Moving a large lecture course online can lead to disengagement and isolation among students, a phenomenon that can be proactively addressed through strategies to foster a sense of belonging and community. When students take large lecture classes on campus, they may feel anonymous in the classroom but they are still in close proximity to their classmates and professor and have opportunities to interact with their peers. More intensive engagement in this manner builds students’ sense of belonging, which in turn leads to increased learning ( Frisby et al., 2014 Chen et al., 2010). In addition, a large and mostly anonymous online gathering of numerous students can easily be broken down into small groups, facilitating much more active engagement-with one another and with you-whether in breakout rooms or other versions of small group collaboration. You will be able to see all of your students and their names up close on the computer screen, and you may even find increased participation, as students in asynchronous activities (such as online discussions) will have opportunities to think through their responses before engaging. Online you will find that there is no back of the classroom and your learning space is no longer constricted by fixed seating. The good news about adapting a large lecture course to an online learning environment is that you will still be able to lecture-albeit in a different way-but you will also have increased opportunities for student engagement-with you, with course materials, and with each other. The professor may use clickers or polls to increase participation, but the design of the room primarily encourages dialogic exchanges between professor and individual students, and perhaps even straight exposition-style lectures with little to no student participation. The room is large, making it difficult to see the students in the back, much less get to know their names. We’re all familiar with the large lecture hall with fixed tiered seating and a pitched floor descending to the front of the room where the professor stands, perhaps on a stage behind a lectern, with a microphone in hand and a large projection screen framing the front of the room.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |