3c. Strategies for building student-facilitator interaction

• Fostering Engagement: Facilitating Online Courses in Higher Education
• Unit 1. Introduction to online learning
• 1a. Who is the online learner?
• 1b. Format and delivery of online courses
• 1c. Defining your facilitator role in your online course
• Unit 2. Student engagement online
• 2a. The importance of student engagement
• 2b. Community and interaction
• Unit 3. Student-facilitator interaction
• 3a. What is student-facilitator interaction?
• 3b. What are the benefits of student-facilitator interaction?

• 3c. Strategies for building student-facilitator interaction

  • Social learning and modelling through interactions
  • Tone, quality, and context of interactions
  • Model engagement
  • Reminder for teaching assistants
  • Starting out on the right foot: Welcome
  • Let your personality shine through
  • Welcome message formats
  • Staying connected throughout the term
  • Announcements and reminders
  • Formative feedback on assessments
• Unit 4. Student-content interaction
• 4a. What is student-content interaction?
• 4b. Factors for engagement in student-content interaction
• 4c. Strategies for improving student-content interactions
• Unit 5: Student-student interaction
• 5a. What is student-student interaction?
• 5b. How student-student interaction leads to engagement
• 5c. Strategies for building student-student interaction
• Conclusion

Social learning and modelling through interactions

In this unit we have outlined the important role that social connection and modelling has on learning. We have also presented evidence of the positive impact that facilitator presence via student-facilitator interactions can have on student cognitive and emotional engagement (attention, interest, enjoyment, and mental health) and behavioural engagement (improving student performance and outcomes and reducing attrition and academic integrity violations). In this section we’ll look at some practical strategies and examples that you can customize and apply in any online course you are facilitating.

There are lots of suggestions here and you need not feel that you should take them all on. Think about each strategy you employ as being one concrete step you’ve taken towards better supporting your students.

Tone, quality, and context of interactions

All interactions with your students are opportunities for modelling, and for this reason it is important to keep in mind the tone, quality, and context in which these interactions occur. Every interaction with your students, whether through announcements, email exchanges, virtual meetings, or discussion posts, sets a tone of discourse and communication. The more open and honest you are with students, the more likely they will be to feel a real sense of connection with you. It is important, however, to balance the sense of friendly familiarity with academic professionalism.

Friendly familiarity

Risk loss of credibility/respect

Sweet spot

Academic professionalism

Risk psychological distancing

We each have a slightly different balance between these two that we are comfortable with, but it is important that there is a balance. If we lean too far towards friendly familiarity, we may lose credibility and the respect of our students. If we completely edit out our personality for all posts or interactions, that can feed into psychological distancing or a sense of greater transactional distance. Striking that balance between friendly and familiar (enabling student to identify with you) and professional (garnering respect and credibility) is important for the development of the kind of modelling/observational learning relationship that can imbue deep and rewarding value into an online course, for both you and your students.

Model engagement

If you expect your students to show up and engage in your course, then you must model the kind of engagement you’d like to see in your students. There are many ways to build presence in a course and stay in contact with your class. You do not need to spend all day everyday responding to discussion posts and emails; however, if you appear too infrequently in the course and your interactions with students are not very helpful, then you are less likely to see students making quality contributions to the course (e.g., discussion, group work, or peer assessments may suffer).

Reminder for teaching assistants

If you are a TA, it will be important to discuss with the course instructor what your particular facilitator role in the course will be. The instructor may have a plan for the modality of interactions with students you’ll be responsible for (e.g., through monitoring discussion boards, answering emails, grading, etc.,). TAs are often asked to interact with student in any combination of these modalities, so it’s useful to start to think through how you might apply some of these strategies in a way that feels authentic to you and relevant to your discipline.

Starting out on the right foot: Welcome

First impressions matter, so start off on the right foot by welcoming students into your course the way you might welcome someone into your classroom or home. You can welcome students with a typed message or a personalized home video distributed through the Announcements function present in most Learning Management Systems (LMSs). Some suggested talking points for a useful welcome announcement are listed below:

• Introduce yourself. Briefly tell students a bit about yourself and what you are excited about in the course (content or assessments). Try to keep it short, but consider including a hook of some kind to pique their interest. You can direct them to a page in the course syllabus or an About the Instructor or About the TA page where you provide more information about yourself. The more information you provide about yourself, the more likely they are to relate to you.

• Show them around. Help students quickly orient to the organization and layout of the course. Courses may be organized in different ways that are not always intuitive for students. Provide them with a quick overview of where they can find critical information in the course (especially the course schedule). If there is a task, activity, or assessment that they must complete in the first week or two (e.g., join groups, introduce themselves in a discussion forum, complete a pre-learning quiz, etc.), point that out for them in your welcome message. Remember, most online courses are self-paced, and without some explicit direction some students may not really dig into course content until week 2 or 3.

• Help them feel at ease. Highlight for your students how they can get help and support from you. What are you committing to in terms of communication and monitoring? What should they expect in terms of email response wait times? It’s helpful to set these expectations early. If you have included details about this elsewhere in your course (e.g., the syllabus or a contact information page), point out that this information can be found there.

