Since more students decide on taking online courses, as educators, we must constantly reflect on our current practices and seek the best ones to provide the applicable tools to engage a diverse population of learners. In this workshop, the participants will have an opportunity to explore and learn more about a few different tools that increase interaction and student engagement in any classroom, especially online. The participants will walk away with at least three specific tools that can be applied in their classroom the next day.
It is challenging to maintain engagement and retention in any online classroom. However, it is even more challenging to do so in an asynchronous online class. Many students seek face-to-face interaction with faculty and peers; however, some have to take online courses to continue their education due to personal and other circumstances.
To maintain the curiosity of our diverse learners, we, as educators, must also be innovative and provide valuable tools that will engage learner's participation and maintain curiosity throughout the course.
In this workshop, we will share specific tools and their implications that could be utilized in any classroom, including face-to-face and asynchronous, and synchronous online. Through our experience as online educators in asynchronous classrooms, we have found tools if that helped us maintain the students' engagement in the discussion forums and helped us with the retention of students in our Spanish online classes.
We want to share with our colleagues a few specific tools and demonstrate concrete examples of how they can engage participation and maintain retention.