Last month the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit invited Dr Kate Exley to run a workshop for Aberystwyth University Staff called Moving your (PowerPoint) Lecture online.

What emerged from participants were lots of useful strategies for engaging students whilst teaching online. We’ve summarised some of the discussion below.

Learning Design:

1. Simple strategies were most effective, such as using word document and uploading into chat
2. Make use of Polling Software to engage students in their learning
3. Build in ice-breaker activities to establish initial engagement
4. In longer sessions, set a task and factor in a screen break
5. Include tasks for students to do in advance and use the live sessions to scaffold their knowledge
6. Include social tasks as well as formal tasks
7. One department are running day long workshops with the option to ‘dial’ in the staff member if they’ve got any questions
8. Stick to one or two large scale activities in a 40 minute session
9. Be aware that students might be entering the synchronous session not having engaged with all tasks beforehand
10. Use collaborative tools such as shared document, whiteboard or Padlet to collectively generate notes
11. Being more informal in recorded lectures
12. Offering weekly live q and a drop in sessions
13. Asking students to meet in groups outside of timetabled activities
14. Share real life examples / case studies in teaching and ask students to contribute with their own examples
15. Ask students to look things up / research in the synchronous session

Teams Meetings and Breakout Rooms:

1. Use emojis in the chat to ask students to give their opinion
2. Email students beforehand with documents that they will be using in the breakout rooms to save time in the session
3. Nominate a leader for each breakout room to lead discussion and feed back into the main session
4. Use Teams for watch parties to help build that sense of community – it might be a TED talk, a tv programme, a film. Send the link to students and ask them to start the recording at the same time and use a Teams chat to get them to comment along in real time
5. Start a breakout room activity early on in a synchronous session to encourage engagement
6. Make use of pauses
7. Ask students to run breakout rooms or synchronous sessions
8. Make sure that you’re the last one to leave the Teams meeting
9. Start Teams meeting a little early to give students the opportunity to chat informally before the session begins

The Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit have got lots of upcoming events and external speakers. Keep up to date with these via our blog.

Our next large event is our Mini Conference: Embedding Wellbeing in the Curriculum on 25^th March. You can book onto our Mini Conference by filling out this online form.