Creating Themed Classes Online
In our previous article, we outline 3 ways to gamify your online classrooms. Here, we deep dive into what it takes to create a themed online class!
Step 1: Understanding what appeals to your students
It is important that the narrative is relevant and attractive to your students, so get up to speed!
“What are your students excited about?”
“What movies or games are popular?”
A great way is to poll your students — select a few themes that you find to be interesting and ask your students how they would like to learn.
In a recent PID Online workshop, we crafted an entrepreneurship module that was Maze Runner themed.
Step 2: Designing your lesson around a theme
Once you have a story, you can craft your lesson using a relatable plotline.
In our Maze Runner example, we placed students into a maze. As they answer correctly, they move closer to the goal of breaking into “Bandar Project ID”.
The key to good lesson integration here is picking stories that have a clear goal which you can connect to a lesson outcome. In this case, escaping the maze also means completing the 4 lesson outcomes of the entrepreneurship module.
Thematic integrations like this may be replicated with other fictional worlds — the game of Quidditch in Harry Potter, drone races in Star Wars, destroying The Ring from Lord of the Rings, and the list goes on.
Step 3: Creating visual content — slides, stickers, gifs
Visuals, visuals, visuals! Start by looking up media elements that are relevant to your story. One of the advantages of teaching virtually is that pictures and videos are accessible online and can be easily combined with your lesson.
Think about how your lesson slides relate to your narrative. A well-integrated lesson plan creates a more immersive experience for students.
For example, the protagonists in Maze Runner start off lost in a maze and find their way out throughout the series. Using this, we marked learning outcomes with specific milestones in the story.
For teachers on asynchronous platforms i.e. WhatsApp or Telegram, you can use compressed clips or GIFs from the story to emulate the experience of being in a fictional world.
And ta-da! You have yourself a themed lesson that will hopefully help attract students to your online classes.
From our experience, team-based activities work well in themed classes. As you will see in the next article, we found that grouping students in lessons can occasionally also induce a sense of camaraderie and competition and is a great tool when teaching online.
In article #2, we explore ways to establish reward structures to retain student engagement. Click here to read it!
This article was written by Alexander Khor, a Programme Associate for Project ID with the research and support of Ang Chiew Teng, a Programme Lead for Project ID.
Project ID is an education social enterprise that runs high-impact programmes empowering students to lead self and others with 21st century skills. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, Project ID has run over 70 online workshops with more than 1600 student participation across Malaysia.
