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bit.ly/lindyatncce

Five Strategies To Improve Engagement in K–12 Virtual Learning

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Lindy Hockenbary (she/her)

Educator | Trainer | Speaker | Author

I help:

Teachers
Schools
Tech companies

Lindy Hockenbary is an educator whose strength is helping other educators utilize technology to enhance learning experiences. She has spent her career in various roles in the education field, including classroom teacher, curriculum writer, technology integration specialist, and professional development manager. As someone who loves to learn, her spare time is spent pondering how to make learning better. She uses these skills to facilitate hands-on trainings for teachers, engage educators through speaking engagements, and provide product feedback and training solutions to educational technology companies. She is the author of A Teacher's Guide to Online Learning and holds several edtech certifications, including Google for Education Certified Trainer and Microsoft Innovative Educator (MIE) Master Trainer.

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Lindy Hockenbary (she/her)

intechgratedpd.org

@lindyhockenbary

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School leader

Technical

Instructional

support

Other?

Classroom teacher

Who Are YOU?

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What To Expect

5 strategies for improved engagement

Why: Research highlights
How: Ideas

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What To Expect

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How Did I Get Here?

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Writing and Writing

A Teacher’s Guide to Online Learning

bit.ly/teachersguidetoonline

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More STRATEGIES!

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Enter the GIVEAWAY!

bit.ly/lindyatncce

Must be present to win.

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Equity

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Why?

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Let’s Consider:

If students don’t have what they need to learn, are they even able to engage?

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Foundation of engagement

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How?

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All Aspects of Equity

Consider
Plan
Tackle

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Access

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But what about . . .

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Device Quality

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Internet Bandwidth

In addition to internet access, you also need to think about internet bandwidth, which is the maximum amount of data that can be transmitted over an internet connection in a specific amount of time. An internet connection with a higher bandwidth performs better than an internet connection with a lower bandwidth. Some internet activities require more bandwidth than others. For example, streaming video and video calls require a larger amount of bandwidth than browsing the internet does. Why is this important? Consider the following scenarios:

Your student is one of multiple children at home who are all learning fully online.

Your student has a parent who works from home.

In these scenarios, each person in the household may be asking a lot of their internet connection. What if you require your students to attend a video call as part of their course grade? What if that student can’t connect to the video call due to bandwidth limits at their home?

When equity of internet access is discussed, it is often only discussed in black and white terms—access or no access. As a teacher, you also need to consider the bandwidth requirements of your course and ensure you aren’t setting requirements that are out of reach for some learners.

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Ask:

Do students have what they need to engage in learning?

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Ask:

Is it an engagement problem or an equity problem?

If you have a student that disengages or seems unmotivated, you must analyze if the issue is engagement or equity. Let me provide an example: as an agriculture teacher, I assign all learners to create a visual guide of the plants in their neighborhood. A student doesn’t complete the project. I could assume that the student is not motivated to complete her work. However, I instead ask the student how I can help her complete the task. The student explains that she lives in a neighborhood in which she doesn’t feel comfortable walking around. Just like that, I have uncovered an equity, not an engagement, issue. I instruct this student to research the plants most likely found in the neighborhood/city/state instead.

These types of equity hurdles can occur in face-to-face learning too, but they seem to be more common in online learning.

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bit.ly/lindyatncce

Guide: Strategic Planning for Virtual Learning Initiatives

Outlines important equity elements

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Maslow Before You Bloom

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Why?

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Research

Student-teacher relationship is an important component of student success in online learning.

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Research

Online students are more apt to remain active in class if they feel a sense of community.

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How?

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But Here’s the Deal . . .

Relationship building does not come as naturally in online learning as it does in face-to-face.

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You Must Be . . .

Intentional

Consistent

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Ideas

Let your personality shine!
Prompt conversation topics

Food, music, pets . . .

Virtual show and tell or talent shows

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Research

Teacher-created videos increase student satisfaction, participation, and can help develop a quasi-relationship.

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Teacher

Quality

Research

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Do

Create short, informal videos that have your voice and your face.

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How can you develop relationships and a sense of community in virtual environments?

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Get to Homebase!

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Digital hub

One-stop shop

Digital Course Homebase

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Why?

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In Virtual Environments . . .

Students won’t get very far unless they open the digital course homebase!

