How to Engage Struggling/Difficult Online Learners

All right it's 12 o'clock good afternoon everybody and welcome to today's health professions educator series session so how i i would if we were in a classroom ask how many for you to raise your hands if you want to select your little uh emoticon that allows you to raise your hands that's fine but how many of you remember back to approximately 18 months two weeks and one day ago when we very first got the notice that we were going to need to pivot a bit to work and teach from home primarily temporarily yeah yeah so i don't think um anyone would argue that across the organization we really did a fantastic job of approximating the in-person experience online for at least temporarily and how many of you really thought that we would still be teaching in at least a hybrid format 18 months two weeks and one day later probably not many of you i know that for sure i was telling my team oh this will probably be one week two weeks at max that we'll we'll be home um yet here we are um many of us are still teaching either fully remotely or with a hybrid approach and we all have learners and we still have those learners who are struggling or challenging in a variety of ways but it may be just taking out a different flavor so today's speakers are here to really help us to learn how to adapt in these evolving waters and with our evolving types of learners who are struggling in a variety of ways so i'm going to really quickly introduce our speakers and i'll just hand it over to them so uh we've got dr diana willaman buckaloo who is associate professor uh of public health and health sciences for the department of public health and health care leadership at radford university carilion we also have dr melania stoykova who is professor of the director and director of the graduate nursing programs at redford university carillion and dr david halpen who is the instructional designer at radford university curling so i'm going to go ahead and i'm just going to turn it over to them we will be monitoring the chat if you have questions throughout feel free to also unmute yourselves from your video on if you have something to say um also we will leave some time at the end for additional questions but feel free to pepper some in throughout so without further ado turn it over to you speakers all right thank you everybody for being here today i'm diana willem and buckaloo and i'm going to be starting us off as sherry has already alluded to we've with kobit i think a lot of us have seen um a greater number of students struggling in this past academic year and even this year so we hope that what we present today will help give you some ideas on how to you know overcome and work with those struggling students so we're going to start off by looking at some of those characteristics for struggling students and then look at some of the challenges that are faced during in the different learning groups and then at the end we're going to look at strategies to increase engagement for our struggling students now we have a lot to cover today so we are asking if possible we would prefer that everybody hold their questions and comments until we have all completed the presentation you are welcome to put things in the chat but we would like to go through the entire presentation and then open it up for questions at the end so let's dig in then to some characteristics of our struggling and difficult online learners and i'm sure that if you whether you're new to teaching or you've been teaching for a long time that you've had a student or more than one student or several students who have struggled in your course so if we look at what are some characteristics of successful university students and you think about students who you deem as being successful you'll see these characteristics and can probably identify that yes those successful students do have a lot of these characteristics but how do successful students differ from struggling students so if we look at these different characteristics we will see that successful students usually accept personal responsibility where a struggling student may say you know what it's beyond my control what's happening in my life the fact that i'm not doing well in my class it's beyond my control struggling students may also have a a difficult time finding that purpose in life they they know that they want to go to school they want to get an education but they struggle with finding their purpose and these struggling students may also have good intentions good motivation and that when they sit down they're going to study for an exam and spend the next hour devoted to that and then 15 20 minutes into that study time they're either bored they're not getting the gratification out of it that they wanted other things come in and are distracting them and no surprise to anybody that has been in teaching for either a short term or long term that we see a lot of procrastination in struggling students [Music] successful students tend to build those mutually supportive relationships those are the students if you think about your successful students if they didn't do well on an exam or an assignment they meet you after class they show up during your office hours saying what can i do i want to do better what can i do to improve with as i move forward on my future exams and assignments where struggling students may receive that low score may fail an exam and they don't reach out at all to us and in fact i've had students that that struggle and have not done well i send them an email i reach out and say i'd like to meet with you let's get together to talk about you know how we can help improve your score moving forward and talk about your assignment send that email never get a reply send a second email again wanting to meet with a student and may never get a reply so while they're replying maybe they don't check their emails maybe they just for whatever reason don't want to meet with me but we do see that struggling students tend to to not reach out and request assistance when they really should be they may not sign up to get that tutoring that they need struggling students also have those disempowering life scripts i fail my math test because i'm bad at math i'm never going