Teaching & Learning Strategies
To Begin: Getting students engaged
Triggering student's cognitive processes
Capturing student attention at the start of the course is a necessary pre-condition for effective learning. Here are two common strategies to trigger students’ initial cognitive processes
Primers for getting student attention: Two possible approaches for capturing student attention is to appeal to their curiosity or establish relevance. Curiosity is experienced as a result of awareness of a knowledge gap, which creates the motivation to find the answer. Weight is established when the topic has personal relevance to a student’s current life experience, and this can lead to a desire to know more.
When using technology for student engagement, it’s helpful to use a familiar media format, so that the focus is on the content and not the novelty of the medium. Curiosity may be triggered by new technologies, but if the reason for using a medium is to promote cognition, then the focus must not be on the delivery medium but the active use of the technology itself.
Presence and belonging: When students feel a sense of care and connection to other students they are more likely to become actively involved. Lecturers play an important role in developing this sense of psychological closeness by actively and visibly being available and present. Technology can contribute towards presence and belonging when it is used consistently and purposefully. In the absence of such use, the student will feel isolated and as if they were teaching themselves
A characteristic of a digital classroom is that the members (academics and students) don’t share a physical location or a common time period. Simply incorporating communications technologies (like chat or a forum) does not lead to improved interpersonal connections. Greater intentionality is necessary to create a classroom community