5 Ways to Build Community When Students Don’t Show Up

Students don’t come to your classes, do they? If they did you probably wouldn’t be reading this post. But do you also wonder why they aren’t coming? Because, actually, you are quite interesting and you design activities to support their learning and their social experiences. So what is going on?

Students don’t come to your classes, do they? If they did you probably wouldn’t be reading this post. But do you also wonder why they aren’t coming? Because, actually, you are quite interesting and you design activities to support their learning and their social experiences. So what is going on?

Everyone will say they are time poor, student and academic alike. One difference is that the student has signed up to do a University course and as such they should want to come to classes. Maybe they do want to but they just can’t make it at the time you have set. You know this and therefore you record your sessions and have a LMS environment with exciting and engaging asynchronous modules designed so they can work on the content when they do have time. But what are they missing out on by not turning up to the synchronous sessions?

The number one experience that students miss out on is not the opportunity to listen to you, the expert, talk about your subject area. It is the social interactions and relationship building with their peers and with you. Unfortunately, the social isolation is felt more acutely when a student is studying in online mode. Of course an on-campus student might also choose not to come to classes but an online student is less likely to have informal meetings with their peers. It is surprising in this era of online social networks with notifications and instant chat that the online students still lacks social connectedness with their university peers and teachers.

This one concern about building relationships, whether it is between academic and student or student and student, lead us to explore some ways to develop this without forcing students to attend. In this post we share our findings from a study of 5 courses in an online Masters of Teaching course and provide 5 evidence based approaches to developing relationships for asynchronous participation.

1. Multi-Modal discussion spaces

One of the great benefits we have as learners, teachers and designers at this point in time is the access to a range of technologies. We have very robust systems that provide high-resolution audio-visual tools that can be used by students. In fact students are already using a range of tools that complement the ones we provide in the university with obvious skill transfers making it quicker and easier than ever.

Discussion forums are a great way to get people interacting but the traditional text version has seen better days. We found that encouraging and inviting interactions in tools such as VoiceThread meant the students could talk to each other at a time that suited them around the ideas of the course. And they were actually talking with their voice and often with a video. Students could make posts while out walking the dog or late at night after they put the kids to bed. Even better still they were able to listen to each other and really start to feel like they were all in the room together. The virtual room. When we asked the students what they thought about using voicethread they made comments such as “it has been an amazing way to feel truly connected”.  When comparing voicethread to previous discussions using text one said it “enabled a more casual and conversational way of interacting with peers”. These thoughts represent the types of experiences that a student would get if they casually met someone on campus or even if they were in a synchronous session talking in small groups.

2. Signposts that you know who they are

Care signposts are helpful markers to set the scene that you do care about them. A trick here is that it might only be a signpost and you may not really know who they are if, for example, you randomly met them in the supermarket. In our courses we found the student feedback was that they felt we knew who they were and that came from interactions in spaces that were not the main live class experience. We knew we were onto something when we got feedback like this “I have not felt connected to my lecturer in any other course, although, being able to see and talk to the lecturer made me feel like she cared about her students and their success through the course”.

The type of signposts you might like to try include providing an initial opportunity to introduce themselves and be sure to respond back to each one individually. This will set the scene and while labour-intensive at the beginning will make for easier sailing later. Say you are always available to be contacted knowing that it is unlikely that they will all contact you. Make sure you refer to them by name when you interact with them and for example if you do have a live class when you send that follow up email mention by name some or all of the people who were there and how they contributed. Kudos to the attendees or even the contributors on the forums. Making sure that you do provide information about content or how to videos using your own voice and image. Try to avoid lots of clips from other less personal sources. The more the students see you the more they will feel they know you, even if the video you made is 5 years old.

3. The online environment doesn’t have to be boring

Listen up! It is time we stopped thinking that if students are having fun they mustn’t be learning.  Equally we need to be truthful to ourselves about the capacity for online environments to be engaging, interesting and entertaining and that doesn’t just mean when we are watching Netflix. We can learn so much from the way that spaces are designed for non-education purposes. Imagine if one of your students described you and your course like this:

She was vibrant, amazing and so good to work with.  She was approachable and always included activities that enabled the students to discuss the course.  She made learning fun and I am thankful for her presence.  She showed us that the online platform doesn’t have to be boring and modelled teaching practices to students.

