Paul Merritt and Sarah Stiles, Georgetown College
PollEverywhere is a free tool (for up to 40 students) that can be used to engage students. Paul Merritt, who teaches psychology courses online at Georgetown, uses PollEverywhere to poll students about sensitive topics. He has found that using anonymous polls takes away the pressure to come up with the “right answer” on the spot and also gives students time and space to consider and share their responses. Sarah Stiles, who teaches sociology, uses emojis in PollEverywhere to get a temperature check on students’ well-being in the beginning of each class session so she can meet them where they are at. Polls can also be used before and after exposure to course content to assess whether or not students’ thinking has changed.

Lee Pinkowitz, MSB
MBA professor Lee Pinkowitz, in redesigning his Valuation course in CNDLS into a hybrid format, made the following adjustments:

• To maintain active engagement with video lectures, he and the CNDLS team implemented the use of interactive lectures that included practice questions interspersed between the videos to check for students’ understanding of concepts as they are learned.
• To increase participation and check for understanding of course materials, all students are required to post quiz questions to reflect their understanding of the course concepts. In the discussion board, each student is assigned to review two quiz questions created by their peers. You can read more about Lee Pinkowitz’ class in Issue 8 of The Prospect magazine (PDF).

Huaping Lu-Adler, Georgetown College
Huaping Lu-Adler designed and taught her History of Modern Philosophy class on the presumption that a student’s sense of wellbeing and academic learning are interconnected. With that in mind, Lu-Adler focused on two aspects of wellbeing that, based both on her personal observations and on studies she had read, can greatly impact a student’s learning experience in class: (a) their sense of belonging (feeling seen/heard/valued/understood); (b) their ability to manage, effectively, such stressors as deadlines, public speaking (as part of the participation requirement), and events that significantly affect our day-to-day life but are largely beyond our control (e.g. the current pandemic). To continue to give attention to these areas in the virtual learning environment, Lu-Adler adapted several student-student engagement routines from her in-person classes to the online space, including:

• implementing “well-being exercises” at the beginning of Zoom sessions where she posed philosophical question prompts that also pertained to student coping skills, gave them time to reflect on the question for themselves, and then invited them to share with the class if they chose;
• incorporating mini-video assignments for students to explain certain philosophical ideas encountered in class in short video segments that students posted for each other’s benefit; and
• continuing peer-discussion and review processes around higher-stakes writing assignments.

Students noted that these practices had a significantly positive impact on their sense of connection to the material, their willingness to take risks in the course, and their overall academic motivation and achievement in the course.

James Olsen, Philosophy
In order to regularly check in on and assess the degree to which students are “getting it,” James Olsen has students do a “Muddiest Point” exercise at the end of each module in his online courses. The activity exists as an ungraded Canvas assignment where students respond to the following prompt: “What aspect of the readings and content from this unit do you feel least solid about? What nagging confusions or uncertainties in understanding the material are plaguing you? Or, if you’re comfortable with all of the material, which aspects were nonetheless the most difficult to understand as you were learning it, or perhaps were the most poorly presented?” Originally, he used the Speedgrader to respond to each student. This took a great deal of time, however, and students explicitly asked to be able to see what other students said. In order to maintain privacy and save time he keeps the exercise as an assignment, but now records and posts a single video responding to various “muddy” issues.

Martha Weiss and Randall Amster, Georgetown College
Metacognition is the term used to denote engaging students in reflection or otherwise promoting self-awareness of their learning process. Metacognitive essays or practices can be linked to most assignments in order to enhance student learning. Martha Weiss and Randall Amster designed an environmental studies course where several of the assignments require students to not only create a specific artifact, but to then reflect on that creation in a metacognitive essay. For example, students are required to create an audio-visual artifact in Voicethread (via Canvas) reporting on a researched innovation. Doing so requires what one might expect—in addition to details on the innovation, students provide an analysis with regard to several key metrics studied in the class. In addition to creating this artifact, students also submit an essay (metacognitively) reflecting on such things as why they chose that innovation, why it was important or worth analyzing, how it connects to their personal lives, and what and how they learned in the process.