Transcript:
Welcome all. Please feel free to share this video with colleagues, if you think they would find it of interest.
I want to talk today about engaging students about the need to mix it up a little bit in terms of the way that we deliver our learning, the way that we engage our students. It is important to be consistent from a quality perspective but to avoid repetition. And it’s very easy to make an excuse and say, well, “this is the room that I’ve been allocated, to teach in”, or “this is the confines of the webinar space that I’m being expected to operate in”. And that becomes a defense mechanism on the part of educators. So this is the way this is the way it’s always been done. “This is the way the lectures work. This is the way it’s done.”
And I think we need to avoid that.
It’s important that we focus on the notion of engagement of the learning we need to think about, what’s going to provoke the learner, provoke the student, to engage with the concepts and the knowledge that’s being shared or imparted.
And that doesn’t necessarily making every session a very different form of active learning, but it does mean you have to focus in on the concepts and think about how best to illustrate those concepts. Visually, ideally. So the best way to do that is to review the concepts within an individual session and put it in the context of a broader course, and then identify whether or not you think this particular concept is best experienced through some lecture form,
or through some seminar form or through some active learning form you might throw in a moot or a discussion you might throw in a question, answer session. You might throw in a way of giving students to do peer learn from each other, even within a lecture theater, anything is possible. It’s really important that you break out of the mold of doing repetitive forms of delivery. It’s really important that we mix it up to maintain the engagement of our students. So look at the whole series of sessions, identify individual concepts, take a course wide view, and then map out what best form of engagement you think is going to work that ensures some variation in the learning experience.
And that’s much more likely to engage, maintain, engagement of your learners.