Make learning fun and both you and your students will thank you for it. In fact the more enjoyable the experiences, the more likely students will do them. So take a look at what you are asking your students to do and maybe ask that helpful family member who is a bit more like your students than you, what they think of your activities. More often than not the interesting activities require student to student interaction but that doesn’t mean group work per se. That might involve the students doing something on their own in their own time but being asked to share it for others to see and comment on. If an activity has been fun for them and produced an interesting artefact that reveals something about their character then their peers and you will find out a bit more about them and as such strengthen the relationship which leads into other experiences. Better still if they can share it in an environment like Voicethread where they make a video and audio recording about what they have done. An asynchronous show and tell.

4. Make asynchronous discussions real discussions

We seem to have fallen into the trap of thinking that it is enough to get students to just do discussion boards, fill in the box with a reflection (for example). When we first started using LMS environments the discussion board was a marvelous way to replicate online forums and to encourage students to ‘talk’ to each other. It was early days of the Internet and we were all in awe of the capacity to interact like this, thus, we all participated. Now we have social networking that rivals anything a LMS environment can provide. But all is not lost. While there may have been a time when we welcomed some of the social media tools into the academic environment that has diminished due to the prevalence of bad behaviour in these spaces. However, there are tools that can be used in a private manner in LMS environments with moderation that doesn’t shut down participation.

These asynchronous discussions need to be real conversations that students want to partake in and not just because they have been told they must complete a certain number as a requirement of assessment. It doesn’t have to be a hard task to change from the forums you might already have to something more engaging. In our courses we used VoiceThread as an alternative to discussion forums and translated the types of conversations we were hoping for into the multi-media environment. One of us created very open-ended interactions where our initial suggestions were small and the students filled in the rest. We were the glue that held it together by continuing to enter into the space and listen and respond. One of the benefits of using VoiceThread meant we could listen to the conversations while doing other things. An approach that students take to video recordings! Once we had a sense of what a few people were talking about we could leave an informal but personal response, not dissimilar to what you would do in a live class. The verbal interaction is really important in developing these connections and one student told us that she “ had way better replies to [her] questions when they were verbal, as opposed to an answer in a forum”.

5. Offer Flexible One-on-One Support Options

And number five is actually offering to provide one-on-one time with students at a time that they can choose. What we normally call consultation time. For this tip we know that many people will say they don’t have time and as such we are wondering what perspective we are now taking when previously we were angry that the student didn’t make time for their studies and perhaps we aren’t making time for our students. It is a two-way street. But this is where the signposts come back into play. Telling the students that they can meet you one-on-one through a virtual meeting is a bit different to everyone of your students actually requesting that meeting. We have found that we have a very small percentage who take us up on the offer yet simply making ourselves available presents the persona that we are there for them. Equally it becomes important to respond to emails within an appropriate timeframe and sometimes doing so when the email arrives also gives the students a sense that you are there, you are a real person and you care enough to get back to them. They matter. For this tip I recommend putting yourself out there and offering support in a way that makes the students feel like you are available whenever they need you (with some parameters for you to get sleep). You can always wind it back if it does become overwhelming however the balance of good support materials in the LMS as well as the suggestion of support will mean the students are less likely to be bugging you all the time. Recently we have been exploring AI tools to also give basic supports which means that there is more time for you to have meaningful conversations over the list of administrative questions.

The Bottom Line

Connection doesn’t require synchronous presence – it requires intentional design. Our students are already experts at building relationships through technology. They do it every day through social media, gaming, and messaging apps. Our job is to create academic spaces that honour these skills while fostering meaningful educational relationships.

If one of these ideas has sparked an action then give it a go. We are constantly surprised by the response we get from some of the things we rationally consider too difficult or unusual for anyone to partake in. And we also get different responses from different cohorts so don’t give up but do know that online shouldn’t be boring and asynchronous students should be able to have relationships with you and their peers.

Remember what one student told us:

“Being able to see and talk to the lecturer made me feel like she cared about her students and their success through the course.” They weren’t talking about a live class.

They were talking about feeling seen, heard, and valued – experiences we can create asynchronously when we design for connection, not just content.

Join the Discussion

Do these 5 resonate with you or do you have another one to add?