Inspire, motivate & engage

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College of Business students and academics share their advice – © RMIT University

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Improving interaction and engagement – Carleton University. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence.

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Inspiring and engaging learners are often key to producing a great learning experience. There are many ways you could do this using a range of tools but the principles and techniques are the same. This section looks at how you can use announcements and discussion forums to inspire and engage your learners. Web conferencing is also very effective – it provides learners and facilitators with a synchronous (live, real time) environment to inspire, motivate and engage.

“Stay relevant. Stay organised. Keep it interesting. Remain up to date. Add interactions.” (Bright, 2014)

Using discussion forums

One of the mainstays for the delivery of online learning activities are discussion boards or forums. They are simple to use, relatively simple to manage, and they provide the flexibility required by online learners through asynchronous communication. This also applies to blogs and wikis.

Online discussions are best when they:

• Support critical thinking and analysis of course content
• Provide opportunities for learners to reflect on readings and workplace or real-world experiences
• Consolidate, integrate, demonstrate and apply learning.
• Connect to assessment

Make sure you are explicit about the value of online activities, regardless of the technology used. Link activities to key concepts, readings and assessment. Learning activities provide a chance for learners to practice and for you to provide feedback. In all activities, you should guide discussion posts, encourage learners to consider different approaches or viewpoints, and challenge learners’ thinking. Controversy can also work well.

Facilitators need to frequently participate in these learning spaces. While discussion forums invite a range of opinions from learners, not everyone will agree with each other. You need to determine when you need to step in and moderate the conversation and whether a comment warrants deletion. It is your role as a facilitator to moderate the discussion. Don’t wait for a problem to remind learners of the guidelines.

What are the rules of engagement in activities? These rules can be established at the beginning as a wiki exercise or in a discussion thread – what behaviours do learners want to see in the discussion forum? What sort of language is appropriate for peer feedback?

Discussion is very popular – when adding discussion forum activities, ensure you place new threads in the right place and give them a good subject line. Link new discussion to announcements and emails. Can learners start their own thread? Can they initiate a discussion? Can they rate each others’ posts? These are choices you need to make to establish the rules and expectations around discussions.

Various technologies provide opportunities for learners to collaborate and interact. But remember, teacher presence is still important and learners get annoyed with interaction just for the sake of it. They do not like being left to fend for themselves with other learners who don’t contribute, don’t do the work to an appropriate standard, or who just don’t behave.

“I would try to look for something controversial just to get things going. ”

Dr Elsie Hooi, RMIT University

“Try to be involved as much as possible.”

Online student, RMIT University

Strategies

Encourage learners to see real world relevance

By encouraging learners to see real world relevance you can stimulate +their interest to make connections between concepts, practice and their world. There are a number of ways you can do this, for example:

• Post links to current events or newspaper articles that can be linked to the course or topic
• Invite guest speakers to participate in web conferences, or ask them to host a discussions in a discussion forum
• Link your course to professional networks and industry sites.

Lead and facilitate

Avoid responding to individual learners with ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Start the conversation, encourage engagement through positive signals, summarise key themes and responses, respond to the cohort, call-out specific learner responses and provide feedback. You will need to do this regularly.

Ask learners to lead a discussion

Each week a group of learners could be responsible for leading a discussion, summarising key themes of a topic or issue, providing annotated relevant references etc. Consider using peer assessment – ask peers to rate, assess and/or provide feedback to learners. These types of social learning arrangements work really well when structured and also facilitated and moderated.

Inspire by acknowledging and encouraging learners

Respond to learners to support their learning, draw connections between comments and content, provide summaries, praise, flag errors or omissions, and encourage learners to engage and participate. [su_lightbox_content id=”my-custom-popup” width=”50%” text_align=”left”]
Acknowledging learners example

Thanks to those of you who have contributed in discussions this week.

Sal posted a great article that is relevant to the next assessment task, so thanks, Sal. And Bevan posted an example of just the sort of management practices that we’ve been discussing – so that was timely. I hope to create an inclusive learning space with everyone’s input. If you don’t feel safe commenting, let me know. Otherwise, I hope to see you ALL participating in the next post! Remember, there is a correlation between participating in these activities and your grade – strange but true!

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Be goal-oriented and on topic

Keep questions relevant to the topic being covered and/or the assessment. Make sure your questions or directions are:

• Open ended to stimulate a variety of responses, e.g. “Explain your approach to…”
• Relevant and include current content that supports the question, e.g. “Using your reading from this week as a guide, what would be your alternative recommendations?”
• Using the medium effectively: your discussion forum should make good use of photos, videos and links.
• Problem/scenario based with lots of elements; for example, post a problem and ask learners to address one element or ask pairs of learners to respond to encourage more interaction between learners.

Use provocative questions

Use thought provoking or provocative questions that encourage participation and critical analysis, and tap into learners’ perspectives / experiences.

