Student Engagement in a Changing Academic Landscape

One of the most commonly asked questions faculty have is “how do I get and keep my students engaged in class?” This blog post is going to focus on the latter with some tips (and humor) to help you along during these rapidly changing times.

In BC times (Before Corona), student engagement looked and felt different, and required a slightly altered approach to engage students. Many faculty were moving from the sage-on-the-stage style to a student-centered learning environment by creating enriching activities, labs, group work and assessments that engaged our students. The pandemic changed ALL of that. Gone are the days of standing in front of a 200+ person lecture or leading an in-person (close contact) discussion group. Change isn’t always a bad thing, but being forced to reimagine the educational experiences we provide is particularly difficult. During the pandemic, we may be teaching in fully online, hybrid, hy-flex or face-to-face formats, and each modality faces its own unique set of challenges. From the technology gremlins in the classroom to the black boxes of blank student videos in zoom, to the problems with remote students hearing in-class questions in a hyflex classroom, and the feeling that our workload just got that much bigger, all contribute to feeling overwhelmed as an instructor.

Never fear! There is good news (I promise!) and there are small bite-size things you can do now that will help you get your students engaged more effectively this semester.

I know this sounds daft, but it’s critical to remember that your students are learning in an uncertain time. Both, learning and college do not look the way they did a year ago. Whether you are teaching synchronously or asynchronously, in-person, or hy-flex, students need to know that you do exist and that there is a real person behind the computer or in front of the class. Students need the reassurance of someone or something constant when learning and especially if you are not physically together, it is even more important to have a strong, supportive presence. Imagine if you were a student learning during a pandemic and your professor wasn’t present or did not communicate their expectations or rules for class engagement? It may feel frustrating, uncomfortable and may also impact your perception of them or the class.

• Communication is key. Set clear guidelines for your students so they know when and how to expect communications from you. If you are using technology, make sure students are aware of how to get it and how to use it. 
• I’m ready for my close up, Mr. Deville. In grad school, a professor for one of my online courses included a brief video at the beginning of the semester, as well as each week highlighting what was covered and what is upcoming. These were not major motion pictures, just quick videos (think less than 5 minutes, tops) that checked in with the students. These videos were critical in creating a feeling of engagement and humanity behind the screen.

I’m not talking about jumping out of an airplane type of risks, but moreso recognizing that academic risks (asking questions, having discussion or debate and even group work) can be intimidating and anxiety provoking for some students. A big piece of the engagement puzzle for students (which can affect motivation and retention) is whether they feel welcome and safe in their environment. No matter how much work we put into building our courses and becoming excellent teachers, the students’ perception is reality. If students have a class where there is no interaction or they are shamed for speaking up/asking a question, chances are the students will tune out and turn off from the content and the class. Furthermore, if there is never a chance to interact, or communicate, with their classmates, then you may experience a lot of blank stares while you teach.

• Break it down for group work! Trust me when I say that if you yell group work in a crowd of undergraduate students, it may have the same effect as yelling fire in a crowded theater. Nothing strikes fear in the hearts of students like the thought of working with others. What we do know is that skills like collaboration and communication are some of the top soft skills that students need entering the workforce after college. If you are teaching hy-flex, hybrid or remote, Zoom has a great feature called breakout rooms. During your lecture, you can have Zoom automatically assign, or you can manually assign students to the rooms to have discussions, work on group projects or discuss topics in the class. Here is a link to learn more about using Zoom breakout rooms. Giving students a chance to work in smaller, close-knit learning communities will help to bridge the distance when they are not geographically close to each other. I will also highlight the Eberly Center at Carnegie Melon as they have extensive resources and research surrounding group work and how to foster engagement with students.
• I’ve got 99 learning modes, but this ain’t one. Have you ever sat through a lecture and became just lost to what they were talking about, and you find yourself suddenly looking at cat memes on the internet? Chances are the information being presented to you was not presented in a manner that worked for your learning style. Presenting information in different formats ensures that you will reach a larger number of students. Your students may feel more comfortable reaching out to you during office hours or in class to ask questions or work with others in the class if they can bridge the gap between what they know and what they are learning. 
• Keeping it low stakes. One of the great things about academia is our freedom to be flexible in how we design our content and structure our student interactions. One way to be take advantage of that flexibility is to incorporate low stakes opportunities for your students to engage with the content. By including short pauses to ask questions, using polls or other answer measuring activities, or allowing students to answer in pairs or small groups, your students can interact with each other, with you and the content in an active and engaging way. As a bonus, when using technology like Zoom or Top Hat, you can have access to various analytics to better understand how well your students are understanding the content. 
• Expectations. Have you ever gotten a barrage of emails from your students regarding an assignment or questions about what is going to be on a test, knowing full well that you covered such instructions in class? Maybe the same students are flooding your emails at all hours of the day and night, each email becoming more and more frantic? You aren’t alone. Boundary and expectation setting are key to creating a robust learning space. Setting clear expectations for your students on everything from assignments to group work, to grades and how/when to contact you will help to mitigate some of these bumps and hurdles. Collecting and sharing “frequently asked questions”, and answering non-personal, clarifying questions on a public message board that the whole class can access or through a brief weekly video are techniques that encourage students to seek answers themselves and minimize the number of individual emails.

