What is student engagement? What does student engagement look like in online activities? This session will explore the answers to these questions through a variety of activities including conversation, games, and design thinking exercises. Whether you are limited to tools in your LMS or you enjoy exploring new tools and technologies this session will leave you with ideas and inspiration that will hook your students.
Central to course development are the selection of tools and techniques to best engage learners with each other, the content, and the instructor. While classic in-person active learning techniques such as discussions and peer review are also applicable to online learning, over reliance and lack of proper application in the digital environment can cause these activities to fall flat when converted to an online format if they are not structured properly. Also, new technologies both within and outside of the LMS offer faculty and instructional designers an infinite combination of tools and techniques for fostering learner engagement that can make it difficult to know where to start, which to focus on, or to distinguish between fad and fantastic.
This session will provide participants the opportunity to identify, categorize, and discuss LMS specific tools as well as what can be found on the web and how to pair them with active learning activities and techniques in order to build an epic, interactive course.
The session will be made up of three parts.
Part I: Introduction to Learner Engagement
During the first part as a group we will establish common knowledge in order to enable participation by both those new to the topic and with those with more experience so that we can discuss the following questions:
- What is learner engagement?
- What are types of learner engagement?
- What does student engagement look like in online activities? How does it differ from in-person activities?
Part II: Learner Engagement Tools & Techniques Meta Game
During the second part of the session we will play a remixed version of the Metagame using Learning Battle Cards. “The Metagame is a ‘creative judgement’ game” (metaga.me) similar to and the inspiration of Cards Against Humanity (metaga.me.) Central to the game are the “Opinion Cards” which provide questions or statements of comparison which players must then use the category cards to answer and debate. Opinion cards will be adapted from the original Metagame and the CU Online Card Game, an edtech version based on the original Metagame. Learning Battle Cards, a compilation of 100+ techniques and activities for learner engagement, will be used for the category cards for this Metagame remix. Additional category cards will be created that represent LMS specific (Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle) tools to accommodate participants that are required by their universities to use only LMS tools and apps for online course. Participants will match, debate, and discuss a variety of learning activities and technologies through conversation around questions such as, but not limited to:
- Which make teaching easier? Which make learning easier?
- Which are more educationally relevant?
- Which ones should all faculty or instructional designers learn about and get better at?
- Which have the most innovative potential?
Part III: Design Thinking for Learner Engagement
Using methods from Stanford University’s d.School Bootcamp Bootleg groups of attendees will brainstorm ways to reinvigorate learner engagement through the use of classic techniques with new tools and vice versa. Two design thinking methods will be offered to participants to work from in small groups. The first method is “How Might We (HMW) Questioning.” Scenarios for small class, large enrollment, and case-based courses will be provided to facilitate the HMW questioning. The second method is “Prototype to Test” where participants will design and draft activities that can then be brought back to their current courses to be tested for regular inclusion in course offerings.