SAGE 2YC

Hey folks! Now that I'm actually planning my spring geology course to be online... rather than having a week to throw a class together, I'm struggling with ways to have my class be more engaging for students, both with interactions with me and with each other. What have you been able to do in an online class to help develop a sense of community?

In my experience, developing engaging online classes is not always the same as developing a sense of community. I think that a sense of community is much more important in a discussion-based course where students need to feel comfortable expressing ideas and opinions that may differ from others. With my content-heavy courses I have focused more on encouraging more engagement in online classes. I have found breakout rooms to be clunky and very time consuming. But I do use informal polls (but not the Zoom polls) and mini case studies quite often. For polling, I will frequently have lectures with multiple choice questions embedded in the powerpoint and when I get to that slide in class I ask students to use the annotate tools (stamp or draw) to mark which answer they think is correct (students can also type their answer in the chat) and then we review it. This takes very little time and is a great way to see if there are common misconceptions I need to address. I also try to include other activities periodically in the semester such as a crossword puzzle I just did for bone anatomy (me trying to use the drawing tool to write the letters in those tiny squares was a great way to teach spelling and we all got quite a laugh at my online penmanship!).