topics for all of us.

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Students say uni online learning is mostly ‘busy work’. Here’s what will really engage them | EduResearch Matters

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To combat high failure and student drop-out rates, universities have developed strategies to monitor online student engagement through measurable activities. We explored if and how these monitoring activities accurately measure online engagement.

Perhaps our most surprising finding was that the teacher-education students in our study did not see their set online tasks as being valuable to their learning. The students complained about being given 'busy work' - tasks given to them that appeared to be aimed at just keeping them busy or monitoring simple engagement through a metrics-based tool.

The students reported a number of other activities that did prompt their engagement in learning, but many of these would not be picked up by the usual ways of measuring engagement.

We believe our study and its findings would be particularly useful to teachers at the moment, in any sector, who are creating online learning activities for their students.
Our study
Our research study involved interviewing nine online third-year students (8 female, 1 male) from a four-year teacher-education degree at a regional university in Australia. Each student had been reported as being 'highly engaged' by their course coordinator. With their consent, they participated in fortnightly interviews throughout a 13-week semester. The aim was to find out more about what engagement meant for them, how they enacted engagement in the online space, both visibly and invisibly, and the factors that influenced their degree of engagement at different points in time. Interviews were held in the week prior to the start of semester, fortnightly during the semester and within two to three weeks of the semester's end - eight interviews with each student in all.

We described a 'highly engaged' student as someone who consistently and reliably participated in discussion boards or other learning activities, collaborated with other online students, and engaged with the lectures/readings. Reflecting the typical online student profile in general, all were mature-age students, in paid employment family/caring responsibilities.
Simplistic measures perceived by students as not useful to learning
From analysis of the interview data, we found that most students were critical of practices that were clearly designed to measure engagement in simplistic ways. These included

being required to make a specific number of posts a week

give feedback to a certain number of other students

do ungraded online activities such as quizzes that did not add to learning.

While these conscientious participants diligently met these requirements, seven of the nine reported that such mandated posts and activities did not encourage true engagement and deep learning. They were described as being 'a means to an end', and 'busy work' designed simply to 'try to make you fill the expected ten hours of study per week.' The mandating of posts to prompt engagement was described as 'ridiculous' and as taking 'a huge amount of time', which they believed could have been spent differently to promote deeper learning.

Students experienced profound disappointment and an even greater sense of having wasted their time when their diligently crafted, mandatory posts, received no commentary or replies from either teacher or other students. In addition, such mandatory posting tended to make the online learning platform clogged and overwhelmed with discussion threads that lacked coherence and structure.
Activities reported as being valuable to learning
There were a number of other ways these students reported as engaging them in their studies, which unfortunately, would not be captured by standard systems of measuring online engagement. These included

engaging in learning with their peers on platforms other than that offered by the university, such as Facebook, Messenger or other social media platforms where they could meet other students and study

following suggestions by lecturers or other students to do additional, relevant activities such as listen to TED talks, watch a YouTube video, or check out a curriculum resource

learning activities that prompted their creativity and ultimately contributed to their final assessment task

lecturers who used a diversity of approaches to learning in the online space

well-designed, engaging assessment tasks

This study has unearthed some of the complexities that emerge when online engagement is measured in mechanistic ways. It also unveils alternative measures of engagement that might be more meaningful for promoting student learning. As such, this research contributes to a broader conversation about measuring engagement in the online space and can frame the direction for future research, practices, and policy on these matters.

Perhaps there is another way of understanding student engagement, that is not tied up with metrics and monitoring. Engagement for online university students happens in many ways, both visible and more hidden. What if we changed our way of thinking about what engagement is? What if we listened to what students have to say about their own engagement?

We invite educators to move away from having fixed ideas about where and how and when online students should be engaging, and offer a critique of the superficial, descriptive, tick-the-box exercises that are usually designed to monitor engagement by computer rather than through human interaction. We hope educators will take this opportunity, where so many of us are moving to online teaching, to explore other ways of understanding student engagement in the online space.
For those who want more

Cathy Stone, DSW (Research), is a Conjoint Associate Professor in Social Work at the University of Newcastle. Cathy is an Adjunct Fellow with the National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education, where she undertook research into

improving outcomes in online learning

Dr. Janet Dyment is the Director of the School of Education at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada. Prior to her move to Acadia, she spent 20 years at the University of Tasmania in the Faculty of Education. Janet's research interests include online teacher education, student engagement, environmental education and education for sustainability. With the recent COVID pandemic, Janet is leading her new teacher education team to reimagine on-campus offerings as remote delivery options and encouraging her staff to ensure student engagement remains high in these new modes of deliveries. as an inaugural 2016 Equity Fellow. Cathy is currently an Independent Consultant and Researcher on the support, engagement and success of diverse student cohorts in higher education. She can be contacted for any questions or further discussion at cathy.stone@newcastle.edu.au Cathy is on Twitter @copacathy Beyond busy work: rethinking the measurement of online student engagement
Naomi Milthorpe is Senior Lecturer in English in the School of Humanities at the University of Tasmania. Her research interests centre on modernist, interwar and mid-century British literary culture. Naomi is the author of Evelyn Waugh's Satire: Texts and Contexts (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2016) and the editor of The Poetics and Politics of Gardening in Hard Times (Lexington, 2019). Naomi is on Twitter @drmilthorpe

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Students say uni online learning is mostly 'busy work'. Here's what will really engage them

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To combat high failure and student drop-out rates, universities have developed strategies to monitor online student engagement through measurable activities. We explored if and how these monitoring activities accurately measure online engagement. Perhaps our most surprising finding was that the teacher-education students in our study did not see their set online tasks as being valuable to their learning.

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The need for Presence not ‘Contact Hours’ – David White

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This is a reflection on some key areas which have come to light with the sudden move to online teaching. I wanted to write this post very early our academic term (less than two weeks in) to capture the moment.

While some of the thoughts might appear a bit grumpy, that's not really representative of how I feel. From what I've seen at my institution the move online has had its bumpy moments but overall it's going ok. If you'd asked me what moving to 100% online over about three weeks would look like then I'd have predicted some kind of socio-tech disaster. Instead, it's spectacular how quickly everyone has adapted and how well the tech has held up. Perhaps we are discovering we were already working more in digital spaces than we cared to admit?

https://www.flickr.com/photos/markdodds/8572486521 CC: BY NC SA

1. What is crisis and what is digital?

It's important to separate out our experience of the COVID crisis from our responses to teaching in the digital environment. Access issues and digital platforms struggling under the weight of unplanned for levels of usage are due to the crisis. The speed of the shift to online accounts for the prevalence of some teaching practices which experienced online educators would not recommend (see the points on deficit and practice mirroring). This is to be expected as we all bring the practices we know into new environments. It takes some time to transpose/modify how we work.

2. Scrutiny

It's definitive that we don't scrutinise that which we are normalised to. As such, we tend not to ask too many questions of face-to-face teaching around themes like engagement and participation. Actually, that's not fair, we do ask a lot of questions, but classic lecture and the seminar practices are still basically sacred and carry massive cultural weight in terms of representing 'university'. When we move to the digital though, all the questions we should be asking about face-to-face suddenly appear, as the change of location breaks the normalisation spell and greater scrutiny is applied.

I'd argue that all the pedagogical questions we are asking about the digital environment should also be applied to the physical environment, especially on questions of engagement, access and inclusion. I've seen the 'How do we know students are really engaging?' question being applied with more enthusiasm online than it usually is face-to-face because embodiment is a powerful, but false, proxy for engagement.

3. Deficit

Because we are responding to a crisis we are inevitably clashing with our current (face-to-face) students' expectations of what they signed-up for. Given this, it's inevitable that online teaching is framed by what it's not rather than what it is. It's seen in deficit, which tends to mask opportunities and the take up of 'new' modes of teaching. The simplest example of 'new' (retro-novel) being the use of asynchronous modes of engagement, such as the humble discussion forum (a lively discussion forum is a difficult thing to foster, but then a lively discussion amongst students in any context has always required expert facilitation).

That's not st say that we aren't already recognising the benefits of online teaching. Anecdotally I'm hearing that lots of courses are seeing much higher levels of attendance than before and that many students find the online environment more inclusive, especially those who are perhaps more reflective or those for whom English is not their first language.

4. Practice mirroring

The principle of Contact Hours is, in my opinion, the biggest stumbling block for the move to online teaching. The narrow definition of Contact Hours in the UK basically boils down to 'time spent in the same room together'. In largely face-to-face institutions there are vague gestures towards 'online' as contact but in most courses this doesn't seem to be officially mapped in. This is amplified by a cultural attachment to the University as a set of buildings. (Until you can screw a plaque to a VLE with the name of a benefactor on it I guess buildings will always win?)

