This session will provide faculty with the theories, tools, technologies, and strategies for proactively engaging students in your online learning environments. As educators transition from traditional classrooms to virtual meeting spaces and digital classrooms, it is important to create a community of online learners through meaningful interactions and social technologies.
An online course that doesn't engage students is merely a landfill of information. Without actively framing the content and implementing strategies to grab student attention and fuel their learning with passion, you will not be able to motivate them to perform well. Your class, program, and academic institution are not merely repositories of information or libraries of content. Our scholarly core competencies lie in the relationships that we foster in order to leverage a community of learners intertwined in constructivist endeavors to apply course material meaningfully in a context that has value and valence to our students' lives.
How can we transition active learning in a traditional classroom to active learning in a virtual classroom? As scores of professors and teachers have experienced this year, traditional, blended and online modalities of learning are not entirely interchangable. There are virtues and vices to each modality, but to treat them as equal to one another does a disservice to each. We must learn how to take the best elements of a traditional classroom and modify them to reproduce the same effects in a virtual classroom. This required adaptation, trial and error, and refinement. The results can be effective as we strive to maximize student engagement and motivation throughout the learning process.
In this session, we will highlight the aspects of teaching an onground, traditional class as we work to massage the participation and interpersonal connections within brick and mortar classroom and ensure that we are able to replicate those components in a remote milieu. We will explore the principles which will aid faculty in becoming exceptional online instructors, as well as the learning theories and techniques that will enhance teaching and learning. We will also discuss relevant ed tech platforms and how they can be utilized in innovative ways in discussions, assignments, and content pages to increase collaboration as we build communities of online learners and increase student engagement.
This session will include an intermittent interactive Kahoot! game with a leaderboard and prizes to ensure active audience engagement (and make sure everyone is having fun).