Planning an Online Synchronous Class Meeting

Just as you do when planning a face-to-face class, you should be purposeful in how you plan an online synchronous class meeting. When you are planning your meeting, consider the following:

• Logistics: How familiar are students with participating in an online synchronous class meeting and with the video conferencing technology? How many students will be attending? How many of your students have access to a reliable Internet connection? 
• Purpose: What is the overall purpose of the class meeting? Is the purpose to discuss a specific topic in the course? To address a specific milestone in the course? To resolve a common misunderstanding or misconception? Often instructors try to do too much in these class meetings. Leave time for students to engage and collaborate.
• Learning objectives: What are the learning objectives for the class meeting? Be realistic about what you can accomplish in the time you have defined. Recognize that there is a difference between a learning objective (what knowledge, skill, or disposition we want students to achieve) and an instructional objective (what activities or tasks we want students to do that will help them achieve the learning objectives). Both are important to consider when planning a class meeting.
• Resources/Tech: What do you need to prepare in advance? This may include preparing a PowerPoint or Google Slides presentation; selecting content resources such as photographs, videos, or websites; creating instructional materials such as handouts or graphic organizers; designing interactive elements such as a poll, form, or game; or setting up a brainstorming or collaboration tool such as a white board or a Google Doc. 
• Pre-meeting student preparation: What will students be doing in advance of the synchronous meeting to prepare for class? Think about how the resources you ask students to review prior to a class meeting aligns with your learning objectives. Provide some guidance to students on how they should use the resource(s) to prepare for the meeting by asking some guiding questions or being clear on what they should be ready to discuss in the meeting. 
• Learning activities: What activities can you plan for the class meeting that engages students in developing the knowledge, skills, and/or dispositions in your learning objectives? Will students work individually, in a group, or as a whole class on these activities? How can the Community of Inquiry (CoI) Framework help you to engage students in deep and meaningful learning? How can you apply the Culturally-Responsive Pedagogy (CRP) Framework to motivate students by establishing inclusion, developing positive attitudes, enhancing meaning, and engendering competence? 
• Assessment: What classroom assessment techniques (CATs) will you use during the class meeting to check for achievement of the learning objectives? Are there digital tools that make collecting this assessment data easier (polls, quizzes, chat)?
• Post-meeting student activities: In what way(s) can you extend the learning beyond the synchronous class meeting? Are there any asynchronous activities that you can ask students to complete that not only encourages additional practice or application but also supports how well students transfer the learning to other parts of the course? For example, could students continue a discussion from class meeting on a discussion board? Could you ask students to apply something from the class meeting to an assignment they complete in the course?

For more information on this, review NLU's Practical Guide to a Powerful, High-Impact Instructional Strategy. 

Suggestions for Improving Engagement

• Post a reminder announcement in your course about the online synchronous class meeting. Include the purpose, the date and time, and the link to access the online meeting room (or the Meeting ID). 
• Send your slides in a PDF form prior to the class meeting for students with slower internet speeds. Most applications have an option to save a document as a PDF file. If not, you can use an online tool such as PDF2GO.
• Find a distraction-free environment, if possible, and login in at least 5 minutes ahead of time. Remind others at home that you are hosting the class meeting and should not be disturbed.
• Ask students to mute their microphones so everyone can hear unless they want to speak. 
• Turn on closed captioning. If attendance at your synchronous session is required, closed captioning  should be turned on as a default.
• Remind students that you will record the session. Remind students that you will upload the recording to the course in D2L so students can review afterwards. 
• Ask for a volunteer to monitor the chat and alert you to a question that needs answered during the meeting.
• Mostly importantly, use your voice to reflect your passion and energy for your subject-matter. It's your time to "wow" your students!

Creating a Welcoming Environment

It is important to set the right tone and create a welcoming environment at the start of each synchronous class meeting you have with your students. Imagine how you would greet students as they entered your physical classroom. You would not wait until the exact minute for class to start to say hello as they entered, right?

Choose different ways to kick off each class meeting, factoring in your comfort level and the comfort levels of your students. For example, if it is early in the term and you don't know your students well yet, choose a low-stakes discussion topic, like sharing streaming movie or TV show recommendations.

You are encouraged to create space for students to share more personally as you learn more about your students and build relationships. Most importantly, model by sharing about yourself, too! Sharing something about yourself also helps create teaching presence, one of the key elements of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) Framework.

Icebreakers are interactive activities that help you and your students get to know each other. Doing these icebreakers serves multiple purposes. First, they connect students to each other and lay the groundwork for an interactive and collaborative learning experience. When one of the first activities students do is to participate in icebreakers, you can set the tone for a high level of participation and interaction. Second, regular contact with students, particularly at the start of class, shows that you are interested in getting to know your students and are invested in their learning, which can help increase students' motivation (i.e. establish a sense of inclusion) to perform well in class.

