Keeping students attentive and engaged in a physical classroom or lecture hall is already a challenging proposition for college instructors. Add to this a forced online learning environment, either completely remote or a hybrid approach, and it is now the top priority among higher learning instructors.
Patricia O'Sullivan, Project Coordinator in Academic Innovation and Instructor of Health Ethics at the University of Mississippi, while speaking at the REMOTE: The Connected Faculty Summit, offered three main takeaways to help instructors engage more with their students in an online learning environment. O’Sullivan has been an educator for more than 25 years and has been teaching online classes since 2005, adding that her current class she has been teaching has been a hybrid environment since 2013.
Acknowledge the moment
First, what good college professors should do to engage with their students is to take a big picture approach to their lecture and acknowledge the moment that we are living in, O’Sullivan said. This not only helps build trust between the instructor and class it acknowledges and affirms the mixed feelings some students may be having.
“This is extraordinary what we are living through together on so many levels. I'm lucky. I teach health ethics, which is perfectly situated for this moment. But I feel that in any discipline we can be talking about economic and racial disparities,” O’Sullivan said. “We can be talking about what it's like to respond to a global crisis. There is a lot going on globally and we can engage students in our discipline with what's going on in the moment,” she said.
Be available
Next, O’Sullivan advises instructors to be “present” to their students in multiple ways. This goes beyond just answering emails or making class announcements.
“Try to reach them in multiple ways. I was not comfortable giving my phone number out to students and allowing them to text me, but for certain students, that was the only way I could reach them and I got more comfortable with that,” she said that made a big difference to how those students engaged in the course and was a “lifeline” for them.
Care about their success
The third big takeaway to help instructors engage better with their students is to let them to know you ultimately are on their side and truly want them to succeed, O’Sullivan said. Too many professors come off intimidating and looking to prove how hard their classes are to pass.
“We ran several focus groups in 2017 to 2019 with students. And this one student said to me that the most discouraging thing he hears on the first day of class is ‘half of you will fail’. He said he felt like a lot of his classes were run like an academic hazing ritual. And I just feel like that is the worst way to set up our students,” O’Sullivan said. “And so, if we can communicate to them that we're on their side, we want them to succeed in class, that's a great way of keeping them engaged,” she said.