8 Simple and Effective Strategies for Engaging Online Students

In this presentation, I will discuss 8 simple and effective strategies I used to engage students in my undergraduate-level, fully-online summer course in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM). The course was intended for Women’s and Gender Studies majors and represented one of the few courses devoted entirely to the study of masculinities on campus. The course was titled “Gender Bodies: Masculinities,” and had 25 students enrolled by the end of the first week. Because the course was offered in the summer when students often return home and work full-time jobs, it provided them with a great deal of flexibility in terms of scheduling, but the accelerated nature of the course also created many challenges. Engaging students in online courses can be difficult in any online course because students may see the course simply as a series of checkboxes or to-do items, but shortened summer courses face have a particular challenge in this regard, considering the potential number of competing interests for students’ attention. Instructors must therefore be mindful to engage students in as many ways possible to ensure that students are as successful as they can and want to be.    In addition to my role as an instructor at UWM, I provide faculty development for online and blended instruction on campus. In this position, I lead UWM’s Online and Blended Teaching Program and the UWM Certificate in Online and Blended Teaching. I meet regularly with instructors who are teaching online courses, so I understand the complex challenges that instructors face when teaching fully-online courses. Therefore, in designing this course, I focused on ways to engage students that were scalable and could be used in multiple disciplines and situations. My goal was to both engage my students but to provide a potential model for helping other instructors re-envision their own online courses.   To this end, I used the following 8 strategies to engage my students:

• Context-Based Readings
• Recursive Quiz Design
• Escalating Discussion Prompts
• Video Response Shout-Outs
• In-Video Quizzing
• Proactive Student Support
• Reflective Surveys
• Badges for Module Completion

Context-Based Readings

Instead of providing students with a simple list of readings for each week, I included a page within Canvas for each assigned reading, all of which had four main headings: Required Readings, What You Need to Know, Additional Resources, and Time Estimate. These headings allowed me to preview for students what they needed to read, what was important about the reading, how it linked to other cultural artifacts related to masculinities, and how long the work should take them. While this may seem rudimentary, the context for these readings gave students a richer understanding of what to pay attention to and why, which led to more informed conversations in the discussions area.

Recursive Quiz Design

Students were given unlimited attempts to complete daily quizzes in the course. These quiz questions were multiple-choice and served to test students’ basic understanding of the readings. Each quiz had 8 questions randomly pulled from a larger pool of questions; however, each quiz also included 2 questions randomly pulled from previous quizzes. The purpose of this recursive quiz design was to reinforce the prior knowledge acquired in previous weeks and to prevent students from gaming the unlimited attempts quiz structure.

Escalating Discussions

Online discussions were a staple in the course, as they are in many online courses. Many instructors are resistant to the one-post-and-two-replies framework that is common in many online courses because such a framework can make discussions feel forced or inauthentic. To address this concern, I incorporated two adaptations to this framework. First, I asked students to find and analyze cultural artifacts of their own choosing and to use the textbook readings as a lens for examining these artifacts. Students submitted a wide range of artifacts that were personal to them, which led to more engaging discussions. In addition, I prompted students to do more than simply reply to two classmates; instead, I asked them to incorporate ideas from new readings to complicate or extend their peers’ initial posts. This prevented students from merely replying with general agreement statements without adding additional content or ideas.

Video Response Shout-Outs

Although I was an active participant in all discussion forums, I found it necessary to provide a general, summative response for every discussion. Because the discussions were group-restricted and because students do not often go back into discussions to see what has been written after they’ve posted, my goal was to provide new context and understanding by drawing upon the more interesting points that may have been missed in the online discussions. To do this, I recorded one-take video responses that were posted in the Announcements area. I was concerned, though, that students would choose not to watch the videos because they were not required or assessed. To provide an incentive for watching these videos, I included “shout-outs” to students within each recap. I mentioned students by name and discussed what I found interesting or engaging about their specific post. In an age of social media where people want their posts and ideas to be “liked,” the shout-outs served as a an incentive for students to watch the videos and pick up on additional content in the meantime.

In-Video Quizzing

In the course, I provided weekly overviews of the material to help students understand what was important to pay attention to each week. These overviews were short, 5-8 minute videos. Each video consisted of voice-over narration and simple slides that contained only a few words each. To encourage students to view the overview, I embedded images throughout each presentation and asked them to take a short, in-video quiz about how many they saw. For example, in the Week 1 Overview, I had 4 images of unicorns placed throughout the video, and at the conclusion of the video, I asked them how many they saw. Although in-video quizzing has greater pedagogical implications than ensuring that students make it to the end of a video, this technique helped to engage students and resulted in more viewings of these overviews.

Proactive Student Support

In a 4-week accelerated course, students who fall behind have difficulty catching back up due to the fast-paced nature of the course. Therefore, contacting students proactively before they show signs of trouble is particularly important. For this reason, I contacted students on a daily basis during the first two weeks of the course if they showed any signs of struggling. Canvas made this easy to do with its “Message Students Who” feature. I also provided my mobile phone number and encouraged students to contact me in this way (and they did). I was able to respond in a very timely manner through text message, and I strongly believe it led to increased student success.

Reflective Surveys

I ended every week with a reflective survey. These surveys offered students the chance to provide feedback about the course and to reflect back upon what they learned that week. Students were better able to reveal in a discrete way not only what they learned but also what they struggled with, and I was able to comment generally on these reflections in the Announcements area. The reflective surveys also gave me a chance to make minor changes to the course based upon their comments and specific needs.

Badges for Module Completion

Students earned a badge in the course for completing all of the components of each weekly module. Although this strategy reinforces to some extent the idea of an online course as a series of checkboxes or to-do items, it also helped students stay on track and freed up their mental energy for the course content rather than on figuring out the logistics of the course. The general purpose, therefore, was to provide a small but additional incentive for students to complete everything they needed to be successful in the course.    In this presentation, I will discuss and provide examples of the 8 strategies listed above. I will also leave 10-15 minutes at the end of the session for participants to reflect on their own strategies for engaging students in online courses. In light of my presentation and the ensuing crowdsourcing, my goal is for participants to leave with several concrete and impactful to implement right away on their campuses.