Faculty and students getting to know one another helps build a learning community that motivates students to engage in their courses, thereby increasing the likelihood of achieving learning outcomes. When students (some or all) are at a distance, getting to know each other can be challenging and requires additional strategies. Here, we have gathered information on three aspects of getting acquainted:
- helping students get to know you
- helping you get to know students
- helping students get to know each other
This information stems from research, established best practices, and examples from successful instructors in the College of IST. For a quick read, see Chickering and Gamson’s seven principles for good practice in higher education, based on 50 years of research on teaching: https://www.lonestar.edu/multimedia/SevenPrinciples.pdf
Helping Students Get to Know You
- Create introductory videos of who you are and what your course is about, including something about you personally
- Use short, just-in-time, webcam-recorded, weekly announcements from instructor to students
- Upload a profile image in Canvas under Account > Profile
- Complete the Canvas Bio under Account > Profile with information about you and your contact information
- Make note (in class, live; and/or in course materials online) of connections to the larger community – what’s going on in Penn State News, tech blogs, current events, civic events, life events
- Make use of multi-media to communicate more about you each week
- Introduce students to your music
- Share memes and other images that resonate with you
- Post cartoons that highlight your sense of humor
Helping You Get to Know Students
- Administer a survey
- Get-to-know-you survey, about their goals for the course, their interests in general, or anything else you want to know
- Pre-course knowledge survey with additional items about how they prefer to learn
- Cultural references survey, about their taste in music, sports, movies, books, etc.
- Technology survey, about their uses and/or interests in relevant technologies that you can highlight in the course
- Ask for photos and names, and encourage them to update their profile picture in Canvas
- Invite students to send you their preferred name and pronouns (he, she, they)
- Meet with individual student teams 1-2 times per semester, or more often if your course is small
- Post a sign-up schedule for 5-minute meetings during your regularly scheduled office hours, and invite students to meet with you virtually
- Create an assignment for students to share with you their goals for the course and/or their goals for a career
- For courses with a synchronous element, invite students to speak during the first synchronous class session—use roll call method and ask for each person to say their name as they like to be referred to and one thing they hope to gain from the course
- For courses with a synchronous element, schedule “one-for-fun” activities, taking one minute in class for something fun
- Ask students to share pictures of their pets
- Invite students to respond to a poll about preferred movies, music, or television shows; and invite commentary for one minute
- For courses with a synchronous element, schedule at least one synchronous class period per week
- For courses with a synchronous element, join the Chat chatter
- Participate in informal chat sessions in the minutes before class begins
- Participate in chat when students are assigned to watch a video during synchronous class sessions
- Tip: If you have been in chat in the minutes before class started, students won’t find it odd that you begin chatting again when sharing a video
- Tip: Ask your TA, IA, or LA to initiate a question or topic in chat so it doesn’t all come from you
Helping Students Get to Know Each Other
- Connections to peers in the course
- Assign ice breaker activities (in the beginning) and team building exercises (later), for students to get to know their team members on team projects (e.g., https://www.thecouchmanager.com/3-fun-and-easy-virtual-team-building-activities/)
- Request that students share information (availability, time zones, team preferences, etc.) that could aid in group formation
- Assign teams to create team contracts in which they list goals for course projects
- Create a Discussion Forum for students to use to connect with each other (e.g., Connect and Chat)
- Express your support of students using GroupMe or other social tools to stay connected
- Encourage and set up study groups in your course space in Canvas, emphasizing that study groups can help facilitate deeper learning and retention of course concepts
- Create a Google Map on which students can volunteer to place a pin to indicate their hometown or where they currently live.
- Set up a wiki space where students can share, asynchronously, about themselves and about concepts that they find interesting
- Tip: To encourage participation, assign some amount of points for students to post news articles, social media examples, cartoons, ads, and other artifacts about course-related concepts throughout the semester; and assign points for students to comment on others’ posts
- For courses with a synchronous element, put student teams into break-out rooms for a few minutes at the start of class; and assign them to share and submit what they did/learned since the last class on their project
- Tip: Anchor the break-out session to a meaningful task, or else this strategy will devolve into silence
- For courses with a synchronous element, end the class period in team-assigned break-out rooms for 3-5 minutes, so that they can make a plan to incorporate whatever they learned from class into their project
- Tip: Consider assigning a brief (paragraph) statement from each group about one thing from their break-out room conversation that helped students discover new ideas or new perspectives
- For courses with a synchronous element, use break-out rooms for significant activities that students can do to make sense of course content; and keep students in those same groups for several weeks at a time–or for the whole semester
- Tip: Break-out rooms for 1-minute activities are generally more trouble than they are worth; find your sweet spot, given your students and your content; experienced instructors recommend 10-20 minute sessions with robust activities
- Tip: To ensure more engagement during the break-out room session, assign some amount of participation points for activity completion or require a deliverable that relates to an upcoming assignment
- Connections to the course community, at large
- Use VoiceThread to create and share multimedia-based introductions that allow for commenting replies to one another
- Survey students and share the anonymous results of the surveys, so that students can see that they are not alone in lacking knowledge about a topic or having programming experience
- Poll or survey students about how things are going in class, review their feedback, and incorporate the suggested changes that you think are appropriate
- Schedule events (e.g., movie nights, game nights, or other social activity) every N weeks
- Note: Those instructors who did this said that while only a handful (10-15%) of students attended, the majority of students had participated in voting for the specific event and were energized about the invitation
- For courses with a synchronous element, establish routines for the start of synchronous class periods
- Begin with music to calm, welcome, and/or wake students
- Begin with game-like trivia, capitalizing on gaming and competitive tendencies
- Begin with a question of the day related to course content
- Begin with announcements, including tech news; and allow students to share announcements about clubs/organizations
- Begin with a cartoon to lighten the mood