Day-to-Day Teaching

In a physical classroom, observing and interacting with students provides important insights about student learning: who is working, who is paused, who is asking questions. Even then, you are never seeing the full picture at once, and student engagement can look very different from one learner to another.

Online, those same snapshots need to be intentionally designed. The ideas listed below can be ungraded (used as an engagement strategy) or as low-stakes formative assessment (more lower-stakes grading ideas are listed on this page):

• Assign an “one-minute” paper that asks students to explain understanding of a key concept, main themes in a reading, or identify questions remaining after listening to a lecture.
• Assign low-stakes quizzes (assign low point value and allow multiple attempts) that help students (and you) identify what they know and don’t know. Provide detailed feedback for incorrect answers that support students' learning. 
• If teaching synchronously via Microsoft Teams, check-in at various times during class and ask students share their understanding via:
  • Chat responses or brief live contributions 
  • Breakout discussions with a quick share-back to the larger group
  • Polls (including tools like iClicker, which can also be used remotely)

For other strategies to adopt to online environments, see the CTL page on “Classroom Assessment Techniques” and Supporting Students’ Metacognition.

Engaging students in the online environment can be challenging, but we have some tools (integrated with Brightspace) that can help. Before choosing a tool, consider, what type of interaction do you want students to have? 

Different tools support different kinds of engagement. In addition to the Brightspace’s Discussion tool, UVM licenses serval applications that encourage students to interact with each other:

• Perusall - A collaborative annotation tools integrated with Brightspace. 
• Yellowdig - A conversation platform that follows the conventions of social media apps integrated with Brightspace.

Choose the Tool that Best Fits Your Goals

• Use Brightspace Discussions when you want students to respond to a focused prompt or question. 
  • Discussions work well for structured, time-bound discussions in which students address a centrally posed question. You can grade discussions with the Brightspace Rubric tool and provide detailed qualitative feedback. 
• Use Perusall when you want students to engage with course materials and with one another.
  • Perusall is best for student engagement with course materials AND each other. Students can annotate readings, webpages, videos, audio files, and other course content, linking their comments and questions directly to specific passages or moments. Persuall also supports peer review activities by allowing students to upload their own content and comment on one another’s work.
• Use Yellowdig when you want students to drive the conversation. 
  • Yellowdig is designed for ongoing, student-led discussion. Students create posts, respond to one another, and build connections across topics. The platform includes an automatic grading system that is based on quantitative criteria that you design, including number of posts and word counts. 
  • Yellowdig asserts that “points serve the same pedagogical functions as attendance and participation points: They engage students, incentivize student interactions, and promote the free exchange of ideas. But unlike standard measures of attendance and participation, Yellowdig participation is easily and precisely quantifiable.” (Gamification, Not Gradification: Use Yellowdig to Motivate Rather than Assess Student Learning)

If small group discussion is a core part of the in-person classroom experience, it can be supported online using the Brightspace Groups tool. Assigning students to groups allows you to associate a discussion forum with the group that you can track (and assess) by group. This UVM Knowledge Base article describes the Brightspace Groups tools and features. 

If you are teaching synchronously via MS Teams, you can use the breakout room feature to enable small group discussion.  This Microsoft documentation explains how to create rooms, send students to rooms, send messages, and close rooms.

If you started the semester with the group assignment, there are tools to support your students finish their work. Group work online can be more complicated because students may be in different time zones, so students will need to take more initiative to meet regularly and distribute the work equitably. Here are some ideas you can try to encourage successful group work: 

• Group Contracts (if you already have one, have students read again and revise if needed given the circumstances). For additional guidance, see the supplemental Harvard Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) resource on Group Agreements.. 
• Require students to submit their meeting schedule to you (this way you will know that they’ve talked about it); schedule should include a facilitator and notetaker (at the minimum)
• Encourage students to contact you early if problems start to happen 
• Include Peer assessment as part of the grade for the group assignment. MS Forms or Qualtrics are applications you can use to create anonymous peer feedback forms you can use to inform your grading. 

Submitting Group Assignments

While students will use tools that work best for them to work on the assignment, you can require them to submit final submissions via the Brightspace Groups tool. 

To set this up, first create student groups in the Groups tool. Then, when creating a Brightspace assignment, choose a setting that makes it a group assignment. Once submitted, you can grade by group which automatically applies the same grade to all members of the group.