Gina Grant

I feel my faculty have a good ideas on how to keep students engaged, it is sometimes the extra time it takes to create various activities and also have the time to provide meaningful feedback to keep that momentum going.

We have really started to progress with problem based learning scenarios. It started with Covid and trying to replace our hands-on activities with activities they can do online.  For example, our welding instructors had pictures of good and bad welds and had students identify which ones were bad, why/how the bad weld happened and how to fix it.

Rubrics can accomplish three things...1. communicates assignment expectations to students 2. provides a grading structure for instructors 3. after grading, provides feedback to students on what criteria they did not meet.  I HIGHLY recommend using rubrics, especially for online.

I think my biggest take-away is "pre-teaching" students their role in online learning. We often get complaints from students that they are "teaching themselves" in an online course when actually the instructor is fostering active learning techniques that the students are not familiar with.  I agree with the idea of making sure the instructor clearly explains how the course is facilitated and that they will not be in a passive learning environment, but an active one.

I really never thought of feedback to be an important component of active learning, but it really makes sense. Feedback allows students to reflect on whether their thinking is correct or incorrect.

It is also important that the students understand that they will need to “do the work” in order to learn the material. Often, we have online students who complain that they are teaching themselves the material. Yes, but we are providing the resources and activities to help you.  That's what makes online learning work!