10 Tips for Creating Community through Remote Instruction

It can be hard to know your students and what they are going through when you aren’t face-to-face with them multiple times a week. In addition to sending out a get-to-know-you survey at the beginning of the course, check-in a couple of times with everyone through another survey throughout the quarter. Ask how they are feeling about remote instruction, whether they feel comfortable learning this way, what they need to feel supported in their learning, and if anything has changed that they would like the instructor or IA to know (Dolan et al., 2017).

In addition to modeling your expectations for your students’ own engagement, think about how you can be a member of the community in addition to the one leading the class. It may be helpful to think about what you do in a physical classroom to connect with your students. Maybe you joke with them, maybe you like to use the whole space of a classroom, or maybe you have a sense of when a particular student is confused. Consider translating these qualities to your remote classroom by sharing a funny video with your students or giving them a partial tour of your workspace. Additionally, you can use a platform like Mentimeter as a way to have students anonymously ask questions.

Consider using Conceptboard to do a virtual version of popular icebreakers such as “Two truths and a lie” or use Padlet to play a game like “6 word memoirs” (more online icebreakers). Consider doing an icebreaker each week at the start of section or class or even assign them as homework.

Before a class or section begins, consider asking students to take a photo of something in their environment and sending it to you or an IA. Ask students to take a photo of something from a list of options such as their room or workspace, something on their desk, a sock, or a ceiling. Open class with a slideshow of their photos or, in a larger class, the photos of a particular section.

 Unfortunately, students feel less of a sense of belonging when instructors exert control over the learning environment. This is tricky because you want your online platform to work! However, students feel more of a sense of belonging when we engage them in dialogue (Rovai, 2000). Try to get into a dialogue with your students by asking them to choose the color of your Canvas page or get them to help you pick out a class or section mascot. You can even ask students to come up with discussion questions or (virtually) bring in an example of something they are learning about and explain it to the class or section.

If you are holding class or section through Zoom or another video conferencing program, you’ll soon find out that it is even harder than usual to get students to volunteer a response! Because of this, it is helpful to know which students you can call on to volunteer a story or comment. To set your students up for success, have them do a pre-class reflection where they talk about a prior experience with something from that week. For example, you may be discussing phylogeny next week, so ask your students to come up with examples of species and a past interaction with one of them. Go through these responses beforehand and, in class, ask particular students to talk about their interactions with a species. Students often feel more connected to each other when they hear their peers tell stories about their lives (Curran, 1998).

Instead of providing all of the relevant examples yourself in a lecture or section, give your students the activity of coming up with their own. Give them five minutes to track down a good example of something you have been talking about and then share it with the class. Students can also send it to you via chat. This kind of activity encourages feelings of community because students are empowered to bring a resource back to the class. Additionally, they have to engage with the course content to know what a good resource would be. Depending on the class, instructors may want to break students into teams and assign points to teams who come up with the most relevant example or find a good example the most quickly (d’Alesso et al., 2019).

Students respond well to being told why they are going to do something (Brown, 2001). They may not see how significant feelings of community are to their experience as learners. So tell them why you want to build a community with them – they may surprise you with how well they respond. Also, let them know what your expectations are for how they interact with each other (Sample Community Expectations). Those who are very comfortable in these environments may use terms or make jokes with which other students are unfamiliar. So let them know how you would like them to speak with each other.

Be kind to yourself. You are doing a difficult thing that you may have thought you would never do and you are doing it in a stressful time. Just like you support your students as they make mistakes (also known as learning), give yourself the same leeway. Your students will probably find it reassuring to see that learning how to do something takes work and that, ultimately, you are all in this new experience together.

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