How to Host Engaging Synchronous Sessions

To retain the attention of learners, it is recommended that lectures be broken up into sections allowing for a change or interaction periodically. Doing so also provides the opportunity to reinforce learning and introduce brief interactions for formative assessment. A variety of ideas to achieve both of these during a synchronous session can be found below.

Facilitate Your Session

As an instructor, the synchronous session may be facilitated in much the same way a live classroom is facilitated. There is the presenter, the participants, a lesson plan or agenda, and interaction. What is different are the tools in which the communication of ideas takes place. Some online classroom facilitation approaches include:

• Call on Students. Calling on students to share their opinion or present the results of their work provides an interesting change for receiving information while also acting as a form of assessment of the presenting students’ understanding.

• Invite a Guest Speaker. Experts in the field may be available to provide perspective and front-line experiences to students. Guests in synchronous sessions do not require travel costs or added technology tools.

• Monitor the Chat. Student-to-student, as well as student-to-instructor interactions, may take place in the chat pane of your synchronous session. Students may opt to pose questions on their own. It is also a great way to brainstorm ideas with the whole class at once. 

• Watch for Raised Hands. Most tools used for synchronous sessions include an option for attendees to raise their hands. Keep an eye out for raised hands along with questions in the chat pane. 

• Utilize Interactive Tools. In addition to raising hands, most synchronous meeting tools have features to indicate agreement or disagreement, emotions (e.g., laughter, applause), and speed (content moving too fast or too slow). Attendees may use these tools to indicate how well they are keeping up with the content. The features can replace the non-verbal cues or body language you might otherwise see in a face-to-face situation. 

• Create Community Agreements. Any group of people coming together for the first time may create community agreement by identifying the norms within which they will function. Just as an instructor may create guidelines for their classroom, similar guidelines can be established in an online environment. Whether in person or online, it is recommended that the agreement be created collaboratively with all participants. The agreements may address the use of microphones/muting, taking turns in discussions, acceptable conversation in the chat pane, and even timing of breaks or time for processing new information.

Break up lectures and presentations with interaction

Think-Pair-Share or Small Group Discussions 

• Share a question or prompt with the class and provide a couple of minutes to think about it and write down some individual thoughts in response.

• Provide instructions for small groups or “paired” discussions. Be sure to share the amount of time they will have in the breakout room and what is expected of them when they return to the main room. Use breakout rooms to move participants into online rooms in groups.

• During a pairing activity, you as the host can monitor discussions by moving among all the rooms. Some synchronous meeting tools allow for messages or reminders to be distributed to all breakout rooms simultaneously. Use that feature to provide reminders of time remaining or to guide discussions to your intended purpose.

• When the whole group is reconvened, have a reporting out the activity. A representative from each group might summarize their results by taking turns unmuting participants. Or, if there are a lot of groups, consider asking a representative from each to post their result in the chat pane.

Polls

• Use polls to gather input in the form of brainstorming with open-ended questions.

• Survey the participants to gauge their understanding of a newly learned concept.

• Get students involved in leading the direction of a lecture with polls that let them vote to determine which example is explained or what the next topic will be in a choose-your-own-adventure style. This is also useful for debriefing on earlier topics when students can indicate a need for a refresher on content in an anonymous way.

Sorting and Collaborative Activities

• Incorporate a whiteboard or a sorting tool for interactivity. Google’s Jamboard can be used without the hardware for sticky note activities for brainstorming and sorting. 

A whiteboard, like Miro or the whiteboard tool in Zoom, can be used to share a visual of a process, equation, or function similar to how one might do it in a face-to-face environment.

Related Information

• Dynamic Lecturing in Synchronous Online Lectures by Christine Harrington, Ph.D.

• How to Share a Whiteboard on Zoom by North Carolina State University (video)

• Jamboard information and examples from the Boise State Community of Practice

• Polling for Meetings by Zoom

• Zoom information and examples from the Boise State Community of Practice

• Zoom Support from Boise State’s OIT Teaching & Learning