The beginning of the academic year can feel exciting but also a cold start. Using digital technologies and low-risk engagement strategies can help kickstart communication and connection and make students feel welcome.
Whether you teach fully online, or a blended course, we share five activities that can help break the ice, get to know your students and make an inclusive start to the new year.
QMPlus can feel a bit impersonal sometimes. A good way to personalise it is asking students to update their profiles with a profile picture or illustration and complete a short bio; editing your own profile goes a long way to encourage them. This bio might allow students to share how to correctly pronounce their name, preferred pronouns and information that is important to them.
When engaging in forums and peer learning later, a profile picture and information makes a big difference in creating a learning community.
Forums can be a great way of getting to know your students and getting them to form connections, but how you use them may change depending on where you are in your course. At the beginning, you may want to focus on tasks that help build connections and community. Getting students to talk about their names and interests is a good baseline, but there are other approaches that can help foster community. For example, bringing an image or video into the task can help to make it more personal. Simple activities like students posting a picture of where they will be studying whether that’s a desk or somewhere else can really make a difference. Bringing students’ physical spaces into the digital environment can reduce isolation and help establish a presence in online spaces. Further into your course you may want to focus more on diagnostic tasks. For example, you might ask students to post a picture of an object or place linked to the course and why they chose it or post a short video blog on what they hope to get out of the module. Remember, a blank forum can be very intimidating for students, so going first as the teacher can really help facilitate these activities.
Another strategy is to invite students to explore an editable online version of the handbook in Word, or a Liquid Syllabus, encouraging them to ask questions about content, outcomes and assessment strategies. You can collect questions and summarise your answers in a forum, or answer questions on the document. This activity might help students explore the module and later with feedback literacy and the teaching and learning strategies used.
Synchronous online environments such as Zoom or Teams can have their own unique challenges and the prospect of being presented with a wall of names with no cameras on is a nerve wracking one. However, there are activities that can help to alleviate these issues. For example, asking students to present an object linked to them and the course can be a good way to get to know your students and their desires for the course, but also gives you a non-confrontational way to encourage students to turn their cameras on. As their object is the focus of the activity rather than themselves this can encourage those who are more hesitant to engage. Remember some students may have reasons they can’t turn their camera on so getting students who are in this situation to post an image in the chat means you can keep the activity inclusive for everyone (Castelli and Sarvary 2021).
Another useful approach involves giving students a digital space where they can be present and ‘physically’ interact with each other while on a call. This can be helpful for decreasing feelings of distance. Tools like MS Whiteboard open up the possibility for real time collaboration in a shared space. For example, you could create areas on your whiteboard for different questions and ask students to put digital post-it responses or images in the corresponding areas. Getting students to group similar responses together adds another layer of interaction and presence that can help you establish connections and feelings of community.
In-class activities might have the advantage of immediacy and the flexibility of moving easily from individual to peer engagement. From a simple Mentimeter icebreaker, poll, brainstorming or feedback request activity, to more group-based icebreakers like “What I want to know”, there is a variety of strategies you can use depending on your situation.
We have focused on utilising these icebreaker tasks at the beginning of the year, especially focusing on students’ values and what they want to get out of the module. Repeating these activities later in the academic year can give you useful insights into how your students’ understanding has evolved.
We would love to hear your ideas for icebreaker activities and if you have any activities you would like to share we have set-up a Padlet for collecting your suggestions. Click here to contribute to the Padlet