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Engagement

starts here.

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How?

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Ask Yourself

What will make learners want to open the homebase?

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Get creative

Have fun!

Incentivize

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Ideas

Themes
Easter eggs
Jokes
Riddles

There are lots of ways you can encourage students to engage with the course homebase. A few ideas include:

Latch on to the current pop culture trends and create a theme for your course. As I write this, the game Among Us is the current kid obsession. I have to admit it is quite fun! By the time you read this, a new game will have probably emerged as the favorite. Whatever game is the current flavor of the day, use this to your advantage! Could you make your course Among Us themed? Could students design a digital avatar based on a popular game? Is there a popular movie that you could utilize?

Place an Easter egg somewhere within the homebase or a learning task. An Easter egg in terms of technology is a secret or hidden item or message. For example, navigate to Google.com and search for “askew” or “do a barrel roll.” These are both examples of Easter eggs hidden within the Google search engine. Embedding Easter eggs into your online learning materials can be a fun way to encourage learners to engage with course content.

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Two-for-ones

Show your personality (if they like you they will be more willing to engage)
Virtual show and tell or talent shows
Prompt conversation topics

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If they like you . . .

they will come.

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What interests your students?

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Self-Efficacy

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Self-Efficacy

Will I be successful at the learning task?

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Consciously or Subconsciously

Everyone does this . . .

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Why?

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Research

Expectancies:

A big driver in student engagement is their expectancy for success.

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In Virtual Learning . . .

It is critical that students feel confident going into a learning task.

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If Students Don’t Feel Confident . . .

Well, they’re not going to be engaged!

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Ask Yourself

How engaged are you when you aren’t confident?

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Schlechty’s Levels of Engagement

Ritual Compliance
Retreatism
Rebellion

Source: @sylviaduckworth

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How?

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Be Intentional

Set students up for success

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Research

Consistency and clarity is critical in virtual learning.

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Create Clarity

Consistency
Routine

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In a digital space instead . . .

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Starts in the digital course homebase!

Ensuring students have one
Consistent across the school
No more than two K–12

Students must have only ONE digital homebase across all of their classes. This is so important for creating routine and clarity.

Whatever digital course homebase tool you use, it should be consistent across your school. Your school should really not have more than two tools for K-12. Currently, there are not many tools out there that work across all of K-12, so it is common to see K-2 through 5 use one tool (Seesaw is very popular) and then grades 3 or 5 through 12 use another tool. This is fine and necessary with the tools currently available. (I hope this changes soon but let’s not go there!) However, if your school has more than two tools being used as the digital homebase, you really need to rethink this for the sake of students and their caregivers.

At the very least, students should only have to interact with ONE digital homebase tool.

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Creating Consistency

Organization
Navigation
Naming conventions
Formatting - have a style guide
Use TEMPLATES!!

How do you make a well-organized and consistent online course? I am glad you asked! Let’s start with the overall navigation of a course, which is accomplished in the digital course homebase tool.

Using consistent naming conventions for learning tasks is also important for consistency. A naming convention is a fancy way of saying an agreed-upon format for naming things. What items need naming conventions in online learning? The categories for how learning tasks are organized (for example, week, topic, or unit) and the titles of learning tasks.

In addition to maintaining consistency with the organization and navigation of your online course, you will also want your course to have the same look and feel from unit to unit or week to week. To do this, use consistent formatting. Remember that format refers to layout, design, or appearance. The following are examples of formatting elements to be considered:

Layout

Font

Colors

Design

Graphics

In essence, you should create a style guide for your digital learning materials. A course style guide basically outlines how the course will look. Some would argue that your educational institution should have a style guide that is followed across all courses in that institution.

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Teach Consistency

Scavenger hunts
BreakoutEDUs
Keys for visual cues

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Pacing Guides

For asynchronous work, especially

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Create Ownership

Do students know how to answer their questions?

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How can you set students up for success in virtual environments?

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Support Caregivers

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But we’re engaging students, not adults . . .

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Why?

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Homework helper (passive)

Co-Teacher (active)

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Setting K-12 students up for success

Setting their grown-ups up for success

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How?

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Complete this exercise.

Template in the bonus resources.

