THEME: TAL2021 - The Good Example - Combining Breakout Rooms and Poll Everywhere to improve student engagement and participation during online lectures (via Zoom)

Learning objectives for the learning activity 
Søren's goal in redesigning the Advanced Product Modeling (APM) course was to investigate whether the use of polls could be used in Breakout Rooms in Zoom, in order to increase students' engagement and participation through active learning. In addition, the secondary objectives were: 

• Setting the scene for the rest of the lesson 
• Motivate students to attend the online class from the beginning of the lesson 
• Social and academic integration 
• Reduce cognitive load 

More specifically, Søren used the learning activities for various purposes such as: 

• Alignment of course expectations 
• Reflections and discussions on course content and putting it into a context 
• Self-assessment and evaluation on homework  
• Knowledge sharing and peer-feedback 
• Peer instructions during groupwork 

The learning activity 
Nine learning activities were planned and facilitated following the same three steps: 

1. Introduction 
   • Recognizable slide for each activity 
   • Outlined expectations for group work  
   • Direction on expected output and timeframe for the activity 
2. Work 
   • Student where randomly divided into Breakout Room
   • The group work was planned with a duration of 10-20 minutes
   • The teacher would be able to continuously monitor the output from the groups through their Poll Everywhere responses and prepare accordingly

   Here you can see an example of Søren's use of the Q&A poll format with the associated results page. In the Q&A format, students write an answer that can be down voted or up voted. On the results page, the blue horizontal bars show how much a student response has been up voted by other students (all teachers can get a SDU license to Poll Everywhere).  
   

    

3. Summary and feedback on the group work 
   
   

The impact of the learning activity 
Here you can see some excerpts from Søren's comprehensive evaluation of his online teaching and the learning activities used using polls in Breakout Rooms in Zoom. 

View an excerpt from the evaluation

 How can this practice be transferred in the future? 
According to Søren, the approach used can be used for most online courses. The approach shows how a simple combination of e-learning tools can be used to support and even improve common teaching techniques such as group discussions and think-pair-share activities in online teaching. However, Søren's study also indicates that the teacher has acquired the necessary skills within the e-learning tools used, as this is a prerequisite for a good online experience. This is backed up by the feedback from the students as indicated below: 

• 91% of students (in the course) think it is either “Important” or “Very important” that “Teachers are proficient in using e-learning tools”.  
• 97% of students (in the course) either “Agree” or “Strongly agree” with the statement “The teacher's proficiency in applying e-learning tools affect the online learning”