UMass Boston

Goodbye Black Boxes: 5 Ways to Get Your Students to Turn Their Camera ON

Why Active Learning?

New Research shows learning is more effective when active. According to a study into learning-centered approaches to education, students learn more when they participate in the process of learning. Active learning is discussion, practice, review, or application. Problem solving. Exploring new concepts in groups. Working out a math problem on a piece of paper or a digital whiteboard.

UMass Boston Supported Online Tools and Zoom Features for Active Learning 

Zoom video conferencing, includes the following features:

• Share Screen—share your screen, your student’s screen, or a Virtual Whiteboard
• Breakout Rooms—divide the main virtual room into smaller virtual rooms
• Creating polls or quizzes—polls can be created before a meeting and used to engage and share results
• Nonverbal Feedback—allow students to express opinions by clicking on icons
• Virtual Whiteboard—collaboratively mark up slides or write on the screen.

Google Workspace also offers collaborative documents (Docs, Sheets, Slides) that allow live editing. (Use your UMass Boston account for added features and security.)

Active Learning Strategies

Strategy 1: Warm up / Ice Breakers

Polling: create a simple poll in Zoom or Mentimeter and ask students to share one word that describes how they are feeling.

8 Zoom Icebreakers to Help You & Your Students Get to Know Each Other

Strategy 2: Turn & Talk

Pause 10-15 minutes during a lecture summary. Then use the chat feature in the web conferencing platform. Ask a question and let the students reply with a brief response. Read them out loud to the whole class or cut/paste the chat into a word cloud generator to share (try WordClouds or Mentimeter). Could also use meeting/breakout rooms with a reporter to share.

Strategy 3: Questions & Answers

Before your live meeting, create a Google Doc or Google Slide Q&A session, share the link with your students and ask them to add their questions in the file. Answer the questions during a live class meeting.

Strategy 4: Think-Pair-Share

1. Give students a question, concept, or problem and allow time to think about it on their own. 2. Two students pair and discuss what they found in breakout meeting rooms in Zoom. 3. The pairs join the large group and discuss their conclusions as a whole.

Strategy 5: Short Student Presentations

Students can be asked to research an issue of interest to them that is related to the course topic or work on a problem outside of class, and to present their findings during an upcoming online class session with Zoom’s Share Screen feature and Google Slides.

Resources

• Teaching Tools: Active Learning while Physically Distancing 
• Keep Learners At The Center Of The Design Process
• Active Learning for Your Online Classroom: Five Strategies Using Zoom
• Faculty Focus: Let Students Summarize the Previous Lesson
• Lights, camera, action: how to get students to turn on their cameras

Learning Design Services is here to help!

If you have questions or would like support in developing and implementing active learning in your online course, please reach out to Learning Design Services.