7 Tips to Make Your Online Classes, Meetings & Lectures More Engaging

Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, in March and April 2020 many universities were finally forced to take online teaching and e-learning seriously. The need to utilize appropriate tools for online teaching has further accelerated the process digitalization, which has been so disruptive for other sectors of the economy.

Overall the experience has been surprisingly positive both for lecturers and students. Many lecturers never enjoyed the commute to the campus, and now discovered digital tools, which make delivery of their classes much easier and less costly in terms of preparation and delivery time. Students have not been overly enthusiastic, but have started to realize the advantages of increased flexibility when studying, and less time wasted on travelling, parking and waiting around on campus. Large steps forward have been taken, but it is important now not to trip in haste.

Nevertheless, nobody believes that a university without substantial experience in delivering online classes effectively, suddenly can “pivot” to online teaching in a few weeks time, without training lecturers, creating support structures for technical issues, and having a modern Learning Management System (LMS). If you have not redesigned your courses and trained your lecturers over the summer, after the Spring panic and Fall debacle is in the making, regarding the effectiveness of your teaching.

When moving classes online, uploading Power Points, recording hours and hours of lectures, or “flipping the classroom” won’t cut it any longer. Flipping the classroom and life-streaming sound so easy, but by itself will not achieve active online learning, if not based on solid pedagogical principles, sensible use of technology, modern outcome-based curriculum design, and robust assessment and feedback. Teaching online will be highly ineffective, however, if courses are not well-structured or modularized, and do not contain carefully structured problem sets or assignments.

High quality online teaching done right, however, takes away most of its drawbacks. There are no short-cuts or technological gimmicks, however, and solid instructional design remains key. It seems wise, therefore, to follow the leading international standard for online teaching and instructional design QM "Quality Matters", which comes with an extensive low-cost online training program for instructors, as well as and certification services. See for example these articles https://bit.ly/qmarticle, https://bit.ly/qmarticle2, or this video https://bit.ly/qmoverview. 

At this point, tips and tricks to make classes more engaging, and best practices should be widely shared among lecturers, because little things can make a big difference. No single LMS can offer all the tools and functionalities mentioned below, but it is always recommendable to integrate external tools in the activities you design in your LMS to ensure a smooth and integrated learning experience for the students.

Personally, my online teaching journey started over 10 years ago at Maastricht University with lecture life-streaming and using video conferencing software, which is now obsolete. With a team of three lecturers, we were doing project-based learning across three countries (Netherlands, India and Thailand), and it was a great experience for students as well as lecturers.

Now because of COVID-19, I deliver all my classes online as a professor at the University of Maryland Global Campus — Europe, with more than 90,000 students one of the largest colleges in the USA and solidly ranked in the top 20 of online colleges. It is one of the founding members of the non-profit QM "Quality Matters", the leading international quality standard for online eduction. UMGC has set the strategic goal to apply this standard in all its programs. Most of its provisions are already part of the way things are done, and faculty members are trained in it application.

UMGC offers over 25 years of experience in hybrid delivery of university programs to non-traditional students and provides all incoming faculty members extensive training in principles of instructional design, technology and online delivery. It has made it mandatory to use Open Educational Resources (OER) so that students do not need to buy expensive textbooks. On the EdX platform they offer a low-cost micro masters of 4 courses priced around $250 each for any interested lecturer.

Much has improved in online teaching since the early 2000’s in terms of available technology and digital tools. First, the YouTube Revolution has taken place, and it is amazing how much excellent video material is available on any possible subject. Most of these materials are free to use for educational use. There is really no need to record your own lecture, when students can watch the same lecture by someone who has spent most of his life researching the topic, and works at one of the world’s top 200 universities. Yale University, for example, has made its history courses from 10 years ago available online. When looking for Open Educational Resources, you will see that each month more material is made available. Why would I record my own lecture on a specialized topic, when I can listen to a lecture from somebody else who has worked his or her whole life on the same topic?

Secondly, today educational technology has become a lot better, and easier to use. Although the current generation of LMS’s still does not always offer all the tools we need to keep our students engaged before, during and after the online classes, we can use a lot of external tools to create well-designed online courses.

