Building Student Collaboration and Motivation in Online Teaching

By Zainab Cheema 

How do we build student motivation and collaboration in online classrooms? There can be no doubt that collaboration is the key to your class’ success, especially in online teaching when students are missing a live learning space shared with their teacher and peers. Increased collaboration and communication have a direct impact on student motivation. When delivering a synchronous, asynchronous, or blended course, educators have to be more mindful in prepping and building collaborative forums with which students can engage. In this blog post, you’ll learn practical strategies for how to boost motivation in an online classroom; increase teacher student interaction, as well as peer interaction; and how to create an online learning landscape that offers connectivity, focus and effective learning.

I was inspired to write this post because I’m currently teaching an online summer course on Travel in Early World Literature, which is an upper division content-based course on literary analysis and discussion. When designing student collaboration activities, I had to keep the online modality in mind. Translating student collaboration from a live class to an online learning landscape requires purposeful learning design. It asks educators to learn about and respond to their students’ prior learning and digital literacy; apply new approaches corresponding to students’ needs; create clear instructional designs and plan new ways of collaboration and learning (OECD Skills Outlook 2019). This post is my reflection on strategies that I’ve been using to create interactivity and discussion online. 

For many online educators, MOOCs are a cautionary tale. The lack of student collaboration activities seem to be its downfall. While MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) have become increasingly popular in recent years through online learning platforms like Coursera and Udemy, their student retention failure is legendary. According to Muhammad Awais Hasan, the four main areas of learning and retention failure in MOOCS are

• students’ lack of collaboration and communication
• less interaction of students’ with the content and instructor
• students’ varying knowledge background and preparedness, and
• students’ lack of motivation.

With the exception of bullet point 3, Awais’ list boils down to the importance of student collaboration and motivation. So, the question is, how do we build high social interaction and motivation in the online learning landscape?

Build tech mindfulness into your learning goals.

Learning goals are specific measurable goals that inform students about the specific knowledge and skills that they will be learning by the end of a lesson plan, or module, or course. Not only do we list our learning goals on the syllabus for the entire course trajectory, we can implement them in our day-to-day lesson plans. They are normally the first slide of teacher’s powerpoint, though the teacher can refer to them throughout their class time in order to reinforce and cluster their students’ learning. When teaching an online class, consider being mindful about and explicitly stating your learning goals for the specific tech platforms and digital tools that you will be using for the day. This may sound like a no-brainer, but it’s actually not. Robert Ellis, Abelardo Pardo, and Feifei Han found that the highest achieving students in blended learning classrooms were the ones that understood that online environment is an essential part of their experience and who reflected on the online aspect of their learning landscape. Being mindful of how the online space is actively shaping student learning will help them more strategically and enthusiastically use the different online tools and modes of learning in different assignments.

How to Do it?

Let’s start at the very beginning. If you don’t know how to write effective learning goals, take a look at Stanford University’s helpful resource and Carnegie Mellon’s resource. Note—while these resources discusses how to create learning goals for a whole course, their principles and strategies can also be applied to the learning goals of a day’s lesson plan. An example of a tech-mindful learning goal could be, “use Slack to develop collaborative skills for group discussion on The Travels of John Mandeville [or selected text of your choice]” or “facilitate student centered learning by offering the choice to a write a blog post or record 5 minute Screencastify video reacting to assigned film.”

Use Slack for Student Discussion and Collaboration

Not only is Slack the go-to messaging program for corporate communication, it is also becoming increasingly popular in education spaces. It’s channel-based messaging makes it ideal for not only class-wide communication, but also for setting up specific hubs for group and team work. Channels can used for discussions and reflections during synchronous lectures, as well as asynchronous messaging for questions, projects and course announcements. Most importantly, educators have noticed that the platform produces a real and substantive increase in communication and collaboration amongst students. In my online synchronous class, I’ve set up a class debate through class-wide Slack messaging on a discussion question and when everyone is done texting, I use it to springboard into a Zoom conversation.

How To Do It?

After explaining your policy for Slack and why you feel it’s useful to use, send all students an invite to join the class workspace that you have set up in the program (emphasize that everyone will be using the free version!).

• Fill out your Slack profile details and add a picture so that students will follow your example and do the same. If you don’t want to add a personal picture, consider adding a representative icon.  
• Think about how you want to set up your main class and student group collaborations. Create and organize the channels on the sidebar to design the collaborative digital spaces that you are envisioning for your class. Use the main channel for your day to day class-wide discussions and set up specific channels for group based team- and project-work. Here is a helpful guide for designing effective Slack channels. Check out this resource’s recommendation for using channel prefixes such as “team-” for teams to work together and “proj-” for cross-team collaboration on projects.

• Get students comfortable with using it by creating an in-class discussion and demo-ing how to set up its Twitter-esque reply threads. Consider this resource for how to organize the threads. In my travel literature class, I give them a discussion question to discuss and encourage them to post their comment as a reply to another student if their thought is in dialogue with a peer’s.
• Assign your next asynchronous discussion post on your assigned reading on Slack and ask students to respond to one another’s writings using the reply feature. Post the Slack User Guide and the Slack 101 video on your Assignment prompt so that they can use to it when writing their first post.  
• Finally, make the point to your students that they can post memes and other visual media, as well as text. The digital and visual tools offered by Slack are great ways for them to use its interactive platform to bring in texting and internet culture to create their voices. Before doing so, inform them about their responsibility to be digital citizens and observe the rules of mutual respect and community. 

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