There is one more group of stakeholders whose perspective needs to be considered when discussing why organization and consistency are critical to online learning. Those stakeholders are the caregivers helping K–12 students navigate online learning. A caregiver could be helping their children manage seven, fourteen, twenty-one, or more different classes! That is what caregivers are up against with online learning. This is why it is vital that teachers and schools make things as organized and consistent as possible.

I encourage you to complete this exercise with the other teachers at your school . Have each grade-level team add what tools families will have to interact with if they have a student in that grade. When complete, examine the chart from the perspective of a parent who may have a child across different grade levels. How many tools are parents being asked to manage? You can find a template with the table at intechgratedpd.org/vip.

This is somethign that may be out of the control of a classroom teacher. Caregiver success is dependent not only on the decisions you make in your classroom but also on the direction and leadership you receive from your educational institution. Caregiver support and success should be addressed as part of all online learning initiatives.

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Caregiver communications must be...

Consistent across grade levels
Streamlined (as possible)
Constant
Similar to students’ view

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Create Ownership

Do caregivers know how to help their students?
Do they know where to go to get their questions answered?

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Caregiver Training Plan

Do you have a plan for “training” caregivers?

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More Ideas

“Chapter 13: Supporting Grown-Ups” is in your email!

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$15

At NCCE

A Teacher’s Guide to Online Learning

bit.ly/teachersguidetoonline

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Connect with me!

intechgratedpd.org

lindy@intechgratedpd.org

@lindyhockenbary

linkedin.com/in/lindyhockenbary

A Teacher’s Guide to Online Learning

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Questions?

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Research

Diwanji, Prajakta, Bindu Puthur Simon, Michael Märki, Safak Korkut, and Rolf Dornberger. “Success Factors of Online Learning Videos.” In 2014 International Conference on Interactive Mobile Communication Technologies and Learning, 125–32. IEEE, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1109/IMCTL.2014.7011119.
Doolittle, Peter E., Lauren H. Bryant, and Jessica R. Chittum. “Effects of Degree of Segmentation and Learner Disposition on Multimedia Learning.” British Journal of Educational Technology 46, no. 6 (2014): 1333–43. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12203.
Drouin, Michelle, and Lesa Rae Vartanian. “Students’ Feelings of and Desire for Sense of Community in Face-to-Face and Online Courses.” The Quarterly Review of Distance Education 11, no. 2 (2010): 147–59.
Guo, Phillip J., Juho Kim, and Rob Rubin. “How Video Production Affects Student Engagement: An Empirical Study of MOOC Videos.” In Proceedings of the First ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale, 41–50. Association for Computing Machinery, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1145/2556325.2566239.
Hulleman, C. S., Barron, K. E., Kosovich, J. J., & Lazowski, R. A. (2016). Student motivation: Current theories, constructs, and interventions within an expectancy-value framework. In Psychosocial skills and school systems in the 21st century(pp. 241-278). Springer, Cham.
Miller, Scott T., and Stephen L. Redman. “Improving Instructor Presence in an Online Introductory Astronomy Course through Video Demonstrations.” Astronomy Education Review 9, no. 1 (2010). https://doi.org/10.3847/AER2009072.

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Research

Northcote, Maria T. “Lighting Up and Transforming Online Courses: Letting the Teacher’s Personality Shine.” In Curriculum, Technology & Transformation for an Unknown Future. Proceedings ASCILITE Sydney 2010, 694–98. Sydney: ASCILITE, 2010.
Swan, Karen. “Building Learning Communities in Online Courses: The Importance of Interaction.” Education, Communication, and Information 2, no. 1 (2002): 23–49. https://doi.org/10.1080/1463631022000005016.
Swan, Karen. “Learning Effectiveness: What the Research Tells Us.” In Elements of Quality Online Education: Practice and Direction, ed. John Bourne and Janet C. Moore, 13–45. Needham: The Sloan Consortium, 2003.
Titsworth, Scott, Joseph P. Mazer, Alan K. Goodboy, San Bolkan, and Scott A. Myers. “Two Meta-Analyses Exploring the Relationship between Teacher Clarity and Student Learning.” Communication Education 64, no. 4 (2015): 385–418. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634523.2015.1041998.
Underdown, Kimber, and Jeff Martin. “Engaging the Online Student: Instructor Created Video Content for the Online Classroom.” Journal of Instructional Research 5 (2016): 8–12.