to be good at math i just have to do whatever i can do to pass this class where their successful students have more empowering beliefs and attitudes and behaviors towards education struggling students may look at sitting down to study and learning is more boring and feeling like it's just more of a duty something they have to do where a successful student may like to learn they are you know they are encouraged by learning it excites them to learn new things struggling students often find that they're that their success may be hijacked by their emotions they're depressed they're anxious they just feel worthless or that there is no meaning in their life and that goes along too with they doubt their personal value where successful students may have that more belief in themselves and their worthiness struggling students may doubt that personal value and i'm sure that if you think about your students you can see some of these characteristics and students that you consider to be struggling students so i did a quick little dive into the literature to see what what is our literature showing us and in one study what we found is that there's psychological distress time management family commitment and all of these factors will impact academics it may cause the student to feel unmotivated to lose focus and as a result their academic performance suffers also from the literature there there is some findings that students from lower ses may struggle more those who are english language learners students who may have had lower academic grades in high school before coming to college and then the concept that was mentioned in one of the articles was failure to fail and i i just want to mention this in case some of you are not familiar with this term but what it is is when students who are not meeting academic standards they are not performing satisfactory satisfactorily in the classroom or in a clinical setting and yet these students are not being failed they are continuing to pass the course and move through the program so what are some reasons for failure to fail one may be retention you know either from the instructor wanting to do everything they can to retain students in their classes and help them be successful so that they can continue on and get that degree program um and university and accreditation standards look at retention so there is you know that that feeling that we want to retain our students but most prevalent of all is the emotional process that's involved with failure to fail and if any of you have ever failed a student you know how emotional it can be because especially if it's a student that you have worked with all semester try to do everything you could to help the student be successful and then they they don't pass the class it's emotional for the instructor but also with this emotional aspect is students complete course evaluations and all of you know that if course evaluations for 10-year track faculty do come into play for 10-year but also if a student doesn't get the grade that they feel that they deserved in your class that they failed the class what they write in your course evaluation can be sometimes very hurtful to read the other thing then is if you go through the grievance process and it's a very time consuming and emotional process for a faculty member and if you go through the grievance you have given your information of yes i here's the supporting documentation of why the student should fail and for whatever reason as it moves up through the process that failing grade is overturned and it can result in a faculty member feeling that they are not being supported by the university so there's a lot on this but you know in the end it may be that they don't feel that they're being supported by the university and students then are being moved through the process because faculty do not want to fail a student other things from other literature emotional and psychological trauma feelings of low self-efficacy just some other reasons of why students tend to struggle and then in regards to online students especially what we're finding now is that online students tend to be non-traditional students many of them are older they have more responsibilities they have family commitments with their children they may be less prepared for success in higher ed because maybe they have been out of school for a long time and some of those skills that they've had are no longer there or maybe they are just not for online work they're just not comfortable with the technology that we use for online programs so when we david and emily and i met we came up with this list and we said why do students struggle and so here's our list what we see a lot especially at ruc is students work full-time they have families they just have a lot of commitments that that impact their time to actually study and put in what they need to be successful students may come with a lack of time management organization skills and study skills so there's a lot of different reasons they may be unprepared or not have the communication skills going back to what i mentioned earlier that you know they they don't know how to communicate with their instructor if they're struggling or if they did poorly on an exam they aren't comfortable with approaching the instructor to speak with them about it and they may have unrealistic expectations they may feel oh this is an online program i can do what i want whenever i want it's going to be easy well i will tell you that sometimes that being in an online program is is a lot more work than what students actually realize and then what we want to ask then first all of you is we've come up with this list what have you observed as far as reasons for why students struggle in your classes and we like for you to create a list in the chat as to some of the things that you've observed in regards to this so i'll give everybody just a minute here to put some comments in there about their observations i'm sure the list that we have gone through as sherry mentioned in the chat is there's probably not a lot of surprises here especially whether those of you that have been teaching for a very long time you probably see a lot of these same characteristics so thank you everybody we're getting a lot of good things