Interacting With Your Arkmont Students
Here are a few ways you can interact with your Arkmont students
Online students aren’t biologically different from students in a classroom, they still require very similar learning tactics. In fact, that’s one of the drawbacks behind online education as a whole: online learning is missing many components that classrooms offer, such as:
- Being able to find and present data to your peers;
- Publicly answer questions in front of peers;
- Interaction (Q&A) with your professor;
That’s just the first three that come to mind, but know that list could be significantly longer.
Ask Questions
Just because you’re the teacher and you’re using the internet as the medium to reach your students doesn’t mean you can’t ask them questions. You can ask questions in your videos and in reading lessons. You could even start a conversation in the discussion area and ask for students to participate.
Tip: Arkmont allows you to ask questions inside a video. For example, say you just covered an important subject and wanted to refresh the students memory from the beginning of the video lesson, you can create an in-video question that will stop the video and ask the question.
Make Your Students Work
Asking your students to do a project, whether that’s writing a chunk of code or writing a small one page article on the subject at hand, is a fantastic way to keep your students involved. They’ll need to apply what you’ve taught them and put it into writing. Or maybe you prefer if they made a video presentation. Regardless of which way you want the work to be created (video, writing, etc.), there’s no good reason you should avoid getting them to do some work.
For clarification, we are not saying you should get your students to do your work, the work should always be beneficial to the student.
Tip: Get your students to submit the link to their work in the discussion area of the lesson. If you wanted to take that further, you can ask students to do peer review and provide meaningful and constructive feedback.
Remember, knowledge is better retained when your students have to work with it. Working with new knowledge helps turn basic information into knowledge, and turn that knowledge into experience.
Add To The Discussion
When a student asks a question, or supplies an opinion about one of your lessons, you have an opportunity to reach out to them. You can ask for clarification or more data, agree or disagree, and even correct any erroneous content they’ve provided. You are the professional in the room, you’re allowed to correct your students. And more often than not, correcting an error from your students is appreciated. After all, your students want to learn and they want to learn the right way.
Tip: Remember to be friendly, but also be authoritative. You’re the expert students are learning from, and that’s all the more reason you should be kind and helpful whenever possible.
These are just a few ways you can interact with your students. Some teachers like to give out their email address and let students email them. Other teachers prefer their students to make a video, post it on YouTube, and share it with the class (to simulate the presentation portion of a classroom).
By interacting with your students, you will be providing them with a better learning experience. Every time I’ve had a great online learning experience, I always enroll in other courses, and you can bet that your students will, too.
