Learning Activities

What is it?

Learning activities are at the core of good teaching. They provide students opportunities to learn by doing and practice what they are learning. Good distance learning needs to be active to ensure that students are learning and are not passive recipients of information. Promote students’ engagement with the knowledge and skills that are core to the course content.

Although the online environment removes access to certain modes of teaching, it opens up a number of new possibilities, some of which you may be able to bring back to your physical classroom once the crisis is over. Students are likely to be more forgiving of missteps in a new environment. Take advantage of this difficult time to experiment with new teaching methods and tools.

Why is it important?

Successful remote teaching and online teaching are based on student-centered, online course design. This type of design rests on these interactions:

  • Student-to-student interactions

  • Student-to-instructor interactions

  • Student-to-community interactions

  • Student-to-content interactions

  • Student-to-technology interactions

How to do it?

You can use active learning activities in distance learning in several of the same ways that you use active learning in your face-to-face class. Active learning can help students predict, discuss, summarize, synthesize, or reflect upon the content, regardless of age. The following offers a continuum of online active learning strategies.

Some possible online active learning strategies:

  • Pause for Reflection: Throughout a modeling or video lesson, particularly after presenting an important point or key concept, allow students to think about the information or identify points that may be unclear. You can include comprehension check questions, asking students if something needs additional clarification.

  • Minute Paper: Ask students to spend a few minutes writing short responses to a question or questions meant to gauge their understanding of a class concept, and post their response. Students can share their comments live, by pasting their answers on a chat feature or coua teachaa tld post their comments afterwards, to discussion. This strategy can provide you with an opportunity to assess students’ understanding of content in a more holistic way than quizzes. You might also have students ask questions.

  • Muddiest Point: Towards the end of a live class session, ask students to write a short note explaining which point from that day’s class is most unclear to them. This strategy helps you better assess student learning and helps students reflect on their learning process.

  • “You are the teacher” question creation: Assign groups to create questions that help check for understanding of concepts. Groups could create these questions during part of your live class and/or quiz other groups as part of your live class. The poll feature in WebEx makes this possible. You could also select some questions from all the groups to incorporate in your follow up.

  • Jigsaw Discussion: Divide the class into small groups, using google docs or phones, students can collaborate. Students then take turns presenting their work to the rest of the group by sharing the screen or documents -- synchronously or asynchronously.

  • Experiential Learning: Online content and a series of online learning activities are created to guide students, alone and in groups, to see/experiment, learn, compare, critique, share, and apply. You may want to introduce some of these activities during your live time and ask students to explore learning and share. Don’t forget the resources curated on our Learning at Home site to support this option.


Tips for Different Types of Classroom Activities

Lecture-oriented Activities

As you prepare to move your lecture-based instruction, one question to consider is whether you want to teach entirely live (synchronously), or create pre-recorded lectures and then reserve the live sessions for more interactive discussions, small group work, or office hours. Consider breaking lectures into bite sizes and checking for understanding through formative assessments, polls, etc.

Creating and uploading your materials

  • Put your slides in a consistent, distributable format (e.g., pdf).

  • Break up your presentation slides: be aware that online, perhaps even more than in the classroom, students will read first and listen second. Consider PowerPoint’s “Animation” feature (or equivalent) that allows you to show just a bullet or two at a time.

Pre-recording and Live sessions

Providing direct instruction through your directed instruction impacts student learning and connection to you and your course.

Staff should not require students to be available at a certain time and place. However, providing the frequent and reliable opportunity to meet with the staff member or with other students can increase student engagement. Additionally, live sessions can be recorded so that students can review the material at a later time.

If you are creating a pre-recorded lecture, consider a few simple tips.

  • Provide an explicit roadmap at the beginning.

  • Break down the lecture into shorter segments.

  • Intersperse the lecture clips with reflection questions for the students to consider.

  • Speak to the student, not to the camera.

  • Insert yourself – a personal story, humor, or editorial commentary – into the lecture.

  • You don’t need to pre-record the entire lecture. Instead, you can pre-record certain segments of your lecture (perhaps some material you want the students to reflect on before class, as homework) and leave the rest to the in-class session. Pre-recording and live needn’t be substitutes; they can serve as powerful complements too.

Presenting your lecture

  • Practice (at least once) in advance: Rehearse using the Share Screen and switching among windows you intend to display. If you’re using your own laptop, remember to close all the windows you won’t be using (particularly personal email, etc.) prior to the class.

  • Keep your normal pace: just because things are delivered electronically does not mean you should speed up or slow down. Your students will still absorb and process information at the same rate. But you should check in with your students more frequently than you might normally, to make sure that they follow the material and remain engaged.

  • Be visible: even when using Share Screen, it’s good practice to make sure that your face is visible on a side screen while the materials are being displayed - otherwise, engagement can decrease.