that are coming up some are not good at appraising their own performance they may not realize that they're struggling poor core skills all right well thank you for those that shared all right let's move on then that finishes up our part about characteristics for struggling students so now i'm going to turn it over to dr molina stay cova thank you so much diana when he was looking through the list that we created i was like definitely we have gen z in our classrooms with all those items critical thinking and our cover dolls so i would like to open this part with a quote from three prom and colleagues in 2019 who stated that conflict and tensions occur among people from different generations due to misunderstanding as well as a lack of perception and compassion in educational institutions we can find teachers who are dissatisfied with their students behaviors which often differs from our own behaviors some challenges in higher education are based on the multi-generational classroom where students represent different learning groups difficult students and this is because of that misconception of learning expectations for example can i have the next slide please thank you so much for example the baby boomers and also the the students who were born between mid 90s and 40s and early 1960s may now return for a second career and pursue the educational dreams that he couldn't do when earlier due to family obligation financial financial obligations and difficulties and just as diana mentioned earlier now they come and they have to learn the technology the learning expectations however those baby boomers have a strong work ethics and loyalty to organization they follow the rules so they may not understand millennials for example who like to rewrite the rules or gen x or gen zs who like to question and criticize everything baby boomers also invest in education and may look for additional training lecture materials to understand the concept of learning because they need to catch up they like performance review and will often ask for detailed feedback which for some faculty may be perceived that those students are struggling so that's why they're asking for so much background in comparison to let's say gen xers who are independent learners baby boomers learn the best in small groups as they like to build strong relationships and they may struggle in a big classroom baby boomers draw from life experiences in a challenge with abstract learning and especially if assignment does not include practical explanation and application next slide please generation x are born in late 1960s and mid 1980s in a race by baby boomers generation so they are the most independent generations because their parents the baby boomers work full time and left them often alone especially like in high school because of that chain exercise the most independent and they're comfortable working alone or they're comfortable with technology a challenge teaching generation x is that they want to learn in the most efficient way they like easy quick way they like worksheets then excel may ask the faculty either via face-to-face via email to clear to give them a clear and transparent expectations exactly what they need to know so they can pass the exams and they like the information presented in straightforward way then extra judgmental and clickage and tend to be skeptical they like to question policies they like to reject the rules and they will often find the grace or they will find flawed instructors and instructions well gen xers work well with baby boomers that both generations value work life and balance next slide please because most millennials are born in early 80s and late 1990s they're raised by gen xers who are more financially stable and off stable and often like helicopter parents claimed and managed everything in the life of their kids or children for that reason millennials may work basic skills such as critical thinking or they may like taking initiatives or even when faced with seed bugs they may tend to give up instead of like bouncing back well that creates a challenge for higher education academia where the expectations are independence in learning students often to require on their own large volume of content from textbooks which is stressful transition for high school millennials where they have had worksheets just to plug the content that they needed to be tested on millennials like to work with others they like to socialize they value teamwork in what is meaningful and has purpose they like fast-paced work environment with instantaneous information technology-based learning creativity and innovation which make conflict in a classroom where you have baby boomers who are structured in systematics millennials have also may also have lower levels of resilience making them struggle with assignments and linger or display self-pity when they receive unsatisfactory grades on tesla assignment so as a resolution millennials may ask you to change instructions or they will push up and rewrite the rules and reject current policies we also need to remember that millennials are less financially conservative and they often request financial tuition or tuition assistance as they poorly plan their money and they may run all the money mid-semester millennials now represent about 80 million which makes them the largest generation and the smartest and the richest people as per google next slide please the most interesting generation now is entering our classroom in that gen xes generations is born in late 1990s and mid-2010 in their race either by gen xers or millennials james is called the digital or the global cohort as they do not know life without technology and they have global connectiveness click on the on the digital device and they're connected worldwide they reach over 30 million in 2019 which makes them the second largest generation in the classrooms that generation reconsider question and criticize everything which makes them impatient in need of immediate gratification gen x is a good in multi-tasking and they may text while in the lecture make them look that distract get distracted well they actually pay attention but for a short time as they have a limited attention span which is a challenge in a two to three hour classroom