Here is how I do it. First, text and media can be integrated creatively as part of the learning experience, and students can even be asked to produce their own media and upload them to the course’s YouTube channel. You can easily get an Excel file with a list of videos for each playlist.

Normally, before class in asynchronous mode, I ask students to watch at their own speed simple videos to watch a number of shorter videos (10–15 minutes), never more than a total of 60–90 minutes. Students can assess their understanding without being graded. These self-assessment questions are linked to learning objectives and can later be used in a quiz, for example. Today, most YouTube videos offer closed captioning and transcripts, and before or after class can be paused, or played back at higher or lower speeds.

In class, the recorded lecture from the “invited” speaker can be discussed, comparing and contrasting different views. Role-playing or class debates can be organized around these activities. Higher-level competencies should be addressed in the synchronous sessions. After class knowledge about specific topics can be further developed through assigning texts or more media.

Briefly below you find 7 tips to make your classes more engaging using free web tools:

1- https://slides.google.com Google Slides in the cloud offers vastly superior functionality compared to alternatives. You can upload your MS PowerPoint or LibreOffice Impress files here, and then easily add, for example, images from Google Drive, YouTube video’s, and poll everywhere polls. There is also a chat/question function on Slides together with lecture notes which the students can’t see. Fantastic! Download the app for easy editing, presenting or viewing from your tablet or mobile device.

2- https://www.polleverywhere.com Try a word cloud for a start the class off, and to test existing knowledge. Next, have students vote on best solutions to problems. Download the app for easy answering. Has an upload template, so you can prepare your questions off-line.

3- https://www.perusall.com for MOOC-style open online discussions around written texts or readings with peer assessment through upvoting. For online discussions around a central proposition check out https://www.kialo-edu.com. Students need to create a login, but then a link can be provided in the LMS. Peer assessment of answers through upvoting. No app yet.

4- https://www.evernote.com for annotating and indexing YouTube videos or any other material. The notes can contain questions or instructions, reference to specific sections of a video, and can be freely shared or incorporated in the LMS through a link. In this manner it is not necessary to edit and cut long media, simply refer to the sections you want students to see. Great app, synchronizes across devices. Upload function through email only for premium version.

5- https://ed.ted.com to build a lesson quickly around any YouTube video, includes quizzes and online discussing. On this platform, it is hard to use only sections of a longer video. Similar platforms for working with media are https://www.edpuzzle.com, or for simple functionality https://vizia.com. All free, no app, no upload function.

6- https://www.kahoot.com. For the last half hour of the class, when attention begins to wane, it is good to play a Kahoot game. You can ask the students to use the same game name consistently so that you can have a final classification at the end of the course. Adapt existing Kahoot learning games, there are over 100,000 to choose from. Their reporting and grading functionality has improved a lot lately. There is even an option to use artificial intelligence to generate quiz questions. If you don't want the game functionality just the quizzes https://www.flexiquiz.com/ (free limited features, $20 per month), https://www.classmarker.com/ (free limited features, $20 per month) https://www.hippoquiz.com (free limited features, $19 per month) Download the Kahoot app for easy answering. Has upload template.

7- You should really try to design your course offline in a spreadsheet to ensure all elements are well aligned, and prepare all quizzes or self-assessments for your LMS off-line using your upload template. This saves a tremendous amount of time. In this manner, you can easily and quickly make corrections or include graphs tables or pictures using any screenshot program. You can easily include all kinds of audio-visual media, and incorporate them quickly without fiddling with your mouse by listing the file location in your template.

Finally, while you are running your online learning activities, it can be very handy to include a timer video from YouTube in your slides, so that students can see, for example, how much time they have to spend in their Zoom breakout rooms. You can also join particular breakout rooms, or have individual conversations with students.

Remember the earlier and better you review your program with end-user inputs, re-design your courses, and prepare your classes, the more you and the students will enjoy it.

Good luck, and have fun!

If you are interested we can support developing high quality online programs, embedding them strategically and assuring all opportunities for revenue generations are utilized. We can provide a team with instructional designers, practitioners and educational technology specialist. Personally, I have been teaching online for over 10 years at leading universities in Europe, and been working with this standard for over 2 years at one of largest top-20 online universities in the USA.