4c. Strategies for improving student-content interactions

Strategy for Clarifying Confusion

Take the opportunity to clarify concepts that students are struggling with by writing out (or drawing) an alternative way of explaining or describing a concept. If the concept itself is best shown rather than described, consider creating your own demo video, like the one below.

Demonstration to clarify concepts

Transcript
Slope Cars Demonstration. Reprinted from "Week 1: Vectors, Velocity, and 1D Kinematics" by Sanderson, J. (2015), PHYS 111. Copyright 2015 by J. Sanderson and University of Waterloo.

Strategies: Encouraging metacognition through student mistakes and confusion

Provide opportunities to learn from mistakes

After grading or reviewing assessment results (e.g., quizzes, problem sets, writing assignments), identify if there were any concepts or skills students seemed to struggle with (e.g., didn’t execute well or completely missed on an assignment or got incorrect on a quiz).

• Class-level feedback: Return to the content and assignment instructions to identify how you might clarify the concept further or explain the process required to do well on the assessment (e.g., process of creating an outline, drafting, revising, etc.). You might also identify common mistakes made on an assignment or problem set (without identifying students) and demonstrate how to avoid these errors or improve. Share this with students by making a post-assessment announcement or a discussion thread in a dedicated discussion forum. This strategy helps students gain insight into their mistakes and helps build their metacognitive awareness by revealing where confusion lies. It can also be a way to provide students with formative feedback, when time does not allow for individualized feedback on each assessment.
• Individual student feedback: If time allows, you may want to reach out to individuals who did particularly poorly on an assessment (or multiple assessments). This is especially important early in the term, when students quickly learn whether anyone is watching or cares. You can ask how they feel about an assessment and where they feel they are struggling. You might inquire about what strategies they are using to learn the material or approach the assessments. Then, clarify concepts through email or a virtual meeting, or identify if there is an issue with their study strategies.

Solicit student feedback to build metacognitive monitoring

Inviting students to provide feedback about concepts that they find confusing encourages students to practise the metacognitive skill of monitoring. There are many ways to solicit this kind of feedback from students. If you ask students to monitor when they feel confused and give you feedback, it is important that you use this information to clarify confusion for students in some way (e.g., through discussion forum or announcements, as above).

• End-of-module polls or surveys. You can ask students to report on the clearest and most confusing concept they came across for each module. Summarize these class data weekly and provide clarification on confusing points in announcements or the discussion forum. This information could also be used to help you select topics for short online video tutorials. If you offer video tutorials synchronously, make sure you post the topics covered to generate student interest, and record and post the video for those who cannot attend the synchronous session.
• Question and Answer Forum: Encourage students to post their questions in a Q & A forum where instructors, TAs, and even other students can answer content-related questions. 

Strategies for building student metacognition through self-reflection and feedback

Self-reflection on approach to content

Consider presenting your students with questions that help them identify their approach to course content, such as those shared earlier in this unit.

Engage students in sharing strategies

Keep a running list of successful strategies that you or other students have used to master certain types of content or practises that help students learn online. Some examples can be found in the online article 21 Study Tips for Online Classes Success. Share with your students in an announcement, discussion forum, or via email.

Provide formative feedback

Take time to give quality feedback on any required learning journals or other reflection activities. If none are required and time allows, you can create an opportunity for students to reflect on their learning and provide guidance by inviting them to create a learning reflection informally and providing (ungraded) feedback.

Case Study

Imagine that you are instructing a first-year math course online. The midterm is coming up, which is worth a large percentage of the final grade. In the past, a high proportion of students have failed the midterm and you would like the student outcomes on this midterm to be better.

One of your students, Lucas, has reached out to you by email, indicating that he failed the midterm practice quiz, which provided feedback on student answers to their problem sets. He tells you, “Everything so far is so confusing. I read the course content three times and I still failed the practice quiz. I don’t know what else to do — I’m going to fail the midterm now, too!”

Strategies for building student enthusiasm and interest

Several good examples of how online facilitators have used short videos to interact with their students and build student-content interaction and engagement are shown below. As you watch these videos, note the different approaches, instructional styles, and ways student interest in course content may be enhanced.

