Niagara College Canada

Without the verbal cues and emotional connection of face-to-face communication, it can feel difficult to build rapport and engage students in the learning process. This section offers recommendations to help you foster student motivation and personal investment in your online course. It offers ideas about how you can establish and strengthen your relationship with students and the relationships of individual students with their peers.

How can I engage and motivate learners in my online course?

Find ways to express your authentic self to your learners, including your enthusiasm, encouragement and concern.

Students crave a connection with their teacher, but the online setting can sometimes depersonalize instruction. It doesn’t have to! Consider creating an introductory video that welcomes students to your course. Introduce yourself and share your passion for the subject that you teach. Continue to draw on personal stories and anecdotes, where appropriate throughout the course, and infuse your additional videos and writing with warmth and humour. Check out our instructions on uploading videos to Microsoft Stream and linking them to your Brightspace course. Also, review our Lesson Recording Comparison Chart that compares the features, strengths and weaknesses of four institutionally-supported tools for making lesson recordings.

Use an enthusiastic and welcoming tone in all course communications, including the Teaching and Learning Plan (TLP).

Written communication is an inevitable part of any online course. The more invitational and friendly your written tone, the more likely students are to ask questions and seek your support as they learn. Remind them that you are there to support their learning and encourage students to reach out to you. Make your preferred contact information available to them and let them know how frequently you anticipate being able to check and respond to student questions.

Highlight key student supports and resources.

Consider using your TLP and the Course Information area on your course site to connect students with important local, institutional, and course-based supports. You will also want to highlight any personal supports that you might be providing, such as virtual office hours. Check out our Brightspace Training Resources on hosting meetings using MS Teams.

Set clear expectations and communicate them frequently.

Student motivation increases when they feel like they can successfully accomplish a task. So, it’s important to be clear about your expectations for student engagement online and their completion of key course activities. Use Brightspace tools, like announcements and rubrics, to remind students of important information that will help them succeed in your course.

• Make announcements
• Build rubrics and associate them with assessments

Invite students to introduce themselves to you.

Just like in the face-to-face classroom, it’s very important that you make an effort to get to know your online students. This can help you to understand their strengths, interests and educational backgrounds which will help you to build rapport with them and tailor your examples. It’s also important to remember that students may have privacy concerns, so where possible you will want to offer individuals options in terms of how they introduce themselves to their peers and what they share. There are lots of online ice-breaking approaches that you might try, such as creating a ‘Getting to Know You’ student survey within Blackboard, or inviting students to post a short video introducing themselves to you and to their peers, or creating a discussion board and asking students to share a bit about themselves there.

• Making surveys with MS Forms
• Uploading videos to Microsoft Stream and embedding in Brightspace
• Setting up discussion boards in Brightspace

Invite students to reflect on their technological readiness for the course.

One important aspect of getting to know your online students is to get a sense of their confidence as digital learners and to become familiar with the kinds of challenges they anticipate, either because of difficulty accessing appropriate hardware or internet or perhaps because of lack of experience with specific software.  As part of an introductory survey, you might ask students questions, such as the type of device they will typically use to access Brightspace, whether they have a suitable and quiet space in which to learn and study, whether they have previous familiarity with Brightspace tools and can navigate them effectively, etc.  Remember that the answers to some of these questions may be quite sensitive, so it is best to ensure that these questions are optional and that specific student responses are never shared publicly.

You might also invite students to complete the Online Learning Readiness Questionnaire, available through The Learning Portal.  The questionnaire invites students to reflect on their learning students have completed this survey, you could consider asking them to briefly summarize their results in a short assignment submission, reflecting on what they are most excited about with respect to their online learning in your course and where they expect to encounter challenges or may benefit from additional support.

Highlight the relevance of each topic/unit to the overall course and/or students’ professional goals.

Students are more motivated when they understand the connections between new course content and their lived experiences or their future personal and professional aspirations. Discuss this relevance in your online course, and where possible, share anecdotes about how key course concepts have impacted you in your current or past professional practice. You can do this through short explainer videos that you create for each unit or week’s worth of content or by associating brief descriptions to each piece of course content so that students better understand how they fit into the bigger picture.

Embed interesting, concrete and contemporary examples from a variety of contexts.

Students want to know that what they are learning is relevant and has important implications for themselves, their societies and the world at large. Where possible, make an effort to include concrete and contemporary examples of key concepts and ideas in your course. Link to relevant news reports, social media posts, memes, case-studies, research and other resources to emphasize the relevance of this learning. Try to draw from diverse examples and sources that are representative of the diversity of our student population and do not assume that all students will be familiar with certain pop-culture references.  When you include an example, take the time to describe why it’s relevant and important for your course.

Include learning activities that simulate real-world situations where possible.

An authentic assignment or activity is one that requires application of what students have learned to a new situation, and that demands judgment to determine what information and skills are relevant and how they should be used. Authentic assignments often focus on messy, complex real-world situations and their accompanying constraints; they can involve a real-world audience of stakeholders or “clients” as well. Where possible, embed learning tasks that simulate real-world situations into your online course.

• Additional information about and examples of authentic tasks and assessments.

Use checklists to assist students in tracking their progress and organizing their time.

If your students have a number of things to do every week, giving them a weekly checklist may help to keep them on track and ensure that they’ve completed key tasks. You can easily create a Checklist in Brightspace using the Checklist Tool. This allows them to monitor and manage their own progress.

Give students some choice.