where lecture content is without technology interactions so break so we need to consider that with when we have those long lectures jsik prefer to work individually because they're faster in processing information which may challenge to our students or those who are less technology experienced like generation the boomers they may also check with the social media the truth of what the instructors are lecturing them so they're constantly taking and validating facts through social media despite that james z decline in face-to-face communication they're faithful to friends and they connected to them through the social media and they also have those influencers who shape how they think and what they do jinzy often agree with the group and toward like the group opinion peers or social issues and they may hesitate to share different views in their periods if put on spot from the faculty when we ask them directly questions in the classroom they may feel targeted in becoming patient slightly disobedient and may be seen as a difficult student however they're great moderators next i would like to invite dr halpin to introduce some strategies for managing struggling or difficult students next slide please thank you melina sorry the slide went haywire there at the end my computer is uh froze up on me okay so i'm going to talk about some of the strategies knowing all of the things that elena and diana just discussed we're going to look at some of the strategies that can help these struggling learners and the first thing is we have a poll question so i think sandy's going to put up the poll is that able to be used david it looks like it it kind of started in the middle i'm going to relaunch that oh here it is i see it okay so basically what we want to know is what is your current currently your primary method of teaching so are you are you completely back face to face are you synchronous but it's all online are you asynchronous online so you just have an online course but you don't ever meet face-to-face or live are you doing a hybrid where you have some live sessions and a lot of online or is it hybrid only online so um should be able to vote are you ready to end it david no now we can go ahead they can go ahead and vote we can wait wait a minute and see okay just let me let you know when you're ready okay yeah what do we got okay okay so a lot of synchronous face-to-face we've got some entirely online synchronous some asynchronous online and a lot of hybrid too so that's very interesting to know that kind of helps figure out which strategies are going to work and a lot of these strategies will work for any of these situations but you may have to modify them and and tweak them a little bit to get them to work and a lot of times that's the the challenge is if you're used to teaching face to face and you suddenly have to move online how you how you transfer those strategies to an online environment so one concept that is wrapped up in all of this is the idea of persistence and persistence refers to the students ability to continue over time to reach their goal and there's also you hear talk about retention in schools but retention is more of an institution focused concept whereas persistence is is something that an instructor can can help control you can help students be more persistent and and move toward their goal and you can't have you can't improve retention if you don't address persistence because if the students are struggling they're not going to persist and then you're not going to have that retention and one thing as an instructor that you that you need to do which is one of the jobs of an instructor is to provide the scaffolding to the students throughout the whole educational experience so you don't want to tell them the answer but you want to kind of guide them and lead them to it so they have the goal up at the top and you've got to figure out the best way to get them to that goal that's your that's your that's your your main goal as an instructor and so i'm going to talk a little bit about course structure and so speaking of scaffolding i i found it fascinating that in china and particularly i was in hong kong that when they're building these huge skyscrapers their scaffolding is all made out of bamboo which i just i'm never cease to be amazed when i see that bamboo and this is this is an example of a very large building that has a bamboo structure and the workers are just climbing all over that bamboo no steel so i just thought that was just fascinates me but it also means that you're building the structure of the course so if you're whether it's a face-to-face course or an online course and mainly we talk about online um you have to organize that content to make it easy for students to access and to understand and so some of the ways you you can do that you have to organize it from a student's point of view so particularly with online students they can get easily confused frustrated or disengaged if they're challenged just navigating through the course materials and so you want to organize it from their point of view and you want to be consistent in your structure so you want to create a predictable rhythm from one week or module or unit to the next so that the students know what to expect they know what's coming up next and another thing you can do you want to make it easy to use and you can also provide a kind of a module roadmap for them we call it a topical outline that lays out the whole course in front of them and kind of sets some expectations about what they're going to be expected to do during the course and for each unit or module that you have you want to set expectations for that unit so you want to let students know here's what we're going to cover here's why it's important i i saw somebody i comment earlier that said students don't don't unders don't think that the content's important and you've got to figure out how to let them know it's important right off the bat and that helps with a lot of more modern students that want to know the relevancy of the material and here's what you need to do for this unit and here's the activities that you need to engage in during this unit and here's how you're going to be assessed on that material so lay it out in front of them right off the bat