Which tips ensure successful online interactions?

Online facetime platforms such as Teams, Zoom and Tencent have enabled the development of interaction patterns for educators that were not possible or commonplace in a traditional classroom. As setting up such interactions successfully can take a little preparation, this third and final chapter on the subject of online teaching offers some helpful advice for peer-to-peer and tutor-to-student interactions as well as guidance for giving feedback on course assessments.

Peer-to-Peer Interactions

While it may be easy in a classroom to see whether or not students are collaborating and discussing ideas, doing so in an online environment can be more challenging for the tutor. Thankfully, many online platforms offer a number of helpful features that work very well to encourage interaction between students, some of which may even create a stronger sense of control and ownership of their learning. We’ve included some ideas below for how to achieve this most effectively:

• Breakout rooms enable the creation of separate conversation spaces that can be used to divide students within the same class into pairs or groups. Such groupings can be very useful during synchronous teaching for enabling discussion tasks and jigsaw activities. Each breakout room a tutor creates however should be set up and monitored carefully to ensure that all students are present and participating in the assigned activities.
• Discussion spaces such as forums can also be set up alongside each lecture or seminar to encourage the sharing of ideas. These discussion spaces should be clearly labelled so that students understand how to use each forum and know the concepts and questions up for discussion. Monitoring of forums is also key to ensure that students are on topic and that discussions are polite, professional and academic.
• Study groups can be assigned to students to provide additional peer support or to allocate project work outside of the online classroom. Students should be made aware of their group members, what the expectations of that group are, and if there are any roles assigned to each group member, such as ‘leader’, ‘presenter’ or ‘note-taker’. Students should also be encouraged to approach their tutor if there are any disputes that cannot be settled calmly by the group.
• Another useful feature of online study is that open documents can allow students to edit a piece of group work together. Many platforms such as Microsoft and Google support the simultaneous editing and updating of Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents in the cloud.

Most online platforms should also allow students to record responses to tasks or to their peer’s contributions and upload them. Other students can then be encouraged to respond to these recordings, whether with further video or audio snippets or simply by leaving text comments.