So in the move to online teaching our initial instinct is to preserve Contact Hours by mirroring what would have been face-to-face sessions with webinar style sessions. What this looks like is exhausting 3-4 hour online sessions which must be almost impossible to stay engaged with. Not only is this unstatable, it is also damaging to the learning process. In short, our limited conception of 'Contact' is antithetical to what we claim we are trying to achieve, especially when we move online.

Broadening presence

In an era of information abundance we know that students are more interested in moments of contact than they are in access to content. Beyond credintialisaion, it's access to expertise and those moments of feedback and co-presence which come to signify 'what they are paying for'. Of course, some courses also offer access to specialist equipment but even then I'd argue that access to expertise is still the main concern.

What I propose is that instead of thinking in terms of Contact Hours we should move to the concept of presence -the extent to which a member of teaching staff is present and in what mode. This could come in many forms:

1. A fairly quick, reliable, turnaround to emailed questions

2. Being active 'live' in forums or text chats (an 'office hours' approach to asynchronous)

3. Lively synchronous sessions - such as, webinars with plenty of Q&A

4. Artfully 'flipped' use of pre-recorded teaching videos

5. Audio, video or text summative feedback (if it's been created just for you then it's always a moment of presence)

6. ...and of course face-to-face sessions in various forms.

We are highly attuned to the levels of presence and attention (we are social beings) which is why a move to online shouldn't involve cutting staff time or staff-student ratios.

With some thought it should be possible to weight the various modes of engagement as forms of presence and broaden out beyond the 'time spent in the same room' concept. Making this work would involve being explicit with students how these various forms of presence support learning and contextualising the value of face-to-face as one of many presence modes. Communicating that will not be easy, as it requires a shift in what we perceive as 'university', but this is something we need to do if we are going to be increasingly online from now on.

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The need for Presence not 'Contact Hours'

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This is a reflection on some key areas which have come to light with the sudden move to online teaching. I wanted to write this post very early our academic term (less than two weeks in) to capture the moment. While some of the thoughts might appear a bit grumpy, that's not really representative of how I feel.

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Heriot Watt's - Watt works series provides some great guides

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Tips on how to make zoom a more inclusive environment

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Photo by Gabriel Benois on Unsplash

By this point in the Covid-19 transition to remote instruction, you've probably had a few sessions on Zoom. You've taught a few classes, met students for office hours. No doubt more than once, you've seen a lot of students staring blankly at you after you pose a question. ( Insert crickets-chirping sound.)

Faculty members are getting a crash course in Zoom and finding it can be supremely awkward, at least at first. One reason for our collective uneasiness: Most of us are not well acquainted with the " hidden curriculum" of Zoom - all the unwritten rules and expectations that you're supposed to know but none of us have been taught. Faculty members and students together are diving into a new tool with little to no experience with it, technically or culturally.

As you lead a class discussion or a meeting on Zoom, it's all too easy to lose people in the process. But the principles of inclusive teaching can help you reach students in a virtual classroom, just as in a physical one.

As longtime advocates of inclusive teaching - the practice of embracing student diversity and designing courses in ways that reach all students - we know how important structure is. More structure in face-to-face teaching works for most students, without harming those who don't need it.

Fortunately, there are ways to incorporate structural elements into remote teaching, too - and it's not too late to add them, with the goal of reaching more of your now-online students. So if you're in the "emergency fine-tuning stage," looking ahead to more remote teaching this summer, or both, here are eight suggestions to help you keep inclusiveness in mind along the way:

Before a session, ask students to consider the settings for their names. In face-to-face teaching, if you ask students what you can do to help them feel welcome, one of the most common responses is "know my name in class." Apply that lesson to Zoom: Invite students to edit their name on display and choose how they would like to be addressed. Suggest they consider adding a preferred pronoun and/or a pronunciation guide, too. As educators who teach large classes, we've always dreamed of having students' names attached to their faces like this, so let's take advantage of the best aspects of this tool, which makes it easy to learn and use their names.

Establish the rules of engagement for each Zoom meetup. In our own courses, we've found that if we ask students to use video in Zoom, most do. (Be aware that some can't because their internet access is too spotty to make the video option work, or they may feel uncomfortable sharing their work space at home.) As always, we advocate being transparent about the reasoning behind your requests. You might also decide which other aspects of class culture are important to you - such as asking students to maintain eye contact, keep their audio muted until called upon, use a certain method to ask a question, or indicate in a particular way when they have to leave a session early. Invite students to suggest a few rules of engagement of their own, since, at this point in the transition to remote instruction, they have probably seen both good and bad examples. As we learned in our initial Zoom sessions, in March, many students had no idea (and some anxiety) about the etiquette professors might expect online.

Use different ways for students to "speak up." In Zoom, just as in face-to-face teaching, there are many ways to hear from people. As self-declared introverts, we're now learning in our own campus administrative meetings what number of people starts to feel like "a crowd" on Zoom and when we might be tempted to retreat and shut down. Likewise, the more ways you can allow students to engage, the better. Besides instructing them to click on the hand-raised symbol to speak, you can allow students to use the chat tool or you could open a live external Q&A. For really quick questions - "Can you see my screen?" or "How are you feeling about the material so far?" - just ask everyone for a thumbs up or down.

Give careful consideration to the way you start. Without structure, the beginning of online meetings can be very awkward. As people join in at different times, consider using those initial minutes to build community. Invite students to pick a virtual background that tells something about them - you could even propose themes: the place you would be if you could snap your fingers and make it happen, the food you are most craving. Another way to begin is to pose a question - "What's one thing that you're grateful for today?" - that students answer through the chat tool. They can scroll through responses as they get settled.

Be intentional about how you end your Zoom sessions. In face-to-face teaching, the universal signal that class is nearly over is that students start packing up their notebooks and other materials. Find ways to make the closing of your virtual class more structured and routine, too. For example, you might end every class with students sharing their "muddiest point" in the chat window before they leave, so you know what to go over again in the next Zoom session. Or you could invite students to hang around after class if they want to chat more informally.

Break out the breakout-room tool. Consider adding to your repertoire the division of the class into small groups. Many students are more likely to participate in a small-group discussion than in a classwide one. The tool itself will randomly assign students to small groups, but you can change the default timing settings of when they enter and exit the breakout rooms, as well as who is in which groups. To keep the first words out of their mouths from being "What does she want us to do?," provide clear instructions to explain the prompt. Ask students to share their names and Zoom locations before beginning the discussion or assignment. Tell them how much time they will have, and how and where to report the results. Groups function more inclusively with more structure, so consider assigning someone (use random criteria, such as "the student who has the largest pet") to report on each group's results once back in the main Zoom meeting. To hold them accountable and give you formative feedback, designate a place (such as a Google doc) to show each group's thoughts or work.

Provide resources and opportunities for asynchronous learning. One certainty in these uncertain times is that students face a whole host of barriers to remote learning - unreliable internet access, computer snafus, even different time zones - that they don't encounter when we are together in a physical classroom. For that reason, record each Zoom session in order to be inclusive. If your subscription allows, record to the cloud to create audio transcriptions. (Another option for transcription: Upload your class sessions to YouTube and then post the link in a secure place on your campus's learning-management system to protect students' privacy.) Post the audio files, too, since video can be difficult to view for some students. Create an online discussion forum that asynchronous users can contribute to before and after class, even if they couldn't contribute in real time. In general, it's helpful to ask yourself: How can I ensure that students who aren't able to join in any synchronous activities feel included in the learning and in our class community?

Lastly, acknowledge that we're all learning together. It's understandable that you may feel frustrated, sad, mad, or any host of other emotions about switching to Zoom (or some other website) from the comfort of your usual classroom. This is not what you, or your students, signed up for this term. But as Harriet Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Carlow University, wrote on the Scholarly Teacher website, "We are always teaching on at least two levels. Clearly we teach the essence of our disciplines, and at the same time, by virtue of our presence and approach, we model ways of being in the world." To that end, you can model how remote learning doesn't have to mean exclusion and social isolation. Perhaps now, more than ever, is the best time to reassure students that they belong in your classroom and you believe in them.

Postscript: This essay is aimed at faculty members, but we also have created "A Students' Guide to Zoom" that may be of use to readers. It can be found here.

Kelly A. Hogan is associate dean of instructional innovation at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a STEM teaching professor in biology. She is on Twitter @DrMrsKellyHogan. Viji Sathy is an administrator in the office of undergraduate education at Chapel Hill and a teaching associate professor of psychology and neuroscience. Her Twitter handle is . Their website on inclusive teaching is . They are writing a book on the topic with West Virginia University Press.
As the coronavirus crisis deepens, The Chronicle is providing free access to our breaking-news updates on its impact on higher education. It's your support that makes our work possible. Please consider subscribing today.