Tap into students’ intrinsic motivation by allowing them to select some aspect of their learning. For example, allow students to choose a topic for their assignment, even if their choice is selected from a limited menu of options. Another example is to enable students to choose the medium in which they will convey their end product. Giving some choice can increase students’ sense of ownership and responsibility for their learning.

Anticipate that students may experience challenges beyond their control at some point during your course, and build in flexibility where possible.

Students’ lives are complex and their progress through your course may be impacted by illness, limited access to web-enabled devices, and stable internet connections, or the need to care for family members. Be ready to handle requests for extensions or accommodations equitably and with compassion.

How can I promote positive communication and collaboration with and between students?

Create and communicate shared norms for respectful online communication.

To ensure that online communication with and between students supports everyone’s learning, it will be important to establish shared expectations and guidelines for respectful communication. You might generate your own list of expectations and share them with students or invite students to co-create an online code of conduct.

Niagara College’s Student Rights and Responsibilities Office (SRRO) has generated a list of netiquette tips for online learning.  These are available for download from the SRRO homepage. Here is another great list of additional guidelines to help you get started.

Model respectful and engaged online communication.

When opening up online discussions, either asynchronously, like on a Blackboard Discussion Board, or synchronously, like during a Blackboard Collaborate Ultra session, you may want to provide an example of a positive and productive contribution. Do not assume that students will know how you would like them to communicate. The expectations and conventions for engaging in an online course are generally quite different than those for engaging with friends and peers on social media or in other digital domains. More on serving as a role model and promoting community in an online course is available in Seven Strategies to Promote Community in Online Courses.

Build in opportunities for students to share their knowledge, experiences and questions.

As in the face-to-face classroom, students tend to be more motivated and retain more knowledge when they can connect new learning to their own experiences and ideas. Where possible, create opportunities for students to contribute their own examples, share relevant pop-culture and media references, and highlight how their own lived experiences connect with course topics and outcomes. Recognize particularly effective student contributions and, where possible, return to and build upon these in later weeks of the course.

Infuse an element of fun and creativity into online tasks.

The science of learning tells us that feelings of curiosity and excitement are important motivators and can spark commitment and persistence in a learning task. Find ways to build intrigue and creativity into your course content.  Perhaps, you can invite students to express their learning in non-traditional ways – like via a drawing or a photograph? Or you can build in a little positive competition, like inviting students to create an original meme to express a key course concept and offering a prize to the funniest and most memorable one.

Check out this example from Dr. Joe Kim at McMaster University.

Set up virtual office hours.

Hosting synchronous virtual office hours for your course can be a great way to get to know individual students and to provide one-on-one or small group support for their learning. Consider setting aside 1 to 2 hours per week per online course for these office hour sessions.

Check out our information about using MS Teams to connect with students.

Distinguish between appropriate forms of online collaboration and those that may infringe on academic honesty.

Explain why adhering to the principles of academic integrity are important in your field/discipline and introduce students to (or remind them of) the skills they need to cite appropriately from various sources. Make expectations clear to students on all assessments, assignments and projects and provide guidelines on how tests should be taken and assignments completed. Be explicit where an individual rather than a collaborative approach should be taken to activities.

NC Libraries have created a number of modules to improve students’ understanding of academic integrity and help them avoid plagiarism that can be linked from your Brightspace course site. Here are some additional ideas on how you can support academic integrity in online courses.

Leverage group tools to support social interaction among students (i.e. study groups).

There are a number of tools integrated within Blackboard or within our institutional Office365 suite that can support on-going connections between students. Depending on the nature of your course, you may want to establish student study groups and assign each group a virtual Blackboard Collaborate Ultra room or a Microsoft Teams space where they can meet and prepare for upcoming assignments or tests. You can create a ‘Course Questions’ discussion board where students can post any questions that they have and either you or their fellow peers can provide responses. You might also explore VoiceThread, another tool that exists within your Blackboard course site, and allows teachers and students to comment on posted material using video, audio, text and or annotation tools.

• Please see our information about using MS Teams to connect with students.
• Tips for acing group projects using Microsoft Teams.

For significant group projects or tasks, establish check-ins and monitor group progress consistently.

One benefit of requiring group collaboration to happen within your  Blackboard course site or within our institutional Office365 suite is that you can continue to access the group’s work and monitor their progress. Ask students to log their progress weekly – both individual contributions and group tasks. Check these logs frequently and, if possible, establish specific times to connect synchronously with each group at key points in the term to get a sense of overall group functioning and to guide their activities as they work toward completion of the larger project. Here are some additional tips for designing effective team projects in an online course.

Monitor student activity in your online course and reach out to those who may be struggling to engage.

Keep an eye on course activities and keep track of any students who may not be consistently engaging. If you have a large class, it may be helpful to run a Blackboard course report to get a sense of what areas of your course site specific students are accessing and how long they are spending there. If you have concerns, reach out to students individually, let them know that you care about their success in your course, ask them whether they are experiencing any challenges that are negatively impacting their participation, and encourage them to re-engage. Throughout the year, faculty members can also use the Salesforce Faculty Update form (available in My Apps on the NC Portal page) to notify academic advisors of students who may be experiencing academic challenges. Find out who the advisors for your academic area are by exploring the Academic Advising website.

You may find it helpful to review student data available in the Insights Portal and Class Progress in Brightspace.

Parts of this page were adapted from Motivating Our Students. Centre for Teaching Excellence, University of Waterloo which is licensed under the Creative Commons (CC BY-NC 4.0).