Third Party Student Engagement tools?
Is anyone using any add-on products to promote student attention, curiosity, interest, and self-reflection by providing opportunities for student-to-student and student-to-faculty interaction? In other words, tools that expand upon the intent of the discussion board to promote student engagement.
Réponses
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In the past, I have used Pear Deck, an interactive engagement tool that enhances slide presentations by assessing student progress, providing real-time feedback, and supporting differentiated instruction through gamified practice. I found it particularly effective for virtual classes and presentations, as it helps maintain student engagement. Pear Deck is also user-friendly, seamlessly integrating with Google Slides and PowerPoint via an add-on, allowing educators to make their presentations interactive in just a few clicks. You can also allow students do go through slides at a self paced rate and track where and how each are interacting with the content.
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Our organization uses Bongo, a video recording tool with four assignment types: individual, group, Q&A (like HireVue) and Interactive. It can be integrated into Brightspace and is an accessible tool for certain assignment types and use cases. Bongo does, however, require a certain level of guidance and training on how to design and build with it. It is scalable.
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As a related topic to this discussion, I would appreciate any suggestions for increasing student attentiveness to emails from their instructor, specifically regarding getting students to open and read these emails! 😊 I dedicate significant time and effort to crafting these course emails, including utilizing generative AI tools. However, students often ignore them. They may read email notifications in their campus Outlook accounts, but they rarely read emails in Brightspace. Additionally, it's a struggle to get students to use Brightspace email, such as sending emails to me. Brightspace email, too. So, as far as this conversation goes, are there any 3rd party tools that could increase student engagement with my course emails?
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Good morning Alex,
We have been using H5P for the last 2 years to create learning activities in our overviews that reinforce the readings and videos. I work in a distance education program so we want to make sure the content is engaging. For example here we have the students watch the video then complete the drag and drop. However this is an ungraded assessment so we don't know if they complete it. However there is a prompt later in the unit overview that will prompt the student to use the video and learning activity to inform a discussion post and to reply to others.
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Our Brightspace email is configured so that emails sent from Brightspace go to the recipients' Outlook inboxes. Perhaps that would help address your student engagement problem.
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We do that, too. But based on the student queries (or responses to my queries) it's obvious that many students are ignoring the Brightspace email notifications in their Outlook inboxes. ☹️
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Getting students to engage in email is a challenge. If you are wanting to communicate privately with students you can set up private discussion boards, which I have found helpful when students are having email issues. Vanderbilt is a good resource for how to set up the discussion boards.
Using discussion boards keeps all the communication in one place. You and the student are not sifting through emails to remember where the conversation left off and also you are not wondering which student the course is referring to.
If you are communicating with the whole class, I recommend using the announcements or placing the information in the content at the start of the module/unit as a file or in the module description.
I would be happy to brainstorm any other solutions.
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I am all for tools, third party or otherwise. You may want to consider taking a closer look at assessment/activity prompts to ensure that they are well written, have clear expectations, and connect with the course outcomes. Because providing students with opportunities for student-to-student and student-to-faculty interaction, may or may not increase student attention, curiosity, interest, and self-reflection if the issue is with assessment/activity information. This may be a mute point if this work has already been done.
If the assessment information is great then exploring tools such as Pear Deck, Padlet, Panopto, Hypothes.is and YuJa is a good place to start. Some institutions have access to Video Assignments in Brightspace which allows for video interaction.
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"I am all for tools, third party or otherwise." — No concerns about security or confidentiality?
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Security and confidentiality are always a concern. The point of the statement is to state that, I am not against using tools, but I am not one that expects a tool to fix an issue that can be resolved by improved course design.
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Some of our faculty have used Padlet with great results. Visually, it provides a much better whole-class-oriented layout, as opposed to a typical discussion forum.
We did a free trial of Hypothes.is, which is a truly awesome tool. The only reason we didn't spring for an institutional license was that a minority of our faculty loved it to death and went whole-hog whereas most others didn't want to restructure their courses around it and invest more time in online discussion as opposed to face-to-face.