Using polls/surveys to increase personal relevance

The following video is a great example of facilitator interaction that can enhance behavioural engagement. In this example, created for a module on Leisure and Work, the facilitator uses short weekly videos to help keep students on track (with gentle reminders about assessments). Here, the facilitator has first used a survey to ask students some questions related to the upcoming week's content. She has then created a video to share the results with the class and comment on their significance. This facilitator notes that the “questions aren’t necessarily scholarly, but more a way to get [students] thinking about next week's ideas.” Notice how the facilitator relates the students’ response back to content in the module.

Transcript
Leisure and Work. Reprinted from "Week 6" by Rafferty, Z. (n.d), REC 101. Copyright by Z. Rafferty.

Using novelty to generate student interest

In the next video example, the online course facilitator takes the opportunity to generate student interest in his German Culture course by talking about a German brand of tissue. By piquing interest through what first appears to be an unexpected diversion, the instructor is able to increase student engagement in advance of introducing the key concept of rapid societal change, which students will encounter and work through in the coming module.

Transcript
Skidmore, J. (2016, November 14). Tempo - A GER 271 ProfMoment. Retrieved from https://vimeo.com/191545703.

Using relatable examples and personal experiences to generate attention and interest

In the following two videos, the facilitator uses relatable examples to make the personal relevance of the research students will learn about in her psychology course on Interpersonal Relationships clearer.

Transcript
Mate selection and romantic initiation. Reprinted from "Module 4: Attraction and Mate Selection" by Marigold, D., 2012, PSYCH 354R. Copyright 2012 by D. Marigold and University of Waterloo.

Relating personal experiences to content

Transcript
Conflict behaviour. Reprinted from "Module 7: Conflict and aggression" by Marigold, D., 2012, PSYCH 354R. Copyright 2012 by D. Marigold and University of Waterloo.

Strategies for value signalling

What matters to your students?

In signaling the value of content, it is important to get to know your online students as well as possible. If you are able to include formal or informal surveys or discussions that ask students to share their reasons for taking your course, and their specific goals for future work or further study, this can help you to be more specific about the importance of various topics. Making a chart or record of your students and their goals can be useful in this context. This information can guide what and how you highlight connections and value in the course through your interactions with students.

Seeing the connections through the content

Value signaling also benefits from attention to other concepts within the course, relating various pieces of information to things that have already been learned (or will soon come up) so that students can see the broad connections within the course itself. Drawing out these kinds of relationships in the course is known as scaffolding and is especially important during course design, but can also be helpful when communicating with students throughout the term. Pointing out how concepts are related in the first few weeks of the term can help to model this kind of scaffolding and emphasize the connections that we hope students will make as they continue to move through the material.

Helping students recognize important information

Students may, at times, miss some key concepts because they simply miss their relevance. Sometimes that is because relevance has not been well-signaled in the content, or students do not recognize or look for that signaling. One very important way that online courses signal relevance is through a list of intended learning outcomes or objectives and sometimes a list of key terms or concepts. In a well-designed online course, these outcomes are aligned with student assessments. Directing students to these lists to help guide their approach to content and preparation for assessments can be a very easy and helpful way to orient students towards relevance.

Case Study

Late one evening, you receive an email from Bernadette, who is taking your course as a required component of her degree. She is not doing very well in the course so far, and she shares that the content has not been exactly what she expected going in. She’s getting frustrated and is thinking about dropping the course.

Strategies that provide transparency 

Explain the why, not just the how

Students who know why they are doing an activity (beyond just getting a grade), and where they can get help, are much more likely to complete it successfully. You can explain this to students in individual consultations or you may choose to start each week/module with an announcement where you introduce the module/topic and highlight why the topic matters and/or the methods or tools used in that module are used.

Grading transparency

If your course does not provide clear grading breakdowns or rubrics (detailed scoring guice) for students, you might consider creating some of these (or discussing this with the instructor if you are a TA), which will not only help your grading efficiency and consistency, but will help students understand and meet expectations. This can save a lot of time in providing customized feedback or one-on-one meetings with students to explain where they missed the mark.

Signaling learning outcomes and alignment

Directing students to course-level and unit- or module-level learning outcomes that are aligned with assessments can help students see transparency built right into the course. If your course lacks learning outcomes, you might wish to compose them yourself based on the content and the assessments in the course, posting these ahead of time for students in a single document, or weekly.