Practical things to try

When you first start to plan for engagement and interactivity in an online course, think about the things that you would do in a regular classroom. I love to use hands up because I can say, who agrees and who disagrees? Now a poll can do exactly the same thing and you can pre-plan it, which means it’s great. It’s just there to launch or to paste in your information as you launch that part of your teaching technology. The thing I love about a poll is that you can take it from a yes/no to something that’s a little bit more in the student’s language. Things like, I completely get it. I think I get it. I’m completely lost. By using a poll in this way, students have the opportunity to virtually put their hands up.

Now, when we talk about this virtual putting your hands up, what it also enables you to do is, as they’re polling, you can engage with what those responses are. So it’s not a silent piece of time. And I use polling software that actually has no music in the background. You can use polling software that has music in the background. One of the challenges with this is your neurodiverse students will be quite distracted by it. So, by using polling software where you are talking over it, you can continue to teach through this virtual hands up experience.

The next piece of interactivity that I like to plan is that in doing this polling activity, there’ll be those students who are very quick. Imagine if you said put your hands up. It’s a physical activity so it happens fast. But when you’re doing polling, the student might be searching for their mouse, searching their click, deciding even if they’re going to engage and interact with you. So you can watch the numbers of the poll, but I introduced a second activity. You see, if you introduce a second activity, then there’s no temptation for the student to start checking their phone, watching YouTube on the side, checking their email or doing other multitasking. If a student’s multitasking, I want them multitasking with me and engaging with me.

So in my classes, I use a symbolic popcorn and this says that I’ve already voted. So once they’ve voted in the poll, they then post me an emoji of popcorn. Why do I love this? Well, if you think about how popcorn works, when you put it in the microwave, it pops very fast at first, it slows down, and then it pops fast again at the end. And by using the symbolism of popcorn, you can drive students to do the same thing with a poll. So, post your poll answer and send me a piece of popcorn. When they send the popcorn, it goes bing. In sending this bing, what it does is it fires off that dopamine hit that students get. And remember, students love that bing. That is why they have the likes on their social medias and the other types of engagement that they’re used to hearing and seeing.

So by using post and the poll and then follow up with popcorn, and popcorn becomes fun. Think about your association with popcorn. I use popcorn because I think about it like if someone’s at the movies, they might throw popcorn if they were at an interactive movie. So I explain this to the students and get them to use it. Now, at the same time, students might choose something different, and I encourage that too. So it could be ice cream, it could be, if it’s late at night, it might be a glass of wine. It could be their favorite emoji from their favorite city. I’m not worried about what they’re posting. What I am worried about is that they’ve voted in the poll and that they’ve sent me an emoji afterwards.

While I’m doing this, I’m watching two things. I’m watching who’s polling and what they’re polling, how many people are saying I’m lost. And then, if they’re lost, I want them to come back in and tell me where they’re lost. The software that I use allows me to actually send them a private message, or I use that as a follow up afterwards. You said you were lost at this point. Can I just check how you’re traveling now? So engagement is just like it would be in class. In class, if somebody said I didn’t get it, I would teach to that for a moment, then move on. But I might catch that student as they were leaving the classroom. Same thing online. There’s plenty of opportunity to catch that student as they leave your online classroom, whether it’s via email, still in the online environment, or a follow up a little bit later on.

The final piece of engagement that I like to plan in is actually the very first thing that I do in the day. I use emojis from the beginning, but I also use emojis as a reward system. Why do I want a reward system? Quite simply because it takes a lot of bravery to interact in an online classroom where no one has their videos on and nobody’s got their microphones on. So if somebody posts a comment, somebody sends me a message, or somebody bravely turns on their camera or even turns on their microphone, I don’t mind what they do. But any student that interacts with me in any way will get recognised and will get rewarded. So I have a number of rewards that I hand out, and I had to really think about who I was as a teacher and how I wanted to interact with my students. So these rewards are very simple things. I give out gold stars. I give out constellation of stars. That’s a great answer. One that’s really thought through, has depth. I also give out a talking emoji, a speaking up emoji. One for the student who’s engaged, hasn’t, perhaps, done a brilliant job but has really tried to come into the content, engage with others, and support others. So that’s a talking up emoji.

And then I have a virtual cup of coffee. Who would’ve known a virtual cup of coffee was going to be the thing that my students loved most. Now, I award virtual cups of coffee for anybody who talks to another student or supports another student on a question or engages with another student. That’s like a teaching assistant award. Now, students comment on how much money have I spent on virtual coffees? And I say, oh, it’s such an expensive class but so happy to share these virtual coffees. They’ve become our social engagement, but also a way of recognising the students who are supporting each other and engaging learner to learner and creating that social engagement that is planned and set out for in my class from the beginning. At the very beginning of the day, the first emoji I post is my happiest face like this and a little girl that dances. Why? Because we’ve got music and I want this interaction and people will send me what they’re doing. So they might send me their favorite emoji. So emoji exchanges are a language that our students are often very familiar with. They’re often using them with their friends.

And we can bring this language into the classroom and plan for it from the very moment that we turn on our music, our cameras, our voice, our screen, our slides. It’s not just that. It’s actually bringing that animation in that will encourage the students to engage and interact with us, with each other. And in doing so, the content becomes alive and part of this process of where it’s not just being consumed but actually interacted with.

The most interesting thing for me when I started to use emojis was how positively the students embraced it. I found that as high as 98% of my students were interacting each and every class. And when I was asking students what they were doing, as high as 86% of students were saying, “I went and did something with that.” So, what we also saw was this really extraordinary thing where the students satisfaction remained as high, if not higher, in a lot of instances than they had had with a face-to-face class.

And I started to think about when was too much and what was just right. But then I noticed something really extraordinary. I no longer had to lead the students to use these emojis. I would log on, say, “Hello,” and the next thing, my screen would light up with emojis. And people would say, “I wanna be known by the dinosaur emoji,” or, “I wanna be known by the tiger emoji.” And so the students’ response was so positive because what it created was a sense of that I understood how they engaged with each other and I’d made it less of a power distance to me as an instructor. And I was more in the room with them and having the same discussion with them in the same way.

So it meant that the students found a language that was quick, snappy, and was a language they were used to with each other. And that made us together as a cohort, learning together, interacting together, and it gave the space for everybody to have a voice without having to think about typing something out. And sometimes, my students don’t have English as a first language and so this meant they could very quickly tell me that they were happy, that they were worried, that they were lost, and I could very quickly tell them, “You’re doing a great job.” So the response to emoji exchange was something way beyond what I could have hoped for, and just allowed me to think about the way I wanted to create that relationship with my students.

My emoji library has grown over the time that I’ve used it. And every now and then I think, “Hmm, I was teaching that class today. I needed a different way of expressing that.” And so then I just introduce that, but I always tell the students which emoji means what. So I spend about a week saying, every time I post it, ‘So that’s a talking up award – Thank you so much for providing that.’ Or ‘You earn a virtual cup of coffee for being a teaching assistant or for teaching others.’ By week two, week three, I no longer have to explain the emoji. I can just give it out and people will say, “Thanks for that.” They wanna earn the first gold star of the day, the first speaking up, the first virtual coffee, or the last one for the day, or even the math in the middle.