Have you scheduled an optional live session for your students, only to find you sit in the chat room by yourself? How can we gain greater participation in these sessions? This facilitated discussion will discuss best practices and strategies to gain greater participation in such sessions.
Have you scheduled an optional live session for your students, only to find you sit in the chat room by yourself? How can we gain greater participation in these sessions? This facilitated discussion will discuss best practices and strategies to gain greater participation in such sessions.
Polleverywhere© and facilitated discussion will be used to engage participants during this session.
The advantages to synchronous sessions are many. They can create greater social presence, resulting in more engagement (Park & Bonk, 2009) and a useful way to exchange ideas. Synchronous sessions with students can also create a strong sense of community in the classroom, resulting in higher retention rates (McDaniels, Pfund & Barnicle, 2016). So why is there normally low participation when an optional synchronous session is offered?
Students often do not participate because of time constraints, e.g. the time of the live session doesn’t meet their schedule (Park and Bonk, 2009). Because the session is optional, students may decide spend the time on coursework because they do not see the value in an optional session. Guth (n.d) suggests a session with a nebulous purpose will be underattended. Instead, faculty should structure the synchronous session by sending an agenda in advance and promoting it to students will result in greater participation.
In his online Seminar, Engaging Students with Synchronous methods in online courses, Scheuermann (Bart, 2010) suggests setting up optional synchronous sessions, but also suggests requirement of mandatory sessions as well will result in high participation.
Participants in this session will discuss their own experience with synchronous, and panelists will utilize Polleverywhere© to further engage participants in a meaningful discussion. Takeaways will include best practices and strategies for student engagement in synchronous sessions.
References:
Bart, M. (2010, March). Incorporating Synchronous Elements into Online Courses to Enhance Student Engagement. Faculty Focus. Retrieved from https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/online-education/incorporating-syn...
Park, Y. J., & Bonk, C. J. (2007). Synchronous learning experiences: Distance and residential learners’ perspectives in a blended graduate course. Journal of Interactive Online Learning, 6(3), 245- 264.
McDaniels, M., Pfund, C. & Barnicle, K. (2016 March) Creating dynamic learning communities in synchronous online courses. Online Learning, 20(1), 110-129.
Northwestern University, (n.d.) Best Practices for synchronous sessions. Digital Learning. Retrieved from https://digitallearning.northwestern.edu/article/2017/06/19/best-practic...