so they know what's expected it's very important to do that and then the last thing with the structure is you want to test it out as a student so once it's once you've got it all set up if you're doing it on an lms usually there's some sort of student preview and i always encourage folks turn that on and go in there as a student because it usually looks a lot different than it looks to you when you're creating it and whether you're putting it on canvas or d2l or or even in google or somewhere online or even if you're doing face-to-face class and you're creating a a workbook for students just go through it as a student or find other students to go through it and give you some feedback on that here's a somebody's drawing on the on the screen there i see at least on my screen i see red so here's a chart that kind of gets back to the some of the the different types of learners that that elena was talking about and some of the strategies that have been shown to work with them um and a lot of these more modern students are obviously they're they're big into the technology um they prefer when you get to the point they don't want a lot of a lot of extraneous information it's all about get to the point tell me what i need to do tell me why it's important build on things as you go try to integrate the technology where possible and different things like that so i'm going to move on from there the next important thing is to engage engage the learners you've got to figure out how to engage your learners particularly when you're online it's important when you're face to face but even more important online and so what are some of the ways we can engage students well first off engagement has been shown in the research to be a key predictor of student success so that's that's why it's so critical and so you want to you want to create activities that ask students to apply content so you have to be careful about not over lecturing i see a lot of instructors that they just they have so much content to get through that they just lecture through all of it it's just lecture lecture lecture powerpoint powerpoint powerpoint bullet bullet bullet um and you've got to figure out how to how to insert some engaging activities that that have students apply that content as you're going along whether that's having them read the content and just having the expectation that they have read it and and creating activities that ask them to apply it obviously if they haven't read it they're not going to be able to apply it so it's going to cut down on the the usefulness of that but you've got to figure out ways to make sure they've they've got the content ready asking students to self-reflect so you can you can use discussions journals you can have students create their own videos to self-reflect on where they are in the course so they can you can have them reflect on the content that they're that they're going through that week or they can reflect on their place in the course and that helps students evaluate their progress in the course and it also encourages metacognition and i saw somebody one of the comments earlier was about students not knowing where they're at in the course and not knowing how well they're doing so if you can encourage metacognition that is basically an awareness of where they are and how well they're performing and a lot of times students don't understand that and there's strategies that that they can use to kind of increase their metacognition and that will in turn help them to persist because if you're if you have a good understanding of where you are and where you're struggling as a student you're more likely to to keep going and persist and one thing i like to do is i like to have students prepare questions so if you're if you're wondering whether they're actually reading the content beforehand ask them to come up with questions based on the content they've read and bring those to class so if you're doing an online course if it's if you're doing a zoom session have them show up and and spend some time asking them okay what questions do you have about this content and then another thing i always like to do is try to figure out where i can have students teach so hand hand the gavel over to the students and have them teach some of the content and i did this in the course i i used to teach at virginia tech i got tired of lecturing and it was it was it was a lot of heavy lecturing and so i i split up the the topics and i assigned them to students and said okay this week you're going to have to present on this piece of this content and then i was kind of the guide on the side to help fill in the knowledge gaps or correct the misconceptions that came up and there's always going to be misconceptions or gaps that students don't know and that's where you can fill in and sometimes having students present also engages the other students so they're more likely to pay attention because it's it's novel it's different from the instructor droning on [Music] and so another concept that's that's tied to engagement is interaction and they have identified three types of learner interactions um in courses and so we have learner content interaction and we have learner instructor instructor interaction and then we have learner learner interaction so i'm going to talk about those individually here learner content interaction is basically the content that you're presenting so it could be lectures videos you can do video lectures powerpoints quizzes are good if you can figure out how to have games and simulations and scenarios and case studies those are obviously critical for healthcare focused areas because you can't do everything on a live patient so you've got to you've got to have these case studies that students can go through and i i always caution people with powerpoints a lot of book publishers will provide you with powerpoints endless powerpoints but be careful about just throwing those out there to students and or just using them to read through because as an instructor you bring your own knowledge and experiences to the educational environment and that's what's really valuable for students is is to get your perspective on the content not just the textbook perspective because a lot of times what's in the book is not how it