With the rapid rise of Instagram Reels and viral TikToks, students are often “plugged in” for hours socializing but struggling to focus in online learning environments. What is the perceived difference between the two? Influence and value. We know education is valuable, but what gives social media the influencing advantage? A social media “influencer” is someone with a large following of people and the ability to impact trends and purchases. This person has created a sense of value for their posts and can even earn an income from networking and collaborating with other brands.  Believe it or not, social media influencers and online educators have a lot in common : they each want to draw in and engage a targeted audience online, but they also have to work within data-driven “rules” to make their desired impact. Instead of resisting social media’s influence on our current culture, here are a few online engagement tips borrowed from the Influencer’s playbook that can outlast any tre...

Within the last 10 years, learning analytics has become an important field with stakeholders beginning to look at how data can be used to assist education. Instructors may not be used to thinking about data that comes from student learning, so here are some basics to get started.  Learning analytics is referred to as the collection and analysis of student data to provide insight into courses and student education. It is often used with the goal of better optimizing learning. This process is not new as you may have already been doing a similar process in the form of observations. Through relying on visual data such as the number of students paying attention, you can determine how well students are learning and make necessary changes to the course. Learning analytics is similar as it gathers data through online resources. It allows for a deeper insight by collecting data that is often not visual. However, due to the recent development of the field, instructors are not as familiar w...

Students are more tired than ever before and it’s impacting their well-being . In 2020, we suffered through a pandemic, social unrest, and a lot of uncertainty. We are now four months into 2021 and there is no clear end in sight. Although the prospect of vaccines and social justice accountability gives us hope, we can not discredit that students are still struggling and may continue to struggle for months to come. Not to mention it is the end of the academic semester, where motivation and energy are lacking for students and instructors alike. Students are hard at work studying for finals and putting the finishing touches on culminating projects. Many students respond to these increasing demands in classes by putting in longer hours (i.e, all-nighters), which in turn takes a toll on students’ overall wellbeing. What we know from Dr. Sara Goldrick-Rab’s Hope Center and the #RealCollege movement is that basic needs have a significant impact on student success. When students aren’t doing w...

When it comes to online course design and facilitation, course announcements are often treated as a “nice to have” supplement to instruction, taking a backseat to things like the syllabus, module overviews, and learning pages. Those pages contain valuable information, but announcements offer an opportunity to share content while making personalized connections. However, students often overlook pages that do not appear to contain value to them, including announcements. There's an art and science to crafting valuable announcements that students will want to view. Planning, organization, and frequency play a role in leveraging announcements to be more than unappealing check-ins that students ignore. Here are some effective ways to use announcements to weave student success and a culture of learning into the narrative of your course. Increase Your Presence One of the most common criticisms of online education is the lack of instructor presence. Particularly in large-scale courses, stud...

If you’ve ever scheduled virtual office hours, the first time may have gone something like this:  you picked a nice time slot when you were available, you shared a meeting URL with your students, you tidied up the background of your desk area, you logged in eager to connect with your students to finally get to know some of them, and then… nobody. You may have thought, “The students will be a few minutes late. No one shows up to a party when it starts.” You answered a few quick emails, and then clicked back on the conference to see if anyone silently logged in, only to see your own face filling the screen, aging in real-time. As you dejectedly logged off, you may have wondered if you should switch to “by request only” meetings if your time is so clearly unappreciated (more on that topic later). Most online instructors have some variation on that story, leading to surprise and disappointment when they don’t get to connect with their online students and have some of the personal co...

Do you often feel frustrated with the way discussions in your online course end up? Is everyone repeating the same thing? Are you reading essays in discussion forums, rather than genuine conversations about the topic? Consider changing your mindset and approach to course discussions through a new discussion pedagogy, that leads to authentic course conversations! Three ASU instructional designers, Abigail Smith , Steven Maierson , and Sarah Prosory , teamed up for a recent webinar to review where we are at with current online course discussion boards, the typical pedagogy that goes along with them, and why it is inadequate. Then they shared a new approach and tool to make discussions become authentic conversations that lead to better student engagement. Where We Are With Course Discussions Let's face it, online discussions are not the same as face-to-face discussions in a classroom. We hear often that "the magic is gone" in online discussions, and they are not interesting ...

Imagine sitting in the audience at a large conference and you had a question. You think to yourself, “should I ask it?” but then overthinking, nervousness, and anxiety come to play, forcing a larger part of your consciousness to rely on someone else to ask that question for you. This is a decision that students in your classes are experiencing, and not all students experience this to the same extent. Student participation as a way to engage students: what you should know A common way for instructors to maintain an active and engaged classroom is by allowing their students to participate in front of the class; this teaching practice is sometimes known as the “Socratic Method” and can serve as a way to help students stay engaged and to critically think ( Garside 1996 ). Instructors will often use this method because they think it can benefit everyone in their classrooms, but little research has been done in large-enrollment science courses. Is whole-class student participation equally be...

Early in the fall of 1992, in my first grad school course at Oklahoma State University I first heard of Stephen Krashen . His famous Theory of Second Language Acquisition posits that “acquisition requires meaningful interaction in the target language - natural communication - in which speakers are concerned not with the form of their utterances but with the messages they are conveying and understanding” (Krashen, 1992). In essence, meaningful communication is what produces any learning, not just English language learning. That fall, discussions rambled about Krashen’s notion of comprehensible input, expressed as i + 1. Simply put, this formula states that learners should always receive input (i) that is just one (1) level of difficulty above their current understanding. In theory, you cannot quantify i or 1, but we know something like i + 20 is suboptimal. In the classroom, you can open the lines of communication so students can feel safe expressing gaps in knowledge and communication...

As the semester is upon us, being prepared to teach on Zoom is essential. The synchronous time you spend in Zoom with your students should be reconsidered to provide the best learning experience possible. We encourage you to do so! This week we hosted our first Teach Talk webinar for the Fall 2020 semester, presented by School of Life Sciences Instructional Designers, Lenora Ott and Sarah Prosory .  We discussed the process of teaching using Zoom, by focusing more specifically on using Google Slides and its features, live captioning, as well as creating activities for students to do during the synchronous session within breakout rooms in Zoom. The key take-away is to plan for what the students need to do before , during , and after the synchronous sessions, and that will guide you in the preparation for your class meetings too.  The Process Before Class: Share on Canvas any links that students will need for the sync session. Pre-assign breakout rooms if needed, otherwise ro...