Practical Instructional Strategies for Keeping Students Engaged beyond the Pandemic
Concurrent Session 2
Brief Abstract
Learn 10+ ways you can make your course a more engaging, student-centered, active learning experience for your students using common education technology tools. Come prepared to share your favorite instructional strategies for fostering active learning.
Presenters
Extended Abstract
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States in March of 2020, educators across the country were forced to teach their in-person classes remotely. The switch introduced both technological and pedagogical challenges for faculty as they pivoted to remote instruction with very little time. This session will focus on the pedagogical challenge of establishing and maintaining student engagement once the course pivoted to remote instruction. Keeping students engaged is challenging under the best circumstances--when there is time to plan and design activities that generate interaction stimulating student learning. The more engaged students are in the course, the deeper their learning will be (National Survey of Student Engagement, 2017). The pivot to remote instruction introduced a whole new level of complexity to the challenge of establishing and maintaining student engagement. Faculty across our university were scrambling to find ways to continue to teach effectively by replacing what they usually did in residence with online options for their students.
At the same time, the shift to remote instruction required a shift in focus for the learning design community at Penn State. Most learning designers at our institution focus on partnering with faculty to design and develop quality courses offered online. When the pandemic hit, learning designers were asked to support faculty who usually teach in-person, many of whom had never taught online or even used the university’s course management system. Fortunately, faculty at our institution had access to a large and vibrant learning design community for guidance, support, and training throughout the pandemic. Learning designers simply used the skills they already possessed to pitch in and help anyone who needed it. The challenge for us was how to do that at-scale in one of the largest R1 universities in the United States. Among other things, we selected a framework to help guide our faculty members’ efforts in keeping their students engaged while learning remotely.
During this session, we will review how we helped our faculty quickly pivot while simultaneously teaching them to create more engaging, student-centered active learning experiences in their remote courses. We will discuss ways that common instructional strategies can be used in-conjunction with each of Moore’s three types of interactions (Moore, 1989) to ensure that students are thoroughly engaged with all aspects of their course. Audience members will actively participate by using instructional strategies that will enable them to share their favorite or most successful active remote learning instructional strategies with other attendees.