Fostering Student Engagement During Uncertain Times

Concurrent Session 7

Session Materials

Brief Abstract

In an online course, student engagement is a challenging issue for many faculty. During the pandemic instructional designers and faculty worked together to find innovative solutions and technologies to engage students online. We will present and demonstrate how we used learning technologies and tools to provide rapid and effective solutions.

Presenters

Lead Presenter: Jakia Salam, North Carolina State University

Jakia Salam is an Instructional Designer at DELTA where she works as a project lead and instructional designer for DELTA Grant projects. She works closely with faculty, new media team and project coordinator team to design, develop, and evaluate on-line, hybrid and face-to-face courses. Jakia is a technology enthusiast and always looking for ways using innovative technologies to develop pedagogically sound courses and address instructional challenges. Jakia provides leadership in the area of instructional design, including the creation of engaging, effective and pedagogically sound instructional materials and activities, the development of assessment and evaluation techniques and process, and incorporate learning technologies based on sound pedagogy and effectiveness. Prior to joining DELTA, Jakia worked in various roles including as a Senior Instructional Designer at UNC Chapel Hill, an Instructional Technology Consultant at UNC Greensboro, a full-time faculty at Guilford Technical Community College, a Chemical Engineer and Application Developer. Jakia holds a bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology and completed her Master of Science in Computer Science from UNC Greensboro in 2002. She also obtained a Graduate Certificate in e-learning from the College of Education at NC State in 2013.

Co-presenter: Angie Smith, North Carolina State University

Dr. Angie Smith received her doctorate degree in Counselor Education at North Carolina State University, Raleigh North Carolina. Currently, she is a Teaching Assistant Professor, Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC) and Supervisor (LPC-S) in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her experience as well as research and teaching interests include career counseling and development, online teaching and learning modalities, supervision in counseling, college counseling, and student development. Her most recent career pursuits include developing and teaching courses for an Online Master’s Program at North Carolina State University and co-authoring a book about online teaching within the helping professions.

Extended Abstract

One of the major challenges all faculty face is how do you engage students in an online class? Student engagement is the key to student success in class. In a face-to-face setting the faculty can encourage the students to actively participate in the classroom. However this becomes more challenging when students are taking courses online or even in a blended format. How do you bring that face-to-face experience online to engage your students? In this session, we want to discuss how we addressed student engagement challenges using different teaching strategies and technologies. Student engagement was one of the biggest issues we encountered while taking face to face classes online due to COVID 19 pandemic. Instructional designers and faculty worked together to find innovative solutions, tools and technologies to engage students online. In this session we want to reflect on those strategies and technologies that we used and have proven to be successful.      

We want to discuss some strategies and activities that engage students in online or blended courses with examples. We designed different activities like discussion forums, group-work, polls, peer reviews, social learning to engage students online and build a strong community of learners. We want to present how technologies can play an important role in student engagement and interaction and how it can be integrated in the course design process. 

We will discuss some very popular technologies such as Zoom, VoiceThread, TopHat, Google Apps, Kahoot!, Flipgrid, PlayPosit, Trello and also some tools that are very effective in engaging students and at the same time give them that “classroom” feel during uncertain times. We will demonstrate some common features and usage of these learning technologies and provide the audience with necessary information if they are interested in using it for their courses or projects in the future. 

Learning Outcomes

After attending this session the participants will be able to:

  • Discuss different challenges instructors face to engage students in an online environment and facilitate active learning
  • Learn different instructional design strategies and techniques that will improve student to engagement
  • Learn how to use technologies innovative ways to facilitate student engagement and interaction effectively
  • Obtain information and resources about student engagement in an online environment  

Audience Engagement

In this discovery session we want our audience to share their challenges, strategies and technologies they used to engage students online. We will use a Padlet board to capture the ideas and resources and share it with the audience.