Adding Interaction To Bring Your Virtual Classrooms Alive

We all know that engagement is critical in a virtual classroom, but that doesn’t mean that designing engagement in your sessions is easy. Having a dynamic speaker and relevant content can go a long way, but it’s adding interaction into your classroom experiences that can make the most impact. It’s the difference between a learner sitting back and watching or leaning forward and engaging.

Experts agree that instructors should prompt interaction every three to five minutes in a virtual classroom. That doesn’t mean you need a full class exercise for each interaction though – there are many ways to add interaction in Adobe Connect.

Status Options: Agree or Disagree

The easiest way to prompt interaction is to familiarize your learners with the Status Option list. Throughout your session, ask your learners to set their status to agree or disagree (thumbs up or down in the HTML client, a check, and cross in the classic view). You can change the view of the Attendees pod to sort attendees by status.

Polls

The Adobe Connect poll pod has three different poll types:

Multiple Choice – enabling learners to select one of the options
Multiple Answer – enabling learners to select multiple options
Short Answer – enabling learners to type their own option
While many customers use polls at the end of their sessions, I’d encourage you to think about how you can use them throughout. Create duplicates of your presentation layout for example, and add poll pods to the new layouts. Remember to acknowledge and incorporate the answers into your session.

Chat

A chat pod is an obvious way to capture feedback during your virtual classroom, but Adobe Connect enables you to incorporate multiple chat pods onto your layout. This is ideal for a quick classroom activity. For example, when discussing an idea, in addition to having the standard chat pod, you can add a new chat pod to capture all of the ‘Pros’ and a third chat pod to capture all of the ‘Cons’. In this way, you can use chat pod to effectively focus on the interactions.

Whiteboard and Annotations

By default, your learners won’t have access to the annotation tools in Adobe Connect, but it’s easy to give them access through ‘Enhanced Participant Rights‘ or by putting them in a breakout room. Remember though that a whiteboard activity doesn’t have to use a blank whiteboard. You can use the annotation tools on any content you can show in a share pod. That includes PowerPoint files, PDF documents, MP4 video, and images. Have your learners use the annotation tools to mark up a work sheet, solve a crossword puzzle, or complete a SWOT diagram.

Breakout Rooms

One of the advantages of breakout rooms is that they give participants most of the rights of a Presenter in Adobe Connect without changing their role. This means that your learners can use the notepad to take notes, annotation tools to mark up documents or use a whiteboard, share their webcam or screen, and interact with each other. Breakout rooms are an ideal way of providing interaction, and they don’t need to be the same. Adobe Connect rooms are persistent and so are the breakout rooms associated with the main room. This means that you can set up different activities and different pods in each breakout room (you can create up to 20). When you’ve finished and ended the breakouts, you can bring the content from individual breakout rooms back into the main room for discussion.

Custom Pods

There is no limit on how a custom pod can be used to interact with your learners. Here are just a few of my favorite examples:

Game-based learning with custom pods like EduGameCloud and QuizConnect that incorporate learning games into your classroom
UpVote for soliciting ideas from your learners and voting on them
Word Cloud for quickly identifying common themes when capturing feedback
Anonymous Chat Pod for capturing feedback on sensitive subjects
Hands Up for quickly capturing feedback – including laughter and applause – during your session
Custom Survey and Polling Pod to add powerful surveys and polls

Quizzes

Adobe Connect supports quizzes created in Adobe Presenter and Adobe Captivate. In addition to providing interaction, a quiz can help you test the understanding of your learners. Options include multiple-choice, short answers, matching, fill in the blank, hot spot, sequence, and more. Quizzes are automatically unsynchronized in Adobe Connect so that everyone can fill them out independently.

Learning Interactions

In addition to quizzes, Adobe Connect supports lots of content from Captivate in both the HTML client and classic view.

Discover how you can keep your audience engaged with the latest features in Adobe Connect 11

Source: Adobe Connect Blog