Faculty Focus

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building student engagement

Using Screencasting to Engage and Build Community with Online Learners

In the online classroom, faculty work hard to engage their distance learners and build a strong sense of academic community in the electronic setting. Screencasting can be an effective and easy way to do this. Screencasting allows you to take a digital video of what you are doing on your computer desktop, and most screencasting tools allow you to narrate your video while recording. The possible uses for screencasting are endless; these include providing course orientations, delivering instructional lectures, providing feedback, and encouraging student sharing.

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Get Students' Attention Right from the Start of Class

“Let’s begin today where we stopped last class.” How many college classes start this way every day? Some students attend by searching their notes or books to discover where the prior class concluded. But, for most learners, this opening fails to capture their attention, and they struggle to find some connections to the topic.

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Connecting with Students One MPEG-4 at a Time

“If you do it right, digital media can really enhance a course and provide meaningful student-teacher connections,” said Kevin Reeve, head of Marketing and Communications for Information Technology at Utah State University. “When not implemented properly, it becomes a frustrating experience for everyone – students, instructors, IT and administration.”

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Building Student Engagement in Online Courses

Despite all the high-tech communication technologies available to online instructors today — discussion boards, email, IM, wikis, podcasts, blogs, vlogs, etc. — every once in awhile Dr. B. Jean Mandernach likes to use a tool that was invented way back in 1876. The telephone.

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Using Video Clips to Stimulate Discussion in Online Courses

If you’re looking to improve threaded discussions in your online courses, consider using brief video clips as discussion prompts. When carefully selected and integrated into a course, these clips can lead students to higher-order thinking and appeal to auditory and visual learning styles.

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Building Student Engagement: Beyond the Classroom

In this, the final installment of a six-part series on strategies for building student engagement, I offer suggestions for engaging students beyond the classroom. As professors, we impact students not only during classes, but also through office hours, emails, and feedback.

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