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8 Ways to Be More Inclusive in Your Zoom Teaching

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By this point in the Covid-19 transition to remote instruction, you've probably had a few sessions on Zoom. You've taught a few classes, met students for office hours. No doubt more than once, you've seen a lot of students staring blankly at you after you pose a question. ( Insert crickets-chirping sound.)

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An excellent Case centre webinar focusing on maintaining clarity, engagement and accountability in online teaching

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Webinar: Moving Case Teaching Online Quickly - Best Practice

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Webinars – from Yawn to Yay - Inspiring learning

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Have you ever wondered if your audience is listening or taking it in when you are delivering a presentation online?

How do you know if your delegates are focusing on you? Are they checking their emails?

Have you been to a really engaging online presentation and thought 'I wish I could do that'?

You can make your webinars more engaging and interactive by using some built in tools and simple techniques. At the same time, you can help participants who find it difficult to concentrate or prefer to type their thoughts.

Take a standard slide deck and follow some of these tips and tricks for a memorable and energising webinar that colleagues and audiences will be talking about for weeks to come.

Getting started

Research your platform and find out what interactive functions it has.

You may have a basic web conferencing set up like Zoom or Google Hangouts. Or you may be lucky enough to have access to virtual classrooms like Adobe Connect, Webex, Blackboard Collaborate or Big Blue Button. (Many other brands are available!)

Basic platforms usually allow screen sharing, audio and video, and audience members might be able to answer using yes or no buttons. They can also message the room using the chat pane. Chat is your friend! It allows the audience to interact with you and with each other. This is where the sharing and creative thinking happens - they can ask questions and make suggestions. Don't worry if chat is lively while presenters are speaking. The audience can always access the content afterwards if they miss anything.

Check your settings

Make sure you keep your webinar safe. When you set up make sure you share a dedicated link with participants and that only specified people can share their screens.

If you are using Zoom there's a handy guide here.

Make your audience comfortable

Welcome your audience into the room and let them know about the ground rules for the session. Remind them to mute their mics if they are not talking and tell them if they have a hand-raise icon or another signal when they want to speak.

Let them know how long the session will last and if there will be a comfort break.

Tell them if they'll be using polls, annotations or other interactions and where the buttons are.

Don't let more than 5 minutes go by without an interaction. Your audience might drift away if they don't feel included and engaged.

Be accessible from the beginning by asking future participants about disabilities - plan and deliver accordingly.

Start and finish on time!

Polls

A poll can get a webinar off to a great start. How does your audience feel about your topic? What do they already know? At the end of the webinar you can gauge any changes in thinking or get some feedback about your content.

Virtual classrooms have polls and discussion pods built in. But if you have a basic platform try Mentimeter for a colourful, visually engaging poll which displays results in real time as various charts or word clouds. You can share your screen so delegates can see the responses in real time. In the free version you can ask two questions every time.

Other freemium tools, Poll Everywhere and Slido are popular alternatives, and also have a range of question types including multiple choice, ranking and word clouds.

Collaboration

Audiences appreciate being able to participate in a presentation, whether by asking questions, posting comments and ideas or sharing links.

Lino.it (free), Padlet and Miro (freemium) are excellent tools if you want to get your audience collaborating and collating before, during and after the session. The virtual sticky notes allow people to post text, links, images and videos. These can be organised into categories or left in freeform.

Slide design

Presentation slides are not engaging if they contain everything you want to say. Try using images instead of words. Scott Hibberson's blog post gives some great advice about where to find free high quality images. When you design your slide deck - make only one point per slide. Better to have lots of short interesting background slides than a few crammed, distracting or unreadable ones. You want the audience to pay attention to you!

Afterwards

A recording of the webinar might be useful to some people, but remember to share your content in another format. You could put the script into notes and share it beforehand or afterwards. For those who missed it or who want a recap, you could write a blog or make an eBook, by adapting the slide deck or making a PDF of your content. You could create a short video of the presentation using a built in tools like PowerPoint narration, free screencasting tools or create an Adobe Spark or Sway. This could include a script and subtitles, for good access to your content after the event.

Webinars don't have to be boring

Using just one or two of these tools and techniques in your webinar will make a big difference to your audience, making sure everyone is engaged and no one is excluded. After all, you want to give them the best possible experience.
Also by Esther Barrett Presentations - from Yawn to Yay
Online meetings - from Yawn to Yay

For more information on teaching and learning using online virtual classrooms email esther.barrett@jisc.ac.uk

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Webinars - from Yawn to Yay - Inspiring learning

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You can make your webinars more engaging and interactive by using some built in tools and simple techniques. At the same time, you can help participants who find it difficult to concentrate or prefer to type their thoughts.

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https://cogdogblog.com/2020/03/greatest-flawed-experiment/

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Making Panopto recordings more interactive/engaging for students

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Making Panopto recordings more interactive/engaging for students

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If recording in Panopto, remember it doesn’t have to be a whole consecutive presentation from a student's point of view; you can direct them to ‘pause this recording now and go and...... then come back for......’

In this way you can direct them to a specific reading or case that you then go on to review, or to do an exercise.

Think about asking prompt questions. When you teach in seminars you generally know the different (right and wrong) ways students will answer. Ask the question, pause, ( or tell them to pause and write it down) then ask them ‘how did you find that?’ - or something similar.

You can then go on to go through the various ways they may have answered, why you think they have done so, and why/what the most appropriate answer is.

This kind of ‘interaction’ will help a student to engage more actively with what you are saying and to self test their responses.

AMcG

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Preparing students for online learning - Blog

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Preparing students for online learning - Blog

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Teaching perspectives from the Business School

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By Susan Smith
Associate Dean (Education and Students)

We've moved our content online successfully and developed an assessment but how do the students now know what we expect from them?

The guidance is to be clear and consistent in your communications with students. They, like us, are facing significant uncertainty about the spread of the Covid-19 virus and are naturally anxious about the implications of moving teaching, learning and assessment online for their degree outcomes.

Module level communication

Be clear about how the module will be conducted online:

What to expect from online teaching. This might include when slides will be available. When a recording will be available e.g. the scheduled lecture time.

What online learning means on your module and the expectations for interaction with the resources and activities. These should be well signposted on Canvas.

How to contact faculty e.g. virtual office hours, discussion boards, bookable web conferences.

Where to address questions e.g. to a discussion board so that answers are shared.

How quickly you will address emails and respond to discussion posts.

What sort of regular communications you will send out to the class e.g. weekly reviews/updates. Plan to send students an update email at the same time in the remaining weeks of term to aid regularity and structure during these uncertain times.

Tip: You can schedule announcements for release at a specified time within Canvas.

Student to student communication

In a face to face environment students can easily clarify understanding with their classmates. These informal interactions are important in supporting learning. Whilst we cannot fully replicate this online you can suggest some routes for students to connect with each other.

Create a student led discussion within your module - perhaps the course rep could lead this?

Some cohorts may wish to organise their own online social space through WhatsApp and other social media tools.

Students as online learners

Moving from a structured timetable and a familiar study environment to an online only mode of study is likely to be a difficult transition for many students.

Tips to communicate to your students for self-organising for online study include:

Plan when you're going to study around your other commitments.

Let others know when you're studying and shouldn't be interrupted.

Organise your study space so it is comfortable and you will be productive.

Engage with your tutors and peer group. Everyone will share similar concerns and difficulties.

Ask questions if you are unsure.

Try to enjoy studying online.

Student support and wellbeing

This is a particularly difficult time for students who may be facing significant personal challenges whilst trying to maintain their studies.

Students can continue to access support from the Student Academic Success Advisor Team within the School.

The Student Life Centre is also a useful source of advice and support.

Other resources that may be useful include the Student Minds website.

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By Susan Smith Associate Dean (Education and Students) We've moved our content online successfully and developed an assessment but how do the students now know what we expect from them? The guidance is to be clear and consistent in your communications with students.

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Staying true to teaching values and objectives in the face of course interruptions

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Staying true to teaching values and objectives in the face of course interruptions

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International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

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Some things will work better than you expect and some will not work as well

There is no 'one size' fits all for you or for students

Ask for feedback

Variety can help

Import resources

Chunk it down

You can only do what you can, with what you have, in the time available.

