Nugget #20: Increasing Engagement Pt. 2

Posted on by Delu Louis Zhao

Engagement

Student engagement is a great way to keep students motivated and to help students stay attentive in classrooms. Research has shown that class attendance is a key factor of a student’s success, but it can be difficult to keep students’ attention in lectures. As a result, it’s important to include interactive activities where students can engage with course content in a variety of ways.

Below are some ways to help increase engagement in classrooms:

  • Polls and clickers: A quick and easy way to grab students’ attention and check student understanding of lecture content. Allows students to reflect on what they’ve learned during class.
  • Small group activities: Split students into small groups and provide an open-ended problem for students to solve. Allows students to apply content, collaborate with others, and build a sense of community.
  • Think-pair-share: Instructors ask students a question and students have a quick discussion in pairs or small groups. This can help students reflect on what they’ve learned so far during class

Dig Deeper:

For engagement and attendance purposes, instructors commonly default to paid tools like iClicker and PollEverywhere that provide base polling features to measure and assess student engagement. While potentially convenient, a large downside is in its paid nature. Here are some free alternatives with their own powerful features:

  • Microsoft Forms allows instructors to quickly create forms to use in their classrooms with support for tools like LaTeX (in the quiz mode) and template galleries. Once published, the forms can track student responses, as well as metadata like time of submission. After data collection, analysis techniques like word clouds help instructors gain insight on students’ results.
  • Vevox fulfills many of the features provided by iClicker, allowing instructors to create real-time polls, interactive quizzes, and anonymous Q&As to collect results analyzed with word clouds and other data analytics. For the free tier, however, there is a participant limit of 100 students.

More sources

These tools are a great start towards adding engagement into your classroom. If there are any barriers to implementing them or if any of the software are missing features you’re interested in having, please let us know! A big part of our UDL and Accessibility Research Group initiatives is in understanding opportunities for improving student and instructor experiences in accessible education.

Thank you for your interest. If you found this tip helpful, please share it with your colleagues!

See you again next week!

-UDL and Accessibility Group
https://publish.illinois.edu/udl-accessibility-group/
gcoe-udlgroup@illinois.edu