This first announcement can really set the tone for the course. Take some time to really think it through. Try to keep it succinct and limited to just the very most important details. If the announcement is too long, some of your students may start to wander off before they get to the end.

Let your personality shine through

We all have different personalities and teaching styles and you shouldn’t feel that you need to conform to any one style. Authenticity is important not only for ensuring that you don’t spend excessive time editing and sculpting your persona, but also because when interactions online are not authentic, students see that and appreciate them less. Below are some examples that help to illustrate how different personalities and instructional styles come through. While authenticity is key, we can and should take advantage of one of the benefits of asynchronous interactions with students, which is that it provides a natural temporal lag that enables us to be more mindful of what we present to students and how we respond to their inquiries.

Welcome message formats

If you are most comfortable communicating and interacting in text and you feel that that’s the best way for your personality and passion to come through, then go for it! Consider adding one or two visual elements, such as a picture to help personalize your message a little more. This could be a picture of you, an avatar you identify with, a picture of your favourite place, or even a beloved pet who is an important part of your life.

If you are comfortable recording yourself, a welcome video can provide an extra dose of presence, helping students see and connect with you.

Staying connected throughout the term

Keeping students engaged and connected throughout the term is more likely if you also remain engaged and present through the entire term. To this end it is important to find different ways to interact with your students and let them know you are present and available to support their learning and that you care about and are monitoring their progress.

Announcements and reminders

Posting weekly announcements and reminders is a good way to stay engage and remind students of your presence. Announcements may contain information that

• helps students engage more deeply or relate more personally to weekly course content and scaffold metacognition (more details and strategies on this is covered in the unit on student-content interaction);
• helps students with soft skills they are still developing, like time management (including reminders about due dates) and study/academic skills (tips on how to approach assessments, study and writing strategies); and 
• reminds students of how and where they can get support when they need it and/or when you will be available in the coming week.

Announcements serve more than a merely practical purpose, and their effect on a course can reach well beyond the information they convey. Announcements are a great opportunity to share something timely, signal care and engagement, thank students for their participation, congratulate the class on the successful completion of a difficult task, or even share a joke or anecdote. When students read an announcement from you at least once a week that signals your clear investment and presence in the course here and now — as it is really unfolding in this particular term for this particular group of students — your presence is more likely to be visible to them, and their emotional engagement in the course is likely to improve. We highly recommend weekly announcements crafted with the same thought and attention to student experience as your initial welcome message.

Staying connected throughout the term can be text-based or you may choose to use video, which adds a personal touch and helps to close that transactional distance.

Modelling engagement and academic conduct

Providing students with explicit instructions is often not sufficient for them to really understand the nuances of many academic and discipline-specific skills, such as academic writing, discourse, debate, or critical thinking. Providing students with applied examples is an important way to model these critical or more nuanced skills which many students struggle with. When we simply tell students to write a paper or consider questions and post to an online discussion, we are assuming that students already know how to engage in this type of academic behaviour. However, even students in higher-level courses struggle with these skills, and some have never had the opportunity to try it out, get feedback on, or observe well-executed examples of these behaviours. Modelling is critical for all those academic behaviours and learning outcomes that really go beyond fact memorization. Below are a couple of strategies that can make a huge difference in the quality of student-student interactions and performance on assessments. 

Monitoring student progress

Identifying struggling students early on can have a huge impact on student outcomes and is really not that different from how you might monitor them in an in-person class. What you do with this information can have a huge impact on your online students, making them feel seen and accountable. 

Reaching out to students individually can change their trajectory in the course, particularly if you express interest in the barriers they are facing and offer compassionate guidance and support. It often doesn’t take much; sometimes just feeling noticed is enough to motivate a student to re-engage.

In a large research study of undergraduate students who had taken online courses (N>800) conducted by the Centre for Extended Learning at the University of Waterloo, students had the opportunity share their experiences in online courses. One of the key findings of this study was how meaningful and impactful facilitators were on students’ experience and outcomes in online courses (Troop, White, Wilson, & Zeni, 2020). A real scenario shared by one of the students in this study is captured in the case study below (name changed for privacy).

Guidance on providing student support

The most important factor for giving students a sense of being supported is demonstrating how and when they can get help when they need it. It is important that support/help is:

• Timely: The recommendation is email responses within 24 hours. You may have a different time frame or there may be days where you won’t be able to respond to students. If so, make sure that those days or times when you are less available are clear to students so they can plan around your schedule. Keep in mind that many students do their learning at night and/or on the weekend and may be in different time zones.
• Accessible to all students (e.g., not just available at a particular time or through a single modality, such as video conferencing)
• Available through a variety of channels: Email, discussion forums, and online office hours.

Office hours and tutorials online

Office hours and tutorials online can take different forms and not all forms are equally attended or used by students. Below are a few suggestions. 

Formative feedback on assessments

Providing students with formative feedback on assessments is a great way to deepen and support learning, particularly for assessments that measure skills and knowledge that will be returned to repeatedly in the course, or beyond. More information on providing formative feedback can be found in the in the resources below. 

While providing feedback can be time-consuming and time and resources may be very limited for your course, please refer back to Unit 1. Introduction to online learning, where we discuss strategies to help you manage and make the most of your time.