Each of these approaches helps you to establish a community of learners by honoring your students' unique backgrounds. These low-stakes conversations to kick off the class meeting are an effective way to integrate culturally-relevant pedagogy into your teaching by giving an opportunity for students to share their stories. You are also helping them feel welcome, safe, and ready to learn, which supports 10 Principles of Online Teaching at NLU, in particular, establishing relationships and a safe learning environment (Principle #1).

Sample Icebreakers and Warm-up Activities

• Log on a few minutes early and, as you prepare to begin, play music at the start of class as students are logging on to the meeting. (Note: Playing music from your phone or other device can be easier to manage, than by playing music from the computer on which you are hosting the meeting.) You can also ask different students to start off class each week by sharing a clip of what they've been listening to lately.
• Do a show and tell! Have students share their pet, an item that is meaningful to them, or an object that symbolizes their personality, or ask students to describe their favorite food or a food memory that represents their childhood or background.
• Do a Wraparound of TV/movie/podcast recommendations. A wraparound is a great tool to use during your class meeting to prompt impressions of a pre-reading or viewing activity, too!
• Post a pseudo-controversial prompt, aka unpopular opinion (pineapple on pizza is delicious, The Office is not a good show, etc.) and have students respond. Bonus points if students can make connections (however reaching) to course content in their responses!
• Do a mood check-in. You can share a Mood Chart (via screen share) and ask students to use the annotation tool to indicate how they are feeling (anonymously). Alternatively, ask students to post a GIF (a static or animated image file) on a shared Padlet of their "current mood".

There are so many other easy yet engaging icebreaker ideas online. Check out our Padlet loaded with ideas for Icebreakers. Try a new one each time!

Planning Meaningful Learning Activities

Once you planned an icebreaker, it is important to plan at least one learning activity that your students will engage in to promote deep and meaningful learning related to the learning objective(s). These learning activities do not have to be overly complicated, but breaking up your remarks with an activity pulls students into the session and also promotes social and cognitive presence.

If the class meeting is occurring later in a week, take some time to review what students already completed in asynchronous activities in D2L. How can you use the class meeting, and the learning activity(s) you plan to address any misconceptions students conveyed on a discussion board or misunderstandings they have in the assignments? How could you also use the learning activity(s) to highlight interesting connections students are making on the discussion board to other content in the course and/or to their personal and professional lives?

Given you have a limited amount of time during a synchronous meeting, stay focused on using resources and materials and learning activities that align with your learning objectives.

You can have students complete any of the activities listed below by responding in a word processing document on their own computers, in a Google Doc that you prepared and asked them to copy for personal use, or on paper.

Recall that Quality Matters (QM) is a set of quality standards based on research and instructional design principles that promote student learning in blended and online course. The standards focus on course design only, not delivery or faculty performance. However, it is worth considering Standard 5, which describes how the design of learning activities should promote the achievement of the stated learning objectives and include opportunities for interaction that support active learning.

Look back at your learning objectives: what is the knowledge, skill, and/or disposition you want students to achieve through the learning activity(s)? How can you encourage interaction among the students (and with you) in these activities to help students develop the knowledge, skill, and/or disposition at a particular level of performance?

Learning activities for pairs or small groups (e.g., using the Breakout Rooms in Zoom):

1. Dyadic Interviews
2. Jigsaw
3. Think-Pair-Share
4. Triple Jump

Learning activities for individuals, small groups, or even a whole class:

1. Fishbowl
2. Groupgrid 
3. Lecture Activity Log
4. QuickWrite
5. Punctuated Lecture
6. Translate That!

Plan Your Remarks

We have purposefully used the term "remarks" to encourage you to emphasize active learning, over traditional lecture delivery in a synchronous class meeting. This modality is unique, as you can expect, in that students, like many of us, may feel inclined to multitask or passively listen if not actively encouraged to be part of the dialog.

