İstanbul Medeniyet University School of Foreign Languages organized a webinar on 19.11.2021 at 15.30 in cooperation with National Geographic (Kardeş Kitap). The webinar “Maximizing Online Participation” was delivered by Amir Esmkhnai, who is one of the National Geographic academic trainers.
The trainer shared strategies on how to maximize students’ motivation in online education in the webinar, whose participants were the instructors of the School of Foreign Languages. He also discussed the ways to increase students’ participation in their learning process and the problems of student engagement and lack of motivation in online education that has now become a necessity due to the Covid-19 pandemic as these are described as the most important problem in the National Geographic research results. The differences between class participation, attendance and engagement were emphasized. It was stated that class participation is an active process and a behavioral phenomenon and attendance is stable and related to physical presence, but commitment to the course is a social, behavioral, emotional and mental process. It was explained that engagement in the course can be carried out in 4 different ways: student-content, student-teacher, student-student and out-of-school. Finally, the trainer raised some questions on ways to ensure course engagement such as “Is this a general issue or just about online education? What/Who has a problem-students, teachers, material, method or expectations? Is this engagement, participation or attendance?” and various suggestions were made together. The recommendations given are as follows:
- Students should be encouraged to make presentations.
- Group projects should be done
- The forms of measurement should be diversified by methods such as the portfolio method or grading for lesson time or weekly.
- Flipped classes should be implemented.
- Students should be given one-on-one feedback on their commitment to the course once a month.
- Rules should be set and introduced, such as students’ attendance to class on time or permission to speak by raising their hands.
- It should be ensured that students feel a sense of belonging to the lesson by using their mother tongue even a little.
- Try to personalize the lessons by methods such as the teacher sharing his own photos.