Host a web conference

There are many tools to help you do this. Collaborate Ultra, Google Hangouts, Skype and Youtube Live are some of the most popular platforms. Consider running a weekly or fortnightly web conference to work through complex problems, provide feedback or run a short presentation or tutorial. Synchronous tools also provide a high level of teacher presence. Remember to record the conference and make it available to those unable to attend.

Monitoring engagement and dealing with non-engagement

You need some ways to check if people are learning. Monitoring learner engagement can prevent attrition from your course. To check if learners are engaging and learning, consider the following:

• Have learners logged on? If not, email them and ask if they are still doing the course. Is there a problem?
• How many learners contribute in discussions and other online activities? Remind learners that there is connection between good grades and participation.
• Notice who attends web conferences and check who accesses your lecture recordings.
• Access LMS analytics to find out how many learners are engaging and what resources they access.
• Survey learners during the course to find out how they are progressing and what they know.
• Some peer-to-peer and group activities can motivate learners – but there needs to be a reason for asking learners to work together and the activity needs to be clearly aligned to assessment and learning outcomes. You will also need to manage the groups.
• Have at least one formative assessment task or diagnostic in the first five weeks to give you and learners an idea of how they are faring. This could be a poll, quiz, or a discussion post. It could be a web page that you ask them to develop as part of a getting to know you activity. It could even be a video introduction or a prior knowledge check.
• If you are going use a poll, survey or quiz for diagnostic purposes, you might consider using these questions:

• What has helped your learning in this course so far?
• What has hindered your learning and why?
• If you have contributed to online activities what has been positive about the experience?
• If you have not contributed to discussions, why not and what might inspire you to be more active?
• Please provide any further comments or suggestions.

Analytics

Most online platforms – learning management systems and social media sites – provide information about users that allow you to check who is engaging. Whether you use Blackboard analytics or Likes on social media, these analytics can provide you with valuable information about the engagement levels of your learners.

Consider the following:

• Create an online survey using questions and invite learners to tell you what they think about the course and their learning experience.
• Using a wiki, invite learners to tell you what they think about the course and their learning experience – create a wiki table so that learners tick yes/no/comment and the learners can all see what they think.
• Access data that might tell us something about learner engagement in weeks 1, 2 and 3. Who is not engaged? Who do you need to contact? What might you need to change?

Dealing with non-engagement

Learners disengage for various reasons. Pressures from work, family and life in general can all impact on learners’ abilities to continue studying. Online courses typically have higher attrition rates than face-to-face courses and that is why facilitators need to effectively motivate, support and communicate with learners in the online space. Blackboard’s retention centre can provide you with valuable analytics.

Analytics can help identify learners who are at risk of dropping out and appropriate action can be taken. The indicators of engagement are:

• Is the learner in the space? Are they engaging?
• Is the learner contributing?
• Is the learner undertaking and submitting the assessment?

If the learner isn’t in the space, contributing or completing the assessments then you need to contact them.

Contact by email anyone who hasn’t logged in by the end of week 1. After week 3, contact learners by email or phone if they are not engaging in the learning space or the learning activities. Here is an example you might like to use to assist you in making this contact.

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Dear John

I notice that you have not returned to our course since week 1. I am interested to read your contributions to discussions and urge you to engage with the resources and activities. All resources and activities are aligned to the assessment, and provide opportunities for you to receive feedback on your progress.

If you have any issues with the course, the assessment or anything to do with your studies, please contact me to discuss.  

Regards

Facilitator’s name

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Managing large cohorts

When facilitating a large online cohort, it is unrealistic to respond to every individual learner post. Skimming is good!
Manage large discussion forums by:

• Posting summaries – capture the key themes, build on the main elements of the conversation and guide the cohort to your main point.
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  Example of posting a summary
  “There are some interesting issues here including ideas about futures thinking and what disciplinary areas should be working together. Steph posted the OECD report on this which is a key text for the assessment. Considering this report, what other recommendations would you make about our original scenario?”[/su_lightbox_content][su_lightbox type=”inline” src=”#my-custom-popup3″][su_button title=”Opens in pop-up” background=”#e2e2e2″ color=”#000000″]Example[/su_button][/su_lightbox]
• Dividing the cohort into small groups – tools like Collaborate Ultra, Padlet, Canvas groups, Wiggio and others allow you to put learners into small groups or allow them to self-enrol into a group and work together. Learners can work up solutions to problems posed, do a group presentation, or brainstorm ideas for individual assessment tasks. If you have 300 learners in your online course, instead of reading 300 responses to the discussion question, you could split learners into groups of 10. This both extends the learning – learners learn from each other – and reduces the number of posts to which you need to respond.

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Use these strategies to improve learner motivation – Improving student motivation © Carleton University. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence.
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Spark and sustain students’ interest in online learning – COFA Online, © University of NSW
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Conducting effective online discussions – COFA Online, © University of NSW
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Designing for Learning – Ten best practices for teaching online

Foster interaction and engagement using instructional and social interaction – Using interaction in online discussion boards, EDUCAUSE (pdf)

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