Review the pedagogical and technical information below to inform your progress in Week Fourteen. Have questions about what you learned here or ideas for future tips? Join Coffee & Answers (open support Zoom sessions with the Academic Technology Team) or email the Office of Teaching and Learning.
Pedagogical
How do I foster deeper student engagement and check for understanding in real-time?
Active learning, any approach that gets students involved in their own learning process, increases student engagement and enhances student outcomes. Most of us know intuitively that we cannot sustain our attention for a fifty or seventy-minute lecture. Active learning can become a break between 12-15 minute pockets of lecture in order to engage students and check and see if they are learning what you are teaching. Fortunately, there are many resources available for active learning in a variety of disciplines. If you try one or two methods and find they are successful, you can branch out and try even more. Some common techniques for active learning are:
1.) Think, pair, share: pose a question, give students a moment to reflect on their answer, and then let them talk with another person about their answer to see if it is correct.
2.) Peer Review: With writing assignments or lab reports or any other writing task, ask students to read and comment on drafts of one another’s work.
3.) One Minute Paper: Ask students to write down 2-3 of the most important points from the day’s lecture or discussion and review them (in a large class review samples). Bring your observations into the next class and clarify any misconceptions.
The Cornell Teaching and Learning Center has many more ideas for active learning. The Stanford Teaching Commons has several suggestions for more engaged student learning. Harvard’s Medical School offers health care educators advice.
Technical
What tools are available to engage students in course content?
To engage today's college students, who are accustomed to high-density visual information, it is helpful to reimagine our presentation methods and embrace visual communication. Engaging visuals and thoughtfully designed Google Slides provide clarity and enhance learning retention. Students often skim lengthy documents, making highly visual communication essential for ensuring key information is absorbed. A simple yet powerful technique, such as transforming a dense syllabus into a concise infographic or a graphic syllabus using Notebook LM, can dramatically improve student comprehension more clearly than text alone.
Beyond static presentations, the strategic incorporation of instructor-made video content offers a significant opportunity to deepen engagement and personalize the learning experience. University-supported, video creation tools, such as Google Vids, Panopto, and Zoom, make creating these resources accessible. Short, self-recorded videos can be used to pre-record foundational lectures for a flipped classroom model, freeing up valuable class time for active learning, collaborative projects, and higher-order critical thinking exercises. Instructors can record brief, personalized audio or video responses as feedback in tools like Canvas SpeedGrader, which many find feels more personal to students and is sometimes less time-consuming than extensive written notes. Even quick weekly video messages can foster a greater sense of connection and belonging with students.
Leveraging engaging visual content through redesigned presentations and the inclusion of short, instructor-made videos can open a new realm of engagement for students. Recall more active learning strategies and tools from the Tip of the Week | Week 4!
Additional Resources
Are these tips helpful? Do you have a topic we should include in future weeks? Please let us know by emailing otl@sju.edu!