Keeping remote college students engaged during COVID

While COVID vaccines are rolling into drug stores and hospitals throughout the country, the higher ed landscape isn’t changing any time soon, and might be forever altered.

Mongoose Implementation Specialist and Medaille College Adjunct Professor Meredith Shaul joins Greg Bauch for a discussion on how college instructors are doing their best to educate and engage remote students.

College faculty are certainly no strangers to disengaged students - you’ve been competing with the marvel of smart phones interrupting studies for years. Now it’s even harder to hold court with multiple remote distractions and the comforts of home. (Full disclosure: Meredith’s dog was on her lap during this discussion!) There are ways to motivate, energize, and inspire remote learners.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• Recognizing signs of a student falling behind
• Building a virtual sense of community
• Tips for keeping your class engaged and motivated

It’s not easy to engage with a student when they’re not in the room, and much harder when you don’t even have the benefit of a web tool that displays a classroom of faces. Instructors have to be even more persistent with check-ins and discussion groups to ensure everyone in their classroom is keeping up.

There’s temptation from both staff and students to throw in the towel on the spring semester and wait until the world returns to a level of normal - a dangerous situation considering the struggles higher education already faced before the pandemic.

There’s also the question of whether or not to shift emphasis on certain parts of a course. Should tests weigh less on a final grade than written reports? Should more leniency be given for class absences considering we’re in the middle of a pandemic? This conversation weighs these issues.

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Guests

Meredith Shaul

Adjunct Professor at Medaille College 
Implementation Specialist at Mongoose

Greg Bauch

Content Production Specialist at Mongoose