AMcG

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Replacing multiple seminars with different mini-sessions

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Replacing multiple seminars with different mini-sessions

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If on campus you had multiple sessions in the week but don't want to 'run' repeated sessions online, then 'chunk' the seminar down into smaller elements.
You can then do mini-sessions at the different timeslots so you can engage with the different groups, record the sessions to make the 'whole' seminar.
It also means you have the opportunity to interact with smaller student groups in a 'live' session.
AMcG

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Remember the timetable is still relevant - ways to deliver shorter sessions

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Remember the timetable is still relevant - ways to deliver shorter sessions

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AMcg
We still have to be mindful of timetabling if delivering live sessions online so we don’t clash sessions with other modules.
Always record so that they can review later.
An option could be to partner with a colleague who teaches the same students, more possible for compulsory NOT option modules. Then you can ‘share’ lecture slots and/or seminar slots and deliver two shorter sessions rather than two long ones.

Phil J
Or record and upload lectures, ‘share’ workshops (take the exercises out, or adapt them and a 2 hour workshop should easily cut down to an hour ...)

Isabel Fisher
Or you think about asynchronous learning - I thought I do most of my teaching asynchronously in short bite sizes which also allows for different time zones as I guess that many students now decide to go home

Mark
All of the above makes good sense. It is easy to upload lecture recordings from last year if this still matches current content (there is a guide) If so an easy win which allows us to focus energy on the type of activities  outlined above.

AMcG

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I’d emphasis is chunking , I.e breaking things down into 10-15 min sessions, where possible. I noted this was also in the graphic re on line exams which Susan sent round, which noted the idea of breaking the exam down into different elements. Takes a bit of time but is generally seen as good practice

Mark F

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KISS absolutely. I’ve done a lot of this stuff with the OU and cannot stress this enough. Do not worry about production values, do NOT try to use all the fancy buttons and tools etc that are available, the #1 thing you MUST do is be comfortable, this leads to confidence, which in turn leads to a good student experience.

Oh, and never, ever, (really, never) utter the words “err, I’m not quite sure what I’m doing” or similar. It’s like a school teacher in the 1980’s who can’t get the vhs to work. You lose the audience immediately.

Matt Walsh

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AMcG
This is a useful info-grahic for taking teaching online, wth a freat KISS (Keep it simple Stupid) approach
https://create.piktochart.com/output/45040488-pivot-online

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Quick tip: responding to questions in Discussions 

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Quick tip: responding to questions in Discussions 

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You can add live links in discussions, links to articles, you tube videos or other web pages too - good for responding to queries with references, resources, or a quick recording you make of yourself answering the question.

AMcG

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Graziana
I'm thinking of arranging chat times with students for Q&As. It's one of the items on canvas...
There is a ‘chat’ function in Canvas for direct communication.

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dDiscussions can be set up to promote group discussion. Just remember to ‘publish’ once you have posted. I have forgotten in the past and couldn’t understand why no response. 😆
When you set up a 'Discussion' you may want to 'allow threaded replies', so that there can be related comments on the same question kept together.
Depending on the purpose of the discussion you may want to 'Allow 'liking'' - and encourage students to use it.
Don't select 'group discussion' unless you want to set up a discussion for a particular group.

AMcG

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Remind students to upload their picture onto Canvas. This will help you when they post comments or questions, and will help the students to recognise a face when they don't recognise a name.
AMcG

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They want to learn, they want to engage, they too will be bored at home and looking for interaction.  Give them a reason for coming away from You Tube - but keep it bite sized.
Also, they are teenagers and many will be at their most active in the evenings, or long after you have gone to bed!  Give them things they can do in their own time, at their own pace, and in their own way.
Get them to share with each other as they will learn that way too - you don't have to give them feedback on absolutely everything, just getting them to do it will help them to learn also.
AMcG

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Care whats behind you and what pages/tabs/docs you have open on your PC when you do a live session

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Care whats behind you and what pages/tabs/docs you have open on your PC when you do a live session

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Matt Walsh

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Many of the publishers are making many textbooks available on Kortext, which is the text book reading tool - more sophisticated than an e-book, as students can add their own notes, highlights and margin comments on their own version of the text book.
The Uni usually has to pay for this and will only do it for large groups and when the students use it, so this is actually a great opportunity.
You may wish to check with the library to see f your Core Text s being made available, and then ask the library to add the Kortext version to your Canvas site reading list. (Be patient, they WILL be busy).
AMcG

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Remind/facilitate how students can interact with each other - they are isolated also

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Remind/facilitate how students can interact with each other - they are isolated also

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Today I added the link to the Zoom website to my Canvas page for my PG module.  Not with a question, not with any content or any expectation , but merely as a suggestion and a way for them to access a tool to 'meet' with their fellow students.  I have set up a specific Discussion called 'student meet ups' and told them they can use this between themselves to share links, ideas, and questions - an links for their own online 'meet ups' WITHOUT any input (interference from me).
I have told them I WILL NOT monitor it, and if they have any questions they need to be answered that come out of this they will need to post it on a separate discussion
AMcG

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Same Content in different formats - curate don't create

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Same Content in different formats - curate don't create

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Don’t forget that there are loads of videos on You Tube of people teaching elements of you subject. A variety of media works well when teaching online. You can embed in the additional resources section at the bottom of your Canvas site, ( if you need help drop me a query or contact TEL). And adding some short videos this week will be good for keeping contact and momentum for students. Don’t be concerned if it repeats material you will/have cover(ed) yourself - variety is the key to this type of engagement. REMEMBER to add the time/length of the video in the description so students know how long it will take. Short videos can encourage students to engage.
AMcG

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One of the most common questions an Instructional Designer is faced with is, "How can I enhance the student experience in my online course?" Often times, instructors wish to replicate the activities they do in face-to-face courses in the online environment but are not sure where to begin. One recommendation is to consult an instructional designer.

We also strongly encourage instructors to participate in the Master Class for Teaching Online, an online workshop designed to facilitate peer sharing of strategies for teaching online. The workshop is facilitated by a team of instructional designers and touches on several best practices. The graphic presented here lists seven best practices for teaching online. Incorporating these best practices will help ensure that you and your students stay engaged and have a positive experience.
Best Practices for Teaching Online Instructor Presence
Establish teaching presence early and often:

Post announcements, appear on video and participate in discussions.

Show your personality, passion, and expertise.

Real World Applications
Motivate students by making a real-world connection:

Show students how they will apply what they are learning.
Teach for Online Students
Orient students to the online course:

Break learning into smaller chunks. Establish a pattern of activity and due dates.

Describe expectations for online participation, communication, and netiquette.

Provide technical support information.

Clear Expectations
Help students dive straight into the content by providing them with:
Learning Objectives
Alignment matters! Be sure that:

Course content aligns with objectives and assessments.

Extra content not directly supporting the learning objectives is removed or made optional.

Prompt Feedback
Provide feedback to improve student outcomes:

Reinforce important materials, concepts, and skills.

Provide timely feedback students can apply during the course.

Engage Students
The quality of interaction between students is a sign of a successful class:

Create educational experiences for students that are challenging, enriching, and that extend their academic abilities.

Provide students with opportunities to interact with peers, such as through discussion and group work.

Recommended Resources:

Graphic created by Ron Carranza, Andrew Salcido, and Jessica Cole. Updated August 22, 2019.

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Best Practices for Teaching Online - Teach Online

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By Andrew Salcido and Jessica Cole One of the most common questions an Instructional Designer is faced with is, "How can I enhance the student experience in my online course?" Often times, instructors wish to replicate the activities they do in face-to-face courses in the online environment but are not sure where to begin.

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Do shared student creation/interaction for content sharing

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Do shared student creation/interaction for content sharing

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There are different ways you can do this. The aim is to get them to be engaging with the material and not actually setting something that requires feedback.
This is a good type of activity to set in groups. Get them to use recording media, and Panopto will work, to read sections of something relevant (not a research paper that is too 'dry', and potentially too difficult).  Get the group to make a recording of a section from the Course text, each adding the next few sentences to the reading. It may seem basic, but they can then share and work together.
OR Set a Case study exercise where the task for one group is record a reading of the case study, another group reads one question and answers it/discusses it - they can 'record this' using similar webinar tools themselves - such as Zoom, which they can use for free in small groups.
Be brave! They will love to be given 'things to do'
AMcG

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Teaching Perspectives from the Business School

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Teaching perspectives from the Business School

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By Susan Smith
Associate Dean (Education and Students)
Many of us have never taught online and rely on traditional modes of assessment. The current 'online pivot' is being driven by necessity rather than choice in face of an unprecedented challenge to the health and wellbeing of our faculty, support services and students.

Collectively and individually we will need to think creatively about our content, delivery and assessment to maintain the integrity of the educational experience and ensure that our students meet their learning outcomes. This will not be easy and we will need to be pragmatic in our approaches to effectively adapt.

