Building Community
One of the most difficult parts of teaching online asynchronous courses is making students (and ourselves) feel less isolated. Some of what I've suggested in earlier modules works toward building community in your class. For example, any time you make a video or audio recording, you remind students that you are a real person who cares about their success. Including a "virtual cafe" discussion board where students can contact one another with questions/concerns/tips gives them access to their peers "outside" of class. Any time you ask students to respond to one another's work, either through discussion or peer review, you connect them with one another.
Give your students a variety of opportunities to interact with you and with their peers:
- Discussion Boards are a go-to tool for creating virtual communal spaces, but they don't always work the way we hope they will. Check out the following resources for making the most of Discussion Boards:
- Create peer review assignments.
- Try a group project--I've had a lot of success with these in async courses.
- Meet with your students one-on-one. I schedule at least one mandatory Zoom meeting with me during the semester. The students and I get to see and hear one another, and it's an opportunity to offer writing feedback without having to, you know, write it.
- Meet with your students in small groups. I have not tried this one, but plan to build it into my upcoming course. A problem that sometimes arrises in group projects is that one group member fails to respond to the others. When I talked this over with a consultant in the University Center for Teaching and Learning, she suggested I create an occasion for group members to "meet" one another. The idea here is that we naturally feel more responsibility toward people we actually know than we do toward names on a screen. Outside of group projects, small group meetings are great ways to host small workshops, generate ideas, or otherwise ask students to share their work with one another.
- Suggest alternate avenues for student-to-student interaction. My in-person students often organize group chats that would be helpful for online students as well!
- Regularly address your students as a group. Celebrate them as a group. Point out areas in which they struggle as a group. Remind them they are not alone!