The Opportunity

One opportunity of online education is the chance to reach many more students than is traditionally possible in a physical classroom. This is often a dream of faculty who move their courses online, to reach a wider audience with their speciality/knowledge/research, but it also poses challenges: how can we create engaging and interactive content for 300 or 500 or 1500 people?

Keep in Mind

As with most things course-design, students need both the technological possibility and the pedagogical motivation to engage in these, or any, activity. It is especially important at such a large scale to get faculty involved in the outcomes of their engagement in this respect and to tie the interactive components to real results or learning activities in the course. Its pretty easy to get students to Piazza, for example, in week one to say hello because they are curious. It is harder to keep them there. This is true of group work, and all the other strategies described in this section. The key, as above, is ownership -- the students in Rachelle Crosbie-Watson’s PS121 course are given the chance to create a “teachable tidbit” where they explain what is different about the cells in a person with DMD from a person free of the disease. The students in Liz Davis’s psych 2 course are going to be asked to understand the content of any given week from the perspective of X psychological theory (behaviourism, cognitive psych etc). Both of these strategies give the students agency.

The Evidence

This article supports both of my methods above: active learning and the targeted use of discussion board assignments:

http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1151&context=psych_facpubs

This article showcases using role play in discussions to increase student engagement:

https://topr.online.ucf.edu/use-role-play-increase-student-engagement-online-discussions/

The Examples

I use two strategies in large courses to try to increase student engagement and interactivity and to promote active learning:

Use discussion boards with targeted short assignments to both keep students on track and get them talking to each other or reviewing their fellow student’s contributions. This makes the students work visible to the rest of the course, allows them to learn by example and sparks conversations amongst them more generally. Using visuals here can also be powerful. Short and sweet is important and low point value. The idea is participation more than in depth assessment.
Assign the students roles or regions or some other subdivision of the course material that students can own and investigate in groups for the duration of the course. Have them report back to the group in section meetings, such that each meeting gets reports from at least 2-3 groups. This gives students ownership/partnership in their learning, a lens through which to view course materials. It is student directed and centered, it increases motivation and means the professor or TA talking aren't always the ones talking. This type of role assignment is fairly common today at museums or other large cultural institutions where it serves a similar function : how to make a large number of people more invested and interested in a potentially huge topic.