As faculty we will be asked to make numerous decisions about how we plan to teach and assess.

The main message is to be consistent, use technologies both faculty and students are familiar with, and to communicate clearly to students.
Benefits
Enrol in the Canvas site Teaching Online, Learning Anywhere which can help you with selecting the appropriate tools to deliver your online teaching.
Best practice
Will it be synchronous (or live)?
Considerations
Live sessions can help to replicate the personal connection we have in face to face teaching and help reduce student isolation. Live teaching also reduces the scope for misunderstanding and allows a more responsive approach.

You need to be clear about the role that the live stream will play in your module design. A live stream of a lecture may not be as effective as a shorter interactive session with students.

Barriers faced by students can include access and availability to high speed internet and scheduling of teaching across different time zones.
Benefits
Walk through of how to set up live streaming of sessions and Canvas Conferences.
Best practice
What about asynchronous?
Faculty role
An asynchronous delivery mode enables an increased level of flexibility with students able to access on demand at a time when they are prepared to study.

If you're recording content for teaching consider chunking it into smaller bite sized sections and adding quizzes and tasks for students to complete prior to viewing the next recording chunk. The Canvas site outlines how to set up quizzes and integrate Padlet into your module.

In an asynchronous environment faculty needs to maintain a presence and to communicate clearly and regularly as well as encouraging students to connect with their peers. Guidance on how to manage communication via Canvas has been prepared by TEL.
How can we facilitate this dialogue?
Considerations
Who is using asynchronous learning techniques at present?
We should be mindful that not all students will have access to high speed internet connections and that this is an important difference in our current situation versus purpose built online courses where students sign up knowing a certain level of internet access is required.

Canvas discussions enable us to split the cohort into smaller more manageable groups and use structured activities to drive student discussion and participation.

The MBA team allocate marks for each module to student interaction with online discussions. These discussions are structured and students are asked to perform specific tasks and comment on each other's contributions. The faculty actively monitor and comment on student contributions to encourage interaction and keep students on track. If you have a large cohort you can split it down into the seminar or workshop groups for this type of discussion.

The ODL teams also use discussions as part of their range of assessment techniques across their modules.

Below is a reflection from Rene Moolenaar who teaches one of the ODL modules:

" I divided the cohort in three groups. Each group was asked to upload an agreed part of their main assignment on a bespoke graded discussion board 48 hrs before the scheduled live session.

" Once the students in a group had uploaded their work, they were then asked over a period of 24 hrs (still before the live session) to read each other's work and ask questions about it and respond to it.

" During the live sessions I then went through the work they had uploaded, gave feedback for improvement and referenced any interesting questions that were asked on the discussion board. Each session was recorded and made available to all students in the cohort."

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Rising to the challenge of the online pivot

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By Susan Smith Associate Dean (Education and Students) Many of us have never taught online and rely on traditional modes of assessment. The current 'online pivot' is being driven by necessity rather than choice in face of an unprecedented challenge to the health and wellbeing of our faculty, support services and students.

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Moving your in-person lecture or discussion course into an online environment typically takes careful thought and preparation time -resources you likely don't have in abundance as your college or university hastens to respond to the global health crisis COVID-19. Similarly, your students may not be prepared to learn in an online environment. For some of them, attending classes virtually may not be their preferred way to learn.

But rest assured: you absolutely can provide a rich learning experience for your students in an online format.

In Part 1, I answered your most pressing questions about transitioning your classroom online. Here in Part 2, I will share my advice on how to take advantage of some unique elements of online teaching, including techniques and features that can be even more powerful and engaging for your students than what they're used to in person. I will also help you deal with some potential drawbacks of online teaching.

Q: Is tone important when teaching online?

Tone has a tremendous impact in an online course. When I teach, I tend to set a relatively formal, intense tone by wearing a suit and tie, whether it's online or in person. A relaxed, conversational tone can set a warmer atmosphere and foster a sense of community. Decide how you want your class to feel. Does it fit with your style? With your school? This will help you decide on a number of things: what the assignments should look like, what the introductions of your students to one another will be like, how you're going to build a community, and what that community is going to feel like to participate in. Is your class going to feel like a business meeting, friends conversing, or somewhere in between?

There is no right or wrong here, but you want to make that choice overtly and consciously, rather than having it just evolve. It might also be helpful to take stock after the first or second class to see how things are going so you can adjust accordingly.

Q: Are there different ways to approach lecture classes versus discussion classes online?

No matter what, try to make classes as interactive as you can. One of your goals when teaching online is to keep students from tuning out. Finding ways to engage students that are also pedagogically meaningful is essential to online learning.

That said, if you're planning to just lecture without any interactive elements, then you'd be better off recording the lecture and making the course asynchronous. Don't make students log in at a set time just to listen to a lecture.

To make a synchronous class more discussion based, interact with students at least every 15 minutes. Set time flags to remind yourself to take questions or run polls. Do something so you're not just speaking. Use the technology that you have available:

Interact with your students through audio and video.

Share your screen so that the whole class can view your PowerPoint slides or other presentation materials.

Hand write notes or draw on screen using a blackboard substitute such as a tablet. If you don't have a tablet, you can type on a keyboard (a quiet one!) or use voice recognition.

Open up a chat. Chat windows are a lot to keep track of, but they are a powerful tool to allow students who aren't speaking to bring up ideas or follow up on previous points. Be sure you occasionally refer to what's being said in the chat comments, so students know you're incorporating their observations into the discussion. Or have a TA or student monitor it and raise salient points periodically.

Use breakout groups-with most online teaching platforms, you can set groups, push a button, and then instantly get students into virtual subgroups.

Remember, things do go wrong, so be prepared with a plan B. And don't let that sense of losing control stress you out. It's going to be okay. Not everything has to be perfect in an online course. Students have been using technology all their lives and understand that things crash.

Q: What's the best way to keep students engaged online?

You have to be larger than life when you are teaching online-since students aren't seeing you in person, you need to be bigger. For starters, don't forget to look at the camera. It takes practice, but if you arrange your setup such that you're looking into the camera by default, that's going to help a lot. And sell. I'm a shameless salesperson when I'm teaching a course, and there's nothing wrong with that. If you don't sell, then students aren't going to be convinced. Engage yourself and show your passion. Maybe it's with hand gestures and vocal intonation. Maybe it's just with the conviction of your words. Remember why you became a teacher and use that energy, that sense of purpose, and convey that to your students.

Here are some other helpful tips and interactive tactics you can use to keep students engaged:

Set high standards for your students. Expect things from them and they will rise to the occasion. If you expect that they're not going to do that much, then guess what? They're not going to do that much.

Allow for time lag. Internet connections are not always going to be perfect. When you speak, your timing is going to be off a little bit-so don't try to accomplish quite as much in the same amount of time. If you ask a question, pause for longer and give students a chance to hear it because there may be a delay.

Keep a class list visible. You can't rely on the participant list in your online platform-it will be constantly changing depending on who logs in, who logs out, and who's speaking. This can be very hard to keep track of, so having a separate class list handy-even if you need to print it out on paper-will simplify this for you.

Engage a range of students. Make sure that you call on different students. Don't let the same voices dominate.

Use warm and cold calls. Use warm calls by letting students know ahead of time that you plan to call on them. You could say, Joe, I'm going to call on you in a little bit. Or email students ahead of time: Joe, I'm going to ask you to talk about this topic. You can also cold call students in a live session. If cold calling produces more anxiety than you are comfortable with, that's fine. Warm calls can be very effective.

Consider the chat window. I mentioned the chat feature earlier. You can open a chat window for periods of time to have an intense discussion and get a lot of ideas out quickly.

Interject discussion at least every 15 minutes. Again, this will wake students up and reengage them or bring them back if they've drifted. Accept the fact that some of them are going to drift, as that's just what happens with online teaching.

Create polls in response to discussion. You can create polls ahead of time to use during class or write them on the spot if something interesting comes up during the discussion. For instance, if someone raises a point you hadn't thought of, conduct a quick poll to see what the entire class thinks about that issue.

Summarize. I don't tend to do this very much in a traditional classroom, but when online students' attention fades, have some way of summarizing what you've been discussing. Even better? Have your students do it. Call on them and say, Can you tell us what we can learn from the last 20 minutes of discussion?

"Don't make students log in at a set time just to listen to a lecture."

Bill Schiano

Q: How do I handle a class of 50 or more students?