As you plan your remarks, we offer the following suggestions:

• Keep your learning objectives in mind. What knowledge, skills, and/or dispositions do you want students to develop during the synchronous class meeting? What might you need to explain, demonstrate, or model that helps students acquire (and perhaps even apply or demonstrate) the knowledge, skills, and/or dispositions in your learning objectives?
• Use multiple teaching strategies. Consider your students' prior knowledge or experiences and how you may need to adjust the pacing of your remarks to promote creative and critical thinking, reflection, and problem solving. Consider checking the K. Patricia Cross Academy website for some examples.
• Stop and check for understanding. Research has shown that students typically retain the most information during the first 10 minutes of a presentation. It’s natural for student attention levels to vary according to motivation, mood, perceived relevance of the material, and other factors. Stop every 15 minutes to check for understanding using a classroom assessment technique (CAT) or a simple, "how is everyone doing?" prompt to the class during which they can respond verbally, via a quick post in the chat, or through emoticon reaction (e.g., a "thumbs up" in Zoom). 
• Involve your students. Think about how you can use some of the techniques throughout the class meeting, and if necessary, adjust or modify your plan based on your students' needs and responses.
• Use visuals to enhance learning. Images speak a thousand words, but using images and graphics with a purpose can significantly enhance your students' learning. Not only can images spark students' interest, they can help make an abstract concept more concrete. Rather than thinking of putting an image on every slide for mostly decorative purposes, think about how you can pair the image with text to support comprehension and retention.
• Less is more. Since people tend to multitask, students likely cannot simultaneously read a dense, bullet-riddled slide AND listen to you AND understand what you mean. Consider creating a slide that communicates a single idea, making the information easy to digest and understand.
• Keep in mind accessibility and cultural sensitivity. Consider using a sans serif font in at least 20- to 24-point size for screen readability. Remember that if you present with Google Slides, you can turn on automatic captions to display your words in real-time. Think about how you can model cultural sensitivity during your remarks, by being aware of our reactions to other individual's differences or any personal biases or beliefs we may have.

Use Digital Tools to Enhance Synchronous Sessions

Using digital tools during a synchronous class meeting helps develop opportunities to build social and cognitive presence. There are many free tools available that can be used while conducting a class meeting.

You may receive offers from third-party vendors to sign up for free academic tools to add to your classes. Many of these tools can enhance engagement and learning, but some of these tools may not be free forever, and many of them will significantly alter your course in D2L or require you to change the way you teach. Furthermore, new tools should pass an audit for FERPA, security, privacy, and accessibility requirements prior to being used with courses.

Check out the Instructional Strategies and Resources page for a list of tech tools recommended by NLU faculty. See the drop-down below for a description of useful Chrome extension.

Consider the following when making decisions about using digital tools in your online synchronous class meetings:

• Learning objectives. How can the technology help you and your students achieve (and not distract from achieving) the learning objectives?
• Student needs. What is your students' prior knowledge, level of technological literacy, and personal interests? How does the digital tool support these needs?
• Accessibility and cultural sensitivity. In your review of the tool, do you see any potential barriers that might prevent any of your students to access or engage with the tool? How well does the tool positively depict a range of cultures, and help establish inclusion, develop a positive attitude towards learning, enhance meaning, and engender competence?
• Features of the digital tool. How do the features of the tool add value to the learning experience? Will you have flexibility in how the tool can be used? Are the features easy to use and implement in an online synchronous situation? 

Are you a Google Chrome user? If so, you can add Google Chrome extensions to your browser that can help you plan for and facilitate an online synchronous class meeting. 

Google provides support on how to install and manage extensions. You can browse the list of recommended extensions below, or search the Google Chrome Store.

1. Bitmoji - The Bitmoji Extension allows you to easily insert different versions of the Bitmoji that you created on your mobile app into many different tools, such as Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides.
2. GoFullPage - The GoFullPage extension captures a screenshot of your current page in its entirety. You can download it as an image or PDF.
3. Tiny Goo.gl URL Shortener - The Tiny Goo.gl URL Shortener extension lets you shorten the current Tab's URL, making it easier to share with your students. The shortened URL comes back highlighted and the extension window closes as soon as the URL has been copied to the clipboard.
4. Liner - The Liner extension is a digital highlighter for web pages and PDF files, which saves all your highlights made across mobile and desktop.
5. Natural Reader - The Natural Reader extension is a smart text to speech reader that allows you to listen to webpages and Google Docs.
6. Pocket - The Pocket extension can capture articles, videos, and anything else you find on the web and save in one place for future reference.
7. PollEverywhere - The PollEverywhere extension enables you to easily embed a slide in Google Slides to display live responses to a poll you have created.
8. Reader View - The Reader View extension allows you to strip away clutter like buttons, background images, and changes the page's text size, contrast, and layout for better readability of web pages. 
9. Slido - The Slido extension allows for seamless integration without the need to switch between Google Slides and Slido, while ensuring that videos, animated transitions, and GIFs work as they should when you present.
10. SmallPDF - The SmallPDF extension enables you to convert many types of files in PDF.
11. Translate - The Translate extension enables you to highlight a section of text - or the entire current web page - and translate it to any language.