is in real life so your experiences experiences are unique to anyone else and so you have to add that in so with a powerpoint you can add your voice to it you can add a voice over powerpoint but make sure when you do that that you're adding more to it and not just reading what's on the slides quizzes there's there's a lot of quizzing tools out there quizzes are good for providing practice and feedback and give students rehearsal and retrieval strategies with those through a couple tools in there ispring near pod but there's so many others let's talk about learner instructor interaction and this is a critical one and it's tied to a concept called instructor presence and so if you're not present in your course you're likely to have frustrated students and particularly with online courses you have to you have to be there you have to be present in that course if you're not students are going to get distant and the more distant they get the less likely they are to persist and if they start struggling you're going to lose them because you're not there and i and we have i hear stories occasionally of of courses that are taught online and [Music] students will start writing and saying where's the instructor they haven't we've submitted assignments they haven't graded them we haven't heard from them there's no announcements we post discussions they don't respond so you have to be very careful with that because instructor presence has been shown according to these folks as the most important best practice for an online course and so why is that well like i said it increases student engagement for one it decreases the isolation in particular with online courses students can get isolated really quickly some students like the isolation they like working on their own there's like okay tell me what i need to do i'm going to do it i'm going to get done that's it others can't can't they can't do that they can't they need some sort of interaction and so you want to try to cut down on the isolation and it's been shown to increase student satisfaction and again decreases attrition and so some of the basic common things you can do is to send regular messages so again if you're in face to face it's easier because you see the students more often but if you're online or hybrid try to send frequent announcements or messages and update students on where things are in the course just that little that little bit that you do can provide that connection to students posting summaries weekly summaries if you're doing weekly units or modules post summaries every week say hey we had a great week here's what we covered here's what we did if there's clinical you know here's what we did in lab or clinicals just a review provide timely feedback on assignments that's critical for um distance based students don't wait two or three weeks to to grade assignments and and provide feedback provide lots of opportunities to interact with students whether that's office hours exam reviews study study sessions and group discussions anything like that that can connect you more to students you can create videos to welcome students to your online course you can do video updates instead of announcements put yourself out there say hey we had a great week or hey this week we're going to talk about this topic and this topic and you're going to do these things so instead of just putting them out there in text you can do screencasts to help students navigate your courses at the beginning those are those are useful another strategy is to think about regular check-ins for students and so that can take different forms one is i think diana mentioned earlier is just reach out to struggling students so if you see somebody that they're not showing up to class they're not turning in assignments you can reach out to them and try to make that connection now as diana said they may not respond and so you may not hear back from them but you you can help by making that effort and sometimes that will that will make a difference for students particularly if they're struggling you know in their personal lives just knowing somebody is out there that cares that wants them to do good in their course you can build in regular check-ins into your course so whether that's periodic meetings or if you have projects requiring students to to check in with you on that project so that's another tech another course i teach at tech i've had students they have to set up meetings with me to check in on on the project that they're doing or present some of their research you can do small weekly assignments that that allows you to get feedback to students more frequently and then study sessions are good so if you create study sessions for for tests or or upcoming projects or anything like that that you can again get students hooked up with you and then finally learner learner interaction is also very critical so this involves collaborative tasks so having students do things together and a lot of times that that ends up being a group project um this allows students to engage with each other they can teach each other in the process which is also important and it helps build critical teamwork skills which is important again in healthcare is to get them working with each other before they get out into the real world now group projects often solicit frowny faces from students because they don't like group projects a lot because they've had poor experiences so you have to be aware of that and try to provide them with good experiences and i saw some research that said academic performance was significantly higher in students who participated in groups than those who completed assignments individually so there is some benefit beyond that to to working in groups and i found this model that that shows the different levels of group learner learner interaction which i thought was interesting it's good to be aware of this when you're designing group activities because you've got to give students time to to go through these levels to to build their community to share ideas and get up to the point where they're reflecting on the experience and it's important to have them reflect on that when the experience is finished so some ways to make group projects work that i've found is to have students establish