For every good thing we love about teaching, there are times when things become muddled. There are times when students have life-changing events or simply disappear without a word. Technology issues, work-life balance and the realness of isolation or illness during a global pandemic can be overwhelming even for the strongest-willed instructor. Here are some of the big issues we face and tips on how to keep those lines of communication open:

The pandemic has thrust mental health into the spotlight more so than ever before. We’ve all had to figure out how to survive and adjust during a time when nothing is certain. The pandemic has also highlighted the growing disparity students face when they are home versus being on-campus. At some point, we may encounter a situation where either our own or the student's mental health may impact engagement. We are all facing the same storm but experiencing the storm very differently.

• Know what resources are available. We don’t talk about the mental health struggle many of us are facing in the current learning climate. Students don’t often come to us as easily if they are struggling with their work, let alone if they are having a crisis. Be familiar with what resources are available to students and faculty on campus and make sure to have those numbers posted in your UB Learns course for easy access. 
• Have a plan in place for students who need to miss time due to illness. Having clear language set in your course for how you will deal with students being absent due to illness will help you and your students keep communication open during an emergency.

Students will, for a variety of reasons, disappear from the classroom environment or from group work they’ve been assigned to. We may not notice that they've dropped off until it comes time to finalize grades for the semester or you may instead hear from their group members that they’ve gone missing in action. Under normal circumstances, students who stop showing up or stop turning in work may have a good reason for doing so, but, with an uncertain learning landscape, these reasons may be plentiful and cause even the most diligent students to stop engaging in the course content. 

• Know where to find student activity analytics. UB Learns has a range of reports that can be run to see how active your students are and where they are spending their time within your course. You can find the walk-through on how to run these reports here. It may not be possible in a large-sized class to reach out to students individually to check-in, but sending a mass email to the class to remind students of the class expectations, or on how to contact you if they are falling behind, may encourage some students to re-engage in the course and with you. 
• Keep a realistic workload. Now that many of our courses have moved online in some format, many corroborating accounts can be found all over social media that faculty and students alike report that the amount of work seems to be increasing tenfold. Make sure students know the time commitment for the course and what is expected of them. The amount of time or schedule your students have may be drastically different this semester than before. You may want to look at your course to ensure that you are meeting all your learning objectives, but to also make sure that everything that semester is serving its purpose. 
• Reach out. We don’t know what is happening in student lives outside the Zoom meeting anymore than when we saw them face to face, but you can send an email to your students to check in. In smaller classes, you can personalize it, or in larger classes you can send an email to the whole class reminding students of your expectations with your contact information. 
• The internet. Even as advanced as technology is in 2020, the internet is a fickle beast. There have been plenty of Zoom calls where everyone at some point has internet instability. Truth be told, the students who may have once resided on campus now may be faced with the predicament of no internet/unreliable access at home and try to make arrangements to get to a hotspot to complete their work. In these situations, the best defense is an offense. Make sure students know how to reach you regarding personal issues such as these so a game plan can be made to keep them on the right path. 
• Group work. As great as group work is to build collaboration and other soft skills, group work is… group work. There is such a love/hate relationship with it. You will encounter students who either do everything or do nothing and take credit for others work. This can burn the bridges between your students and your course very quickly. We want the students to engage and want to work together, so one option is to have the students draft their own group contract. They choose their roles and responsibilities and each member signs it. Students are more likely to adhere to their rules and learn how to work around problems initially, rather than coming to you. If students need you to step in to help remediate the issue, you set the expectation early enough to let them know how much/little you will be involved in the process.

As a learning community, we are learning and adapting daily to meet the needs of our students and respective institutions. One of the big takeaways about student engagement and how to keep them from mentally checking out is to make sure they have a clear way to speak to you and your other students. Giving them a voice (even if it is only via a written format) and opportunity to work with the material in their own way will continue to encourage engagement throughout these evolving times.