A lot depends on how long the class lasts and the format. For example, if you have an 80-minute synchronous class with 50 students, you will probably hear from no more than 25 to 40 students during the meeting. A great tactic to get students more actively involved is to use a breakout session, where students can talk to one another. Or open the chat window so everyone gets a chance to participate by typing their answers or comments, even if they're not all heard in the larger discussion. Another way is to open a shared document and have students type into it.

If I have over 50 students in an asynchronous class, I try to do a lot of the work in groups. If I have 120 students, for example, I'll teach as if there are three classes of 40 or four classes of 30 and have them hold their own discussions. This is more work, so don't do it this way if you don't have the time.

Q: What are best practices for running breakout groups online?

Most of the major tools (Zoom, Adobe Connect, and Blackboard Collaborate, for instance) offer this functionality. Don't be intimidated by it-vendors provide good, brief tutorials on how to use this function. Most will also let you set the groups up before the session starts. But in the simplest case, you just input the number of groups you'd like, and the system will assign everyone instantly.

I find the ideal size of a breakout group to be in the 4- to 7-student range. You can go larger if the students are used to working in virtual groups, although I'd stay below 10 if you can. I try to pop in on each group if there is time, just to check on progress and ask if they have questions. If you want to keep close tabs or have a record, you can disable audio in the breakout rooms. But I typically let them use audio and video in the rooms if it is available. Unless I have a lot of time for the session, I don't do much substantive work with individual breakout groups. If you have a very large class, you probably can't "visit" every group personally. Most tools will let you send messages to groups without joining each one.

If you don't have enough students to make subdividing into groups sensible, then let them work as one group. In that case, I usually "sit in" as their manager, auditor, client, or consultant. To use the group time well, set a clear task; suggest processes that might make them more productive; provide a timer, or regular reminders of time remaining; scope the deliverable so that it will be meaningful and useful; and define the deliverable explicitly.

Q: What's the best way to manage shy or reticent students?

This is a common challenge with online courses. You'll need to decide how important this issue is to you, and then let that determination steer the remedies you implement. For me, it's essential that all students be engaged in the discussion, including turning on their video camera for synchronous sessions and contributing to the conversation. I see it as central to the success of the course and, more importantly, to students' learning and development. My students are in a business school, and they're planning careers that will require them to engage and speak up in physical and virtual meetings.

Here are strategies I often use:

Make it clear that online engagement is required. Technical camera issues are rarely a valid excuse in 2020-students can always use their phones.

Passionately explain why such engagement is important-it's good for the class and it's an important practice for them before they embark on their careers.

Warm call students regularly (some before the synchronous sessions, some during).

Send emails (I use a mail merge to make it seem more personal) to anyone who didn't engage in the previous session. I typically express my interest in hearing from those quiet students in the next session.

Make participation a significant part of the grade, if possible.

Use polls, shared documents, brief writing exercises, or chat to help draw out students' ideas. Then call on individual students to expand their thinking-this doesn't feel as high-pressure as a pure cold call.

Use group work before or during class to prime the discussion. You can assign groups to present the opening part of class, for example. Or you can delegate extra responsibility for the class discussion to a group to ensure you will at least have a small subset of students who are well prepared.

These same techniques also help students from diverse backgrounds who may not be studying in their native language. Many students who are reluctant to speak in physical classrooms find speaking in virtual ones easier. The same techniques you use in the physical classroom remain essential, but pay particular attention to speaking pace (yours and your students'); many of us speed up when we are speaking to a computer.

Also, be honest and talk to your students about this unique situation. Explain why getting comfortable in an online setting is relevant to their careers. This is the way so many meetings happen, and right now, with so many companies canceling conferences and travel, this is the way most work is going to get accomplished for a while. Remind them of that.

Q: Why is it important to build a community among students?

The more you can build community, the more your students will feel invested in the course, and the more likely they are to engage in the work. Plus, by promoting a community among your students, everyone in the class will start to want everyone else to be better, which is very valuable.

There are also benefits to community building that go far beyond your class. The more connections we can build during this time, the better off all of us will be. Many of your students are going to want this connection because they're going to miss being able to physically go to campus or go to the coffee shop and talk to people. Providing some of that connection in the online space will help with the stress and feelings of isolation that this COVID-19 pandemic is very likely to cause.

A simple but important step: make sure your students know each other. There are tools available in your learning management system that foster community by allowing you to build profiles where students can describe their background. Also, encourage your students to chat informally just as they would in a physical classroom-during breaks or before class.
Read Part 1 to learn how to quickly adapt to teaching online and set up your digital classroom.

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You Can Still Engage Your Students When Teaching Online-Here's How

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Moving your in-person lecture or discussion course into an online environment typically takes careful thought and preparation time -resources you likely don't have in abundance as your college or university hastens to respond to the global health crisis COVID-19. Similarly, your students may not be prepared to learn in an online environment.

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... Suddenly Forced to Teach Online Due to a Global Pandemic

At the time of this writing, colleges and universities around the world are cancelling face-to-face classes to slow the spread of coronavirus. At nearly every institution of higher education, faculty are being asked to prepare for the possibility of teaching courses online. As an experienced online professor, here are my Top 10 Tips to help you transition to teaching online.
Tip #1: Consider Teaching Asynchronously
For the first few weeks of teaching online, it makes a lot of sense to meet synchronously with Zoom or WebEx. Perhaps that's all we'll need and then it will be back to normal. However, it is possible that face-to-face learning will be disrupted for longer than just a few weeks. In that case, I encourage you to seriously consider teaching your course asynchronously.

What does that mean? It means that instead of live webinars, you would provide your students with lecture videos, which they can watch at any time of the day or night. There are many advantages to asynchronous learning. It provides greater flexibility for students during a time of crisis and gives them the opportunity to review lectures multiple times. For faculty, developing lecture videos can be a real time savings, especially for those teaching multiple sections of the same course.
Tip #2: Keep Course Navigation Simple and Obvious.
Everything is harder for students online. Communication is slower. Distractions are greater. The greatest gift you can give to your students is to make the learning process simple and clear. When you're a student taking an online course for the very first time, you're like an inexperienced traveler who just landed in Jakarta. Where am I? Where's the syllabus? What's my first assignment? Imagine all the uncertainty of the first day of class without an instructor there to walk you through it.

Navigation should be stone-cold obvious. In addition, I would suggest you make a brief video labeled "START HERE" that shows students exactly how the course is laid out. Here's an example of one of my welcome videos.
Tip #3: Build on Existing Content
Professors have been teaching online lecture and lab courses for well over a decade and there's an enormous number of quality educational resources already available for you to use with your students. The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement is alive and strong, and you should take full advantage of it. As you search the web you'll find lecture videos, lab activities, discussion prompts, simulations, etc. This should be your first stop before making lots of content yourself. As my old physics professor used to say, "An afternoon in the library can save you a month in the laboratory."

If you teach advanced courses, you may be underwhelmed by what you find online. Think creatively about how you can twist an activity to make it work with the resources you find. For example, did you find a great lecture video, but it's more appropriate for high school students? Ask your students to watch and critique the content, looking for oversimplifications or errors in the presentation.
Tip #4: Keep Your Lecture Videos Short
I know our slide-decks are built for 50 minute lectures, but believe me when I tell you that you're going to want to split that up into shorter lectures - it will benefit both you and your students. When students work online, they don't just sit at the computer for 50 minutes and then come back two days later for the next lecture. They consume content at different speeds in different amounts over different intervals of time. Shorter lecture videos are much like shorter chapters in a popular novel - they allow more "break-points" where a student can step away and then come back and pick up where they left off. Shorter videos also make it easier for students to find the content they want to review.

Shorter lecture videos are also a huge benefit to instructors. If you're not accustomed to recording yourself, you will quickly discover how many more mistakes you make when there's a microphone or camera recording. Hopefully you can just power through those mistakes, but if you can't - you will waste hours trying to edit or re-record a 50-minute lecture video. Instead, keep those videos short (5-15 minutes) and you will find it faster and easier to record, edit, and upload your videos. Plus if you ever decide to revise your video lectures in the future, you will be so glad that you can just update a brief video rather than re-record a full lecture.

You can make longer videos, but don't expect students to watch the whole thing. YouTube analytics will even show you which parts students are skipping (or rewatching).

By the end of this 8-min video, only 40% of my students are still watching. But many students are re-watching the video at the 2 minute mark.
Tip #5: Use Simple Technology
Technology is amazing, but it often causes problems for students. Troubleshooting technology issues remotely for 30 students is a nightmare. If you're the one causing the issue (with an overly technical assignment), then you should take a hard look in the mirror and ask yourself if the tools can be simplified. In online classes, we should always strive to use the simplest possible technology that gets the job done - even if that means students are taking cell phone pictures of hand-drawn work and uploading it for you to grade.