group norms and what that means is you put it on the group the members of the group to create their own guidelines for how they're going to work together and then what's going to happen if they don't work well together so establish their own standards and rules and then what's going to happen if somebody does not follow those rules so what are the consequences for that and you put that on them to determine those quant consequences and carry out those consequences and so that's what i do in in my teamwork course the first thing the group to do is establish norms and after that point if somebody comes and says well so-and-so is not working we haven't heard from them they're not doing their work i put it back on them to look at their group norms and say okay what's in your group norms you it's up to you to follow that so it really works really well students love having that set up at the beginning and then just allowing them room for creativity is very helpful so have giving them assignments that allow them to create whether it's a powerpoint a video it could be it could be a poster presentation a lot of our instructors have students create poster presentations so that's that's very helpful and then allowing everyone's voice to be heard i think is important and i have an assignment in one of my teamwork classes where students have to reach a consensus on a controversial topic and they have to present their results and that they have all agreed to that and they have to figure out how to come to that consensus but part of the assignment later on i want each student to write what their opinion was particularly if it was different from the consensus originally so that allows them to have a voice and i think when you allow students to have that voice it it makes them more engaged and more likely to persist and again going back to struggling if they're more engaged with their peers the peers are going to help them with their struggle also because you can't do it all and then some other ways you have online discussions and again students don't like discussion so you have to make them purposeful and there's various tools out there that will help with that a lot of our folks use voicethread for online discussions there's things like flip grid padlet jamboard we've used quite a bit to have students interact with each other and you can also have students assess each other this is really interesting because that takes some of the burden off the instructor if you create an assignment that allows students to evaluate each other so students for example post something in a discussion and then instead of the instructor going in and providing feedback you have other students go in and provide feedback based on some criteria or assess what they've done and that provides that back and forth with students and alleviates some of the the effort for the instructor so that's really useful there's a tool out there called peer grade that facilitates peer to peer feedback i think it i don't believe it's free though but i i've explored it a little bit looks very interesting and then there's some team or competition tools kahoot and brightful is a is a site that has a lot of um games and things that that gets students collaborating and i think a lot of folks have used kahoot it's kind of a game show type competition format which can be useful and these things can be used in face-to-face classes or online and that's what's that's what's really neat is that you can you can leverage them um in different ways if you're doing hybrid courses just a quick note getting back to what we were talking about with lecturing is if you're teaching hybrid and you and you it's mostly online but you have a few sessions where you're meeting students face to face just remember to make those those face-to-face or live sessions make them valuable so have students do pre-work and then come to the the synchronous session ready to apply that content and then you can follow it up later with more support information and then just some quick tips on synchronous zoom sessions we we tend to say everything zoom but you may be using webex or google or some other synchronous tool but most of us have been using zoom quite a bit in the last year and a half and so some of the tips for for using zoom is again you can provide students with objectives and guiding questions right off the bat because if they're not engaged they tend to tune out with online sessions and you've got to limit your lecture time you've got to make it less than you would in a face-to-face course so 10 to 15 minutes tops for lecturing in zoom and then you've got to get them doing something so lecture 10 to 15 minutes have them do something show a video do a poll break them out into rooms that's so useful to have breakout rooms or even the whiteboard collaboration i've seen that leveraged really well in the past and you can repurpose your in-person activity so one of the most common ones is think pair share that can be done online utilizing breakout rooms you break them into rooms have them think have them pair up and then bring them back to the main room to share so it's you can leverage those things and again get back to something i mentioned earlier have students teach so if you're in the zoom hand it over to the students have them create a powerpoint and share that with the other students and then one final cute little thing is to open your zoom sessions early because i've heard that a lot of times students will log into the session early and they'll talk with each other so anything you can do to get students engaged with each other more will help out um again it goes back to the the persistence and the engagement and the interaction which ultimately will help the struggling learners and you can also have asynchronous sessions if you're teaching an asynchronous course you can have required sessions so you may say okay this is a totally online course but you've got to attend at least one or two synchronous sessions during the semester and that pulls them in and and makes you have a little bit of a hold on them so they're not totally out there in the wasteland by themselves and so we've got a little time here for questions um or discussion i think i saw some questions and comments coming in