The current challenges to creating engaging philosophy courses are obvious. The majority of classes remain fully or partially online, decreasing student motivation and preventing the valuable connections with their peers and professors that come from in-person instruction. Even though these circumstances are still fairly recent, these sorts of challenges to creating engaging online college courses are not. Not long ago, many prominent voices thought that physical college campuses would quickly become a thing of the past, replaced by massive open online courses that were more effective both pedagogically and financially. These predictions turned out to be premature, as some of these courses had completion rates as low as 5%, demonstrating the significant obstacles to creating an engaging virtual academic environment. As part of our ongoing series, in today’s post I will discuss how you can increase student engagement by creating courses that emphasize both human connection and immersive assignments regardless of whether they are taught online or in-person.
One of the primary missteps of the massive open online courses was that they failed to emphasize the human connection necessary to create compelling courses. When classes take place face to face, these connections happen so naturally as to go almost unnoticed. When a course moves online, however, instructors must be more intentional in creating connections with their students. The best strategy is to employ multiple methods and mediums to recreate the amount of interaction that takes place during a typical in-person course. Here are a number of ways to get started:
- Create a consistent workflow that starts off with weekly overview of the class activities for the week.
- Respond to student inquiries in a timely manner, and include a picture in your email signature.
- Introduce yourself to your class in a way that shows them who you are outside the classroom, and shout out great student work early and often, letting them know you recognize all the hard work they have been putting in.
- Face time is especially valuable, so find ways to virtually engage with students early and often. Minimize pre-recorded lecture videos and emphasize live instruction. Depending on class size and context, you can hold virtual office hours over Zoom or Google Meet, schedule short, ten-minute meetings to give paper feedback, and even give recorded video feedback instead of written comments on essays and written exams.
Students also need to connect with their peers. Despite your best efforts, you will not be able to invest enough in every student to guarantee that they will be engaged in your course. And that’s okay! In the typical classroom, students interact with their peers even more than they interact with the instructor, and it is possible to create this sort of collaborative environment in online spaces as well. At the beginning of your course, encourage students to join a conversation thread via Slack, Microsoft Teams, or GroupMe that is dedicated to the course. All of my courses this semester have dedicated GroupMe conversations, which both serve as a way to help students connect and as a go to forum for any questions about the course. Decide now how you are going to prioritize student discussion. For my large intro courses this fall (with enrollment caps of 120 and 180) students, I created discussion groups of 15-20 students. Instead of using the discussion boards offered by Canvas or Blackboard, these dialogue groups will meet an hour a week over Zoom, engaging in a structured conversation centered around the course content. If you do make use of a discussion board, favor shorter, conversational posts instead of longer, standalone posting. Group work can also build a sense of connection between students. On simpler assignments, students can give one another constructive feedback, providing mock grades using a course rubric and suggesting modifications on how to improve. You can also create more involved group projects, like collaborating on a course Instagram account or creating a philosophy TikTok channel. Whatever you do, don’t forget to host an end-of-course celebration!
Along with a strong sense of community, engaging courses have a number of absorbing, immersive assignments. The most engaging classes are those centered on issues that students see as relevant to their everyday lives. A quick reminder about our students: They are not philosophy professors, and most of them will not go on to graduate school. They probably do not find philosophy intrinsically interesting. Despite how obvious these truths may seem, it is very easy to fall back into the habit of modelling a course based on the way the topic might be approached in a graduate seminar. It may come naturally to create a class based around the readings that are most popular amongst academic philosophers, focused on questions that arise within that literature. In order to break out of this perspective, begin by considering where your students are coming from. What are your students like? What issues do they find pressing and relevant? What parts of the subject matter will speak most to what they are currently going through?
Once you have a good idea of where your students are coming from, you’ll be able to create compelling assignments. The assignments should not only touch on issues they care about, but also help them put their new philosophical ideas into practice. Are you teaching an ethics course? Have students identify which virtues they value the most in their friends, and have them develop a plan to grow in that virtue throughout, journaling to record their progress. Are you teaching a political philosophy class? Structure the class around several issues that your students are invested in and have them conduct research on how to make the biggest difference in their communities in these areas. In my Introduction to Philosophy course this past semester, all of the course content was structured around how philosophy can inform how we live. The semester then culminated in the Apology assignment, an essay that mirrors The Apology of Socrates. To complete this assignment, students gave a narrative account of how their philosophical views developed over the semester, defended those views against objections, and explained how they were planning to apply these ideas to their lives moving forward. Make sure that your goals in all of this are transparent – once they see that you want them to grow in areas that they already care about, they’ll be even more likely to dive in headfirst.
Creating compelling, engaging philosophy courses is within reach. Whether those classes primarily take place in person or online, students respond when classes create community and help them think carefully about meaningful issues. For more pedagogical resources for creating engaging philosophy classrooms from the Philosophy as a Way of Life Project, join our Instructor Community on Facebook!
Wes Siscoe
Wes Siscoe is a Dean’s Postdoctoral Fellow at Florida State University and the Mellon Course Design Coordinator for the Philosophy as a Way of Life Project. He received his PhD from the University of Arizona and has been a visiting researcher at Brown, Notre Dame, and Rutgers. His research revolves around several themes– rationality, language, and virtue – and their importance for accounts of human excellence and achievement.