The same is also true for the technology that instructors use to create course content. I've been teaching online for years and all of my course content was created with Google Docs and a $20 subscription to Screencastify. None of my computers cost more than $300 - I only use Chromebooks. Why? Because it works.
Tip #6: Make It Simpler for Students So It's Easier for You
I'm a big advocate of making things simpler instead of harder. Don't get me wrong, I don't think a class should be simple as in "everyone gets an A!" I mean it should be "simple" in that students know exactly what's expected of them (so that I don't get a hundred emails a day asking questions). I've already touched on a few things we can do to simplify our online classes like using simple technology and simple navigation, but there are other things that we can do as well.

For example, let's say that I have an assignment asking students to write 500 words on examples of symmetry in nature. That's a fine assignment, but it is a bit tedious (especially the part where I have to read all of these essays). How can I make that assignment simpler? Instead I will ask each student to take ten pictures of symmetry in nature and to share those pictures with the class on a discussion board. The assignment just became way more engaging and enjoyable for students and way easier for me to grade. I call that a win-win.
Tip #7: Think Creatively About Labs
I've been teaching online science labs since 2009. And yet I continue to hear from college faculty who believe that science labs cannot be taught online. Well I'm here to tell you that they already are being taught online. Granted, online lab activities look different than those in the traditional laboratory but they're no less high quality. In my teaching, I generally take three different approaches to lab activities:
Simulations
There's an enormous variety of excellent simulations freely available on the web. These simulations were often built to replicate traditional science labs that are already being done in the classroom. Moreover many of these simulations have existing lab write-ups available for faculty and students to use. The most challenging aspect of simulation-based labs is that they often rely on out-of-date technology, Adobe Flash. Flash continues to be supported by Google Chrome (until the end of 2020), but only if it is specifically enabled by the user on the website. ( Here are instructions for enabling Flash). At the end of the day, there are always some students who are unable to get Flash simulations to work on their computers. As a workaround I often record a screen capture video of the simulation in action so that students can use the video to collect the necessary data to complete the lab.
Kitchen Labs
This is the category of labs that can be completed with common household items (or something that could reasonably be found at a grocery store). At first it may seem that the list of labs in this category would be extremely small, but when you start to think creatively you can find many interesting lab alternatives that work quite nicely. For example, in my astronomy class I have students create a spectrometer with a CD and a cereal box. They measure the speed of light by melting chocolate in a microwave. And students measure the speed of sound with a cell phone and a car horn. When you combine your expert content knowledge and your creativity, you'll be surprised with what you come up with. And... never underestimate the value of photographs as a lab assessment tool (it's impossible to cheat when you have to submit a picture of yourself and the spectrometer you just made out of a cereal box).

A student with his homemade cereal box spectrometer.
Separate Data Collection and Analysis
This third approach separates the data collection process from the data analysis. After all, data analysis can easily be done online. It is the data collection that is difficult. In a traditional science lab, students walk in and find a set of equipment. They are then told precisely how to set it up and precisely how to collect the data.

In an online classroom, we can replicate this data collection process in many different ways. You could record a video (using your own department's lab equipment) which shows how the experiment is set up as well as the data collection process. You can provide them the data to the students or ask them to record the data from the video themselves (as if they were a lab partner standing right next to you). This approach can actually be an improvement over traditional labs, since you can collect data from anywhere. Imagine taking your students with you via video to collect data from a unique ecosystem or even a professional-grade science lab.

Granted - there's no substitute for the real thing when it comes to learning how to use scientific equipment. But if we're honest about our introductory science labs - most of them are focused on data collection for the purpose of understanding scientific concepts. That can definitely be done online.
Tip #8: Leverage the Benefits of Autograding
I think autograding gets a bad rap. Consider the benefits to students of autograded assignments. Students get immediate feedback on their work. That's huge! It allows the assessment to be part of the instruction because students can immediately see what they understand and what they don't.

When combined with questions banks, autograded assignments make it easy to give students multiple attempts on homework or quizzes. I use autograded practice assignments with an unlimited number of attempts so that students can try again and again until they earn full credit. After all, why wouldn't I let my students work harder to demonstrate their mastery of the content? Especially since I'm letting a robot do the grading.

Keep in mind that "autograded" does not necessarily mean "multiple choice." Every LMS has several autograded question types like numerical response or fill in the blank. For those types of questions, students can't simply guess their way to full credit.
Tip #9: Answer Student Questions with Course Improvements
Maybe you'll be back in the face-to-face classroom in just a few weeks. (Here's hoping, right?) But maybe not. If you find yourself teaching online long-term, then consider this innovation for continuously improving your course: answer the students' questions directly in the course.

Are you getting emails from students who can't find the syllabus? Then improve your course navigation. Have several students asked about the same topic that they just don't understand? Record an additional video to address the topic and post it to the course so that other students don't get stuck. Taking this approach has the double benefit of helping students before they get confused and reducing the number of emails you receive. Over time, your course will continue to improve and both you and your students will be happier.
Tip #10: Save Time with Chunking
Without the structure of a class schedule to organize their day, online professors must become master time managers. The best time management solution I've ever encountered is "chunking your time." The basic premise is that you set aside larger chunks of time each day or week for your essential tasks rather than simply responding to interruptions when they arise.

For example, I only respond to student emails in the morning between 8:00 AM and 9:00 AM. That gives me enough time to answer all of my students' questions, and since I do it every weekday, I always respond to my students within 24 hours. It also means that I don't have worry about checking my email and responding to students at any other time during the day. I do the same thing for my grading. Every Wednesday and Friday I set aside time to grade all the student work that has been submitted. Once again by grading on these two days I can be sure that every assignment has been graded within 72 hours. You can chunk other essential tasks like updating your course content or committee work.
In Conclusion
You've been put in a very difficult position, and hopefully it is just for a little while. Remember that you have colleagues around the country (and around the world) who have walked this path before you. And we are here to help.

If there's anything I can do to help, feel free to reach out to me at avheuv@gmail.com.
Andrew Vanden Heuvel is an online astronomy professor at several community colleges across the country. He was the 2010 Michigan Online Teacher of the Year and a finalist for the National Online Teacher of the Year award.

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10 Tips for First-Time Online Professors

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Suddenly Forced to Teach Online Due to a Global Pandemic At the time of this writing, colleges and universities around the world are cancelling face-to-face classes to slow the spread of coronavirus. At nearly every institution of higher education, faculty are being asked to prepare for the possibility of teaching courses online.

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As with any interaction online, you will keep student's interest and engagement if you can keep those interactions shorter. Ask students to upload their answers to questions/exercises before the 'live' session, and then spend time going through those answers in the session.  This way you can shorten the session, but still have the same interaction.
OR You can even do this by using the 'go away and come back' option - start a session, set a task, send them away with a time limit to complete it, and then come back and discuss.
AMcG

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Update: ALT held a webinar, Online learning beyond the technology: Reconceptualising online engagement, on 21 April 2020, with Petrea Redmond and Alice Brown (authors of the paper discussed by Gabi in this post). The recording is available here.

Image by Castaway in Scotland, CC-BY-NC

Switching to online delivery?

If you teach at an institution that is affected by the Coronavirus and is temporarily switching from campus-based teaching to online delivery, you may be wondering how you can help your students to engage online. This blog post offers some suggestions, based on a review of the scholarly literature on online engagement by a group of Australian academics (Redmond, Heffernan, Abawi, Brown and Henderson, 2018) - with a shout-out to the authors for making it open access!

Caveat: I am starting from three assumptions, as follows, which I know don't apply in all scenarios:

You work for an institution that has a virtual learning environment (VLE);

Both you and your students have access to connected devices (preferably a laptop/ tablet or computer, but at least a smartphone);

Your institution will provide essential technical support.

(If you don't have these facilities, I recommend you read Tannis Morgan's helpful blog post, Online Teaching with the most Basic of Tools - Email, and browse through the further resources at the end of this post.)

An online engagement framework

In the review by Redmond et al. (2018), the authors found that online engagement can be categorised under five headings: emotional, social, collaborative, cognitive and behavioural engagement. I'll deal with each of those below, but first, it's worth noting that there is opportunity lurking in the crisis, in that there can be some real benefits to students to learning online, for example:

Online learning is flexible in terms of time and place.

Online learning can be more inclusive. Since there are a variety of alternative ways to participate, the students who tend to speak the most in class might be less dominant online, and the quiet learners might contribute more ideas in writing.

Written records can be kept of the learning, for example in discussion forums, which students can refer back to later.

Students will learn new ways of communicating and managing relationships online, which may be useful in other situations, such as in employment.

