Best Practices for Supporting Teaching and Learning Online

With online learning now being implemented at the University of Macau, committed teachers are holding classes online with UMMoodle and Zoom. This blog post features some of our colleagues’ tips and best practices. Let’s see what has worked well to support teaching and learning of different disciplines in an online environment.

.

Engaging Students During Zoom Meetings with Chat and Polls

By Mr. Miguel Costa (FST)

We are approaching a month of online teaching – it’s hard to believe the time is flying so fast! In this time period, I have been testing and implementing different Moodle tools (and some outside sources) to aid in my teaching. I have noticed there are certain tools that I have either gravitated towards or that my students have expressed a preference towards. I would like to share them in this post.

Chat in Zoom

Engaging students in an online class is even more challenging than in my usual classroom where I can monitor and interact with my students. So, to engage students in my online classes, I make use of Zoom’s in-meeting chat, which allows me to send text messages to students.

With Chat in Zoom, we can control students’ use of in-meeting chat in four ways:
1) with everyone publicly,
2) with everyone publicly and privately,
3) with me, the host, only,
4) enabling them to communicate with no one (not recommended).
Chat is an excellent way for me to provide prompt feedback to my students.

.

What is more, Zoom saves the in-meeting chat on your computer. After the meeting, I can review the chat transcript and check it for questions or messages from students then address them properly in a forum post on UMMoodle. For more details on how to use this chat function, see a guide here.

Polls in Zoom

Another feature I make use of is Zoom’s polling feature. If you have a “pro” or “licensed” account, you can use it to create single choice or multiple-choice polls, and share the results with all participants of that particular meeting. The polls can be set so that students can respond either anonymously or with their screen name. These quick polls allow me to monitor students’ understanding of the material and their attention during our meetings.

Polls can be created before, or during the meeting. At the end of the meeting, it is possible to generate and download the polling report and post it later on UM Moodle. For more information see the page here, or for details see a guide here.

.

Students who would like more information should pay close attention to their courses on UMMoodle. Video tutorials on how to use UMMoodle can be found at an ICTO page, A Distance Learning Quick Start Guide for Students.

Contact Points:
For teachers and students –

ICTO Help Desk
https://icto.um.edu.mo/help-desk-services/
Telephone: 8822-8600
Email: elearning@um.edu.mo