Image from Pickpik

The question I have been asked the most in recent months is one all teachers are interested in now they have been compelled to use online learning. It is this: What can I do to engage my learners in an online environment? What they are really asking is, how can I motivate my students to learn when I’m not in the same space as them?

The glib answer is – do the same as you would if you wished to engage them in a face to face environment. But it’s a little more nuanced than this, because you are not there.

One of the principles of pedagogy I learnt very early on in my career was not to privilege teaching above learning. The delivery of content and the instructional aspects of education are, and should always be considered to be, just two components in learning. There’s more to education than standing up and teaching.

When learners are in an online environment, problems can be compounded. It’s easier to be distracted, easier to focus on familiar objects or events in the room than on learning. It’s more likely that there will be interruptions at home that will not occur in a classroom. It’s a psychological inevitability that learning from home will not be as intense as learning in a classroom with one’s peers. All of these issues need to be considered, and more, if we are to make online learning a more engaging experience for learners.

That’s why I suggest that you amplify and extend the methods you use in a classroom. Engaging students there requires activities, dialogue, and most importantly, applied focus on developing skills, gaining knowledge and improving understanding. How do you do this? Every teacher is different, but I suspect you use questioning, you present challenges, you set problems and you get students to search, create and present new knowledge.

Engaging students online involves exactly the same methods, but in an online context, they can be offered in shorted bursts, allowing students to think and reflect more, and to engage with their peers and with the teacher as well as with the content.

Here’s the best tip I can give you: What a student does offline is probably more important than what they do online. Presenting content should be mainly seen as a stimulus for further study, and should not be the end goal. Learning about the content, exploring wider, constructing meaning, and ultimately sharing that knowledge should be the goal. How you assess and measure that is up to you.

I doubt if anyone will post any relevant comments on this post (blogging seems to be a dying art for most teachers these days) but if you choose to do so, I will respond. Promise.

How are you engaging your learners? by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.