the chat but i wasn't able to keep up with them so um if anybody's been watching are there any questions or if anybody wants to chime in absolutely i mean this was a great presentation and obviously the reasons for and the way in which struggling manifests uh will look differently depending on you know if you're in the classroom virtual classroom versus virtual clinic or wherever um and of course there are different approaches for addressing so if there are questions or also if you have um additional approaches that that weren't mentioned here today based on your learning environment please feel free to share those as well now's the time you can unmute and or take your video block off or whatever you would like to do or type it into the chat so dr henderson writes can you circle back to time on zoom for learning sessions yeah that is their question related to that he said it sounds like 15-minute chunks yeah so it's and as an instructor um one of your main goals is to chunk the content and with being online yeah you've got to have those smaller chunks when you're when you're trying to engage students online because in the last year and a half i've seen i've done a lot of zoom sessions and i i start seeing students you know looking at their phones or they're talking to people in their house or even dozing off um so you've got to you've got to limit your droning not that the droning is bad it's important information but you've got to pause and just get the students pull them back in so whether it's poll questions are great i mean it's just you throw it out there say okay i want to i want to get everybody's opinion on this um or you know how are you doing are they are they getting what you're what you're talking about and that can help you moving forward and if you don't if you got 50 students in your class and you don't get 50 responses to the poll you can kind of start calling people out say hey and even even uh switching presenters or having somebody else talk having a learner talk um is effective as well or you know asking um i i don't like say calling uh calling the learners out because that makes them feel less comfortable but even just you know calling names specifically and once your learners i think get used to you doing that they're um less apt to go and to do other things yeah and i think i talked about having them prepare so knowing that for example they have to come up with three questions based on the content that week and you may call on them for their questions so they have to be kind of on alert a little bit when that's happening so anything you can do to make them on alert is good but you don't want to catch them by surprise where they're just oh i don't know you know so you have got to set that expectation ahead of time you're right and i'll just chime in that if you have an hour zoom session with students trying to think every 10 15 minutes taking that break doing a poll putting them in breakout rooms those are all things that will help to keep them engaged and knowing that i'm going to have to interact so they don't tend to just put their you know picture on and then walk away and you do have to gauge your learners that's that's going to be uh different for everybody if you have a group of learners who sort of despises those breakout sessions um those breakout rooms uh you know which tends to be the case oftentimes with faculty um then then you know that you need to take a different approach um for uh your your particular group of learners but yeah or you know and it can be tricky coming up with activities that will engage everyone particularly those learners that are on the fringes that you know don't they're the ones in class that didn't want to raise their hand they sat in the back of the room and just tried to get through the class and you in an online environment you've got to try and pull them in also so using a lot of these tools like and i mentioned jamboard that was a great one because it's it's basically just a big board where you can post notes and i found it really useful for for generating ideas from students you you kind of say okay here's and you got to give them the leading questions that helps too so here's some questions i want you to answer in your sticky notes and post those up and then we're going to kind of group them together and and and see where we have see where we're at so a lot of times these tools can help with that too you're not limited to what's in zoom you know you can pull in things from outside did you see the other question in there uh diana or david how often are you using jit or flip classroom models for pre-learning with your synchronous sessions i let diana answer that she does a lot more of that than i do i think um for my synchronous session students usually always have pre-reading to do and they know that i break up my zoom session so i'll tell them the first 30 minutes i'm going to cover content and the last 30 minutes will be discussion on the material that you had to read to prepare for this and i always try to get things that i think are relevant to the student have meaning for the student maybe it's a current topic a hot topic an issue that really seems to keep them engaged if you can pull in topics that they feel are relevant or that they can feel that they have some say in but typically they always my students always have reading to do or prep work to do before the zoom sessions for the nursing students to try to keep it consistency if we tell them at the beginning of the semester you'll have like a flipped classroom we keep it flipped classroom through the whole semester so the students can have the expectations absolutely i think the the expectation for expectations setting the expectations for both yourself and the learners cannot be overemphasized i think that is key from the beginning expectations tied to objectives tied to feedback and uh evaluation ultimately um so i think though it's only fair to set up the expectations across the board early on um it is 102. i apologize for going a couple minutes over i know our presenters have already expressed that they are willing if you need to contact them or have further questions please feel free to do so um and otherwise i hope you all have a wonderful and safe rest of the day.