The ideas suggested below all make the most of these advantages, while at the same time aiming to enable each of the different kinds of online engagement.

Emotional engagement

Your students may be feeling a sense of isolation, as well as some anxiety about learning online. You can help by setting a welcoming, inclusive tone in all your communication, and by keeping students informed about where to find things online and what to expect. You can do this by making regular (at least weekly) announcements in the VLE. You could also set up a discussion forum on the VLE for queries about the course. Let students know when you will be checking the forum (for example, from 10am to 11am daily on weekdays), so that they know when to expect your replies. Also, look for ways to tap into students' motivations to learn and their interest in the subject area. One way to do this is by inviting personal responses in discussion forum activities, being careful not to put pressure on students to self-disclose if they don't want to.

Social engagement

Social engagement is extremely important in online learning - most students want to feel a sense of belonging to a community. Opportunities for building social relationships online are therefore critical. To facilitate this, you could set up a discussion forum and invite students to introduce themselves to one another, or if they know each other already, to share something about their lives beyond the university, or their reasons for choosing to study this subject. Sometimes, students will also set up their own social media-based groups outside of the VLE. Don't worry if they don't ask you to join these groups - in fact, it's generally better for staff not to go into students' social spaces. However, you could encourage them to be inclusive and to invite all their peers if they do talk about setting up such groups.

Collaborative engagement

Collaborative engagement goes beyond social engagement in that it is more focused on learning with and from other people. You can set up discussion forums that encourage students to share their understanding and to respond to one another, or ask students to research a topic in pairs and give a joint mini-presentation in a web-conferencing session. Collaborative engagement is also about students connecting to institutional resources and opportunities, and so you might want to signpost students to library, wellbeing and employability resources. These materials may become more important for students while learning online, as they may have more time to explore and reflect on the opportunities available to them.

Cognitive engagement

Cognitive engagement is a key aspect of every student's success, and involves skills that we usually refer to as study skills and academic writing skills. Assuming that your module assessment focuses on these skills, one way to encourage cognitive engagement is to keep the final assessment in mind in the design of any online activities you create. If you can set up quizzes on your VLE, these are a good way for students to self-assess and receive instant feedback. Discussion forums and web-conferencing sessions can be used for students to practise developing arguments, integrating ideas, and justifying decisions. Cognitive engagement is integrally interwoven with the other kinds of engagement, and so by thinking about engagement holistically, you will increase the chances of your students engaging deeply with their learning.

Behavioural engagement

In some ways, behavioural engagement may be more visible online than face-to-face. For example, you can see whether students are viewing lecture recordings or clicking on resources in the VLE. However, in much the same way that students' attendance at physical lectures does not indicate anything about their cognitive engagement, these basic VLE analytics will not be hugely informative. This is one reason why you may want to set up other engagement opportunities. Some ideas follow.

Lecture recordings do not have to be based on the format of your usual hour-long classroom lecture. If you're recording lectures at home, you might want to experiment with different formats, such as shorter summary lectures followed by other activities (see below). These recordings will no doubt find their way back into your teaching when you're back on campus.

Quizzes can help students to know whether they are on track. They can be time-consuming to set up, but once created, can also be reused, even when normal, classroom-based teaching resumes.

I've recommended the use of discussion forums above for all the different kinds of engagement. Discussion forums tend to be inclusive, as they allow for flexible participation, and they generally don't require much bandwidth. If you've not used discussion forums before, here are some tips:

Avoid completely unstructured discussion forums - these are unlikely to engage learners.

Structure discussion forum activity by asking questions that are related to the course assessment, so that students see value in participating.

Ask open-ended questions, so that all students can contribute something original.

Encourage students to respond to others, and not just to 'broadcast' their own views.

Don't set word limits - this will stifle the discussion.

Give each discussion forum a time frame. Topic-specific forums generally work well when run over one or two weeks. This also helps to pace students through the syllabus.

You don't need to read and reply to every comment yourself - instead you could write a general response to everyone at the end of each weekly/ fortnightly discussion period.

Web-conferencing sessions are another good way to get online engagement. If you can divide your cohort into small groups (fewer than 30 students), then you can invite students to speak using their microphones. Students can also type in the chat box during the session, and this mode of communication appeals to some students. Remember though, that not all students will be able to participate in these sessions, especially if they are in distributed time zones or don't all have good connectivity. If you think this is the case in your cohort, it is advisable to avoid web-conferencing altogether and just use discussion forums.

Concluding thoughts

If you were not sure where to start in the switch to online delivery, I hope this post has given you some ideas for engaging your students. I strongly recommend that you familiarise yourself with your institution's guidance on how to use the VLE and its associated tools, and then schedule a chat with a learning technologist ( AKA educational developer, instructional designer, etc.) in your institution if you have any questions. Try to plan for the use of unfamiliar technologies in advance, as your support team may be stretched to capacity and they may not be able to help you at short notice. (See Matt Crosslin's Emergency guide to getting this week's class online in about an hour or so if your need is more urgent.)

Remember you can also look for help elsewhere - for example, there are some wonderful Twitter folks offering to answer questions under the hashtags #digped and #PivotToOnline, and lots of great resources being shared there. Look for creative solutions. It won't be perfect, and you might need to make some compromises, but who knows, you might find new ways to engage your learners that endure beyond the pandemic.

To end with, here are some great sources of further guidance:

If you'd like to share your response to this post or ask a question, please use the Comment box to do so. I look forward to hearing from you!

Reference

Redmond, P., Heffernan, A., Abawi, L., Brown, A., & Henderson, R. (2018). An Online Engagement Framework for Higher Education. Online Learning, 22(1), 183-204. https://doi.org/10.24059/olj.v22i1.1175 [CC-BY]

Author Info: Gabi Witthaus is a consultant at Art of E-learning. She is doing her PhD on the online engagement of refugees and asylum seekers in HE. She also works in the College of Arts & Law Digital Education Team at the University of Birmingham. Twitter: @twitthaus Blog: www.artofelearning.org

If you enjoyed reading this article we invite you to join the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) as an individual member, and to encourage your own organisation to join ALT as an organisational or sponsoring member.

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When the VLE becomes your campus: some thoughts on engaging learners online

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If you teach at an institution that is affected by the Coronavirus and is temporarily switching from campus-based teaching to online delivery, you may be wondering how you can help your students to engage online.

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REMEMBER to remind students to put a name or identifier on their Padlet entry. It is so much easier to discuss with others if you can use a name/nickname on the entry to identify it.  Also, it will be more engaging for all, students and you, who are using it.
AMcG

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Getting students to create content, and be engaged with each other

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Getting students to create content, and be engaged with each other

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We all know that in some ways, the best way to learn is to teach. Also, engaging with a face is better than text. Set a question and ask students to record their answer on a SHORT video, (they can do this on their phones). Tell them not to worry abut the presentation value, but just a quick content. This way they can all share in each others engagement.  Then ask the students to 'vote' or to add comments to each others content, in a supportive way.  You will be surprised how constructive they will be with each other!
Yes - it is nerve wracking when you try something like this for the first time - but trust your students, they are more experienced at this kind of thing than you are.
As you will see, there is an option to 'like', or add comments, at the bottom of a Padlet entry.
AMcG

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Keeping Contact means Keeping engagement

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Keeping Contact means Keeping engagement

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Add something to your Canvas site most days, if you can. Doesn't have to be anything much, a link to a news story, a You Tube video, or just a comment in a section in your 'Discussions' 'You might like to think about......'
DONT keep sending them emails. Keep off email to groups if you can. Students will set their own timetables and commit times when it suits them - welcome to asynchronus engagement! So much better to add to the site in some way, that way they are more likely to engage with whatever you wan to share in a way that relates to relevant their content, and not in isolation from it.
AMcG

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Adding video. recordings of teaching or any other media on your Canvas site

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Adding video. recordings of teaching or any other media on your Canvas site

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ALWAYS ALWAYS put on the text with the media link how long/time it goes on for.  Just as with any media online we all want to know how long it will be and it helps to mentally prepare.
AMcG

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Remember that expecting students to watch a complete 1 hour recorded lecture is something they are unlikely to do. Yes, in Panopto they can decide to watch it for themselves in sections, but they are not used to this form of engagement and wont understand when, and even that it is ok to engage with the material in sections. And after all, however engaging you are, you are not Netflix! (You wouldn't watch an hours presentation with slides, don't expect them to). If you can record any input in no more than 15 minute sections, or perhaps 30 mins with a place for students to pause actually highlighted, you will more likely get better engagement.
AMcG

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Keep in regular contact even if you’ve nothing much to say ... students may feel isolated and ‘cut off’