The Remote Learning Engagement Gap
Moving away from the in-person classroom setting means educators lost the ability to see students’ body language and adequately read the room. It also took out relationship building that was formed through in-class discussions. Many classrooms lost a lot of their group dynamics and students lost their identities as they became just another user on the other side of a computer screen with their videos and mics turned off.
Annie Peshkam, the Director of the Initiative for Learning Innovation and Teaching Excellence (iLITE) at INSEAD, believes that online classrooms can be drastically improved by embedding more active learning into the course curriculum. To help educators get started, she created a list.
8 Cooperative Learning Practices to Try:
Poll-Group-Repoll
Value Line
Student Teams-Achievement Divisions
Learning Roles
Role Play
Expertise/Specialization Project
Peer Grading
Group Processing
Some of these practices are familiar and can be easily replicated online. Consider polling, for instance, instead of using in class iclickers, educators can use Zoom’s online polling feature.
Most of Peshkam’s activities consist of breaking the students into groups of 3 to 7 this can also easily be done online thanks to Zoom’s breakout rooms. Professors can choose to split the students into groups automatically or manually, and they can pop into separate zoom groups at any time.
Peshkam thinks past the idea of group work for the sake of group work and presents thoughtful exercises that help develop skill sets, realize weaknesses, build relationships, and increase engagement with course content.
Core Elements That Every Classroom Needs
Eric Sheninger, an Associate Partner with the International Center for Leadership in Education (ICLE), believes that to engage learners, remote learning should include some degree of the following six elements: relevance, discourse, collaboration, flexibility, personalization, and feedback.
Relevance
Learners are far more likely to retain the information if it is relevant to them. According to Sheninger, the material is relevant if students can tell you the following:
What they learned
Why they learned it
How they will use what was learned.
Discourse
Learning alone isn’t the same as with peers. The pandemic doesn’t allow for the same class dynamics as students are used to, but there are digital tools that create spaces for students to discuss the educational content amongst one another, which can drastically increase their engagement with the material and help build stronger relationships with their peers.
Popular online education platforms like Moodle and Blackboard have discussion boards built-in. Alternatively, the chat feature on Zoom is also an option.
Collaboration
As we mentioned earlier, group activities and projects are still very much a possibility in a virtual world made possible via Zoom, Google Hangouts, or other video conferencing tools.
Flexibility
Once traditional classrooms have been removed from learning, it might be worth reimagining timelines. Not every student has the same quiet areas and times set aside for them during the day so harsh deadlines aren’t always possible to reach. Swapping strict due dates for more lenient time frames could allow more students to properly engage with their course work.
Personalization
Personalization means focusing less on the “what” (content, curriculum, tests, programs, technology) and more on the “who”. Each student responds differently to activities and course material. Some students are more visual learners, whereas others may have better luck with auditory lessons.
Janice Vargo, an Associate Partner on the Design and Implementation Team at Education Elements, believes that personalized learning always involves these core four elements - targeted instruction, data-driven decisions, flexible content, and student reflection and ownership.
The ability to set goals and self reflect, for example, can be taught to early learners and can be a tremendous tool to develop students' accountability critical thinking skills.
Feedback
Giving feedback provides the means of justifying grades, reinforcing good work, and communicating areas for improvement. Consider logging this feedback digitally in a place where students can frequently access and return to over the course of the year to track their progress and see how they’ve grown.
For additional information on remote learning, check out our article, How to Cultivate the Perfect Virtual Learning Environment.