Engaging students

Having students listen to a lecture attentively on a small screen can be challenging. Consider taking advantage of various features in WebEx to keep them engaged, such as reflections, Chat, or invited Q&A (using Raise Hand).

  • Reading the room: unmuted students can inadvertently start talking at the same time, you will not be able to read body language easily, and those less inclined to speak may disappear more easily. To address these issues, be more diligent about pausing and asking if anyone else has more thoughts before jumping to the next topic.

  • Invite and respond to questions: Consider inviting students to ask their questions in Chat. You can also consider asking students to use the Raise Hand feature in case they have an urgent question.

  • Encourage students to reflect: for example, say “I’d like you to think about ….”, take a short pause, and then if appropriate, provide an answer, or solicit answers from the students. Again, the Chat feature can be helpful in having students record their reflections.

  • Post answers later: You might consider offering to post responses after the class to certain Chat questions that you didn’t have time to address during the session.

Discussion Based Activities

Several features of small or large case-based courses can transfer well to an online setting since Webex and other technologies have various interactive features built in. Here are tips to consider when teaching a case-based course:

  • Calling Patterns: Keep your students in front of you: WebEx’s gallery view lets you see thumbnails of usually 25 students at a time (depending on your screen). You can also move from screen to screen to see the next 25.

  • Discussion transitions: it may be harder than usual for students to know when you have shifted between discussion topics, so be sure to state clean, well-defined transitions.

  • Using Chat to decide on calling patterns: tracking the Chat feature can be useful in deciding which students to call on next - for example, if a particular student notes through Chat that she/he disagrees with the student speaking, or has some additional data to provide.

  • Role plays/debates between students: you can request two students to “role play” a situation like you would in the physical classroom.

  • Warm and cold calls: you can “cold call” a student just as you would in the traditional classroom, instead of waiting for them to raise their hand. For “warm calls,” you can message them privately in Chat before you call on them.

  • Raising hands: this feature works like the physical classroom. Have students use the Raise Hand feature in WebEx to answer questions. When you open up a conversation to students, you can pause a beat to let a number of people raise their hand and then pick according to whatever calling pattern you want. Call on a student by name.

  • Polls (private or public): with WebEx’s polling features you can get group results in real time, then reveal them later.

  • Checking in/Reading the room: unmuted students can inadvertently start talking at the same time; you will not be able to read body language easily; and those less inclined to speak may disappear more easily. To address these issues, be more diligent about pausing and asking if anyone else has more thoughts before jumping to the next topic.

  • Board Plans: if you usually do “board work” as part of a class session, you have a number of options. Note that if you’re accustomed to multiple simultaneous boards you may need to adapt to showing a single screen’s worth at a time. See Boardwork from the Bok Center for suggestions.

  • Closing Up: Summary slides work as they do in the physical classroom. In addition, though, you might invite students’ reflections on the case too (through Chat). This can be a useful addition in an online setting vis-à-vis the physical classroom - the collective reflections of the class can provide a powerful summary of the discussion. Consider archiving these reflections for the class.

  • Assessing Participation: In case-based classes, participation is a heavy component of the grade. Student comments can be more easily recorded since WebEx retains a video archive of the entire class.

  • In an online setting, consider using students’ Chat comments and reflections as additional inputs to a student’s participation grade, and a supplement to the spoken word. This can help draw in students who may be somewhat quiet in “speaking,” and can also help limit frivolous chat. If you decide to use Chat in participation grading, you should be sure to let students know about this norm before you start teaching.

  • Ask questions: have students use the Raise Hand feature in Zoom to answer questions. Call on a student by name and “Allow to talk” (unmute).

Hands-on Activities

Lab courses: one of the biggest challenges of teaching online from anywhere is sustaining the lab components of classes. Since many labs require specific equipment, they are hard to reproduce outside of that physical space. Consider the following as you plan to address lab activities:

  • Define what the lab should achieve: different lab activities serve different purposes.

  • Take part of the lab online: many lab activities require students to become familiar with certain procedures, and only physical practice of those processes will do. In such cases, consider whether there are other parts of the lab experience you could take online (for example, video demonstrations of techniques, online simulations, analysis of data, other pre- or post-lab work).

  • Investigate virtual labs: online resources and virtual tools might help replicate the experience of some labs (e.g., virtual dissection, night sky apps, video demonstrations of labs, simulations, YouTube videos). Those vary widely by discipline, but check with your textbook publisher, or sites such as Merlot for materials that might help replace parts of your lab during the closure.

  • Provide raw data for analysis: in cases where the lab includes both collection of data and its analysis, consider showing how the data can be collected, and then provide some raw sets of data for students to analyze. This approach is not as comprehensive as having students collect and analyze their own data, but it can keep them engaged with parts of the lab experience during the closure.


ADAPTED FROM HARVARD - https://teachremotely.harvard.edu/best-practices