Interaction and co-production

In this section we offer ways of offering high quality ‘online parallels’ for the interactions and collaboration you might usually foster in seminars, workshops or interactive lectures. But we also suggest ways that online platforms can offer added value, especially in allowing for modes of asynchronous contributions that ‘live’ sessions do not nurture - postings, annotations, long-form collaborative discussion, considered and collective responses that are sometimes curtailed in live or in-situ contexts.

Online spaces can also offer enhanced room and opportunity for student co-production of resources, analysis and outputs, mirroring the dynamics of networked research, so we’d encourage you to build these digital dynamics into your modules, too.

This section offers ways of using digital technologies to:

• Enable forms of online engagement to stimulate interaction: chat, comment, polling, voting
• Offer online affirmation of, and feedback for, student contribution
• Set up spaces of student co-creation and editing: online ‘makerculture’
• Inspire student confidence as digital curators of knowledge

Tips and tools for interaction and co-production

• Use Mentimeter to provide real-time interaction between staff and students, Mentimeter can be accessed remotely by students and using live polling, quizzes etc. It allows students to provide instant feedback on questions or topics to staff.
  • Mentimeter help

• Support students to share their skills and co-produce resources online. Skills can be shared via video, discussion, or documents
  • The Open University: Maker culture at a distance  
  • How to work with channels(including private channels) within a team

• Empower students to present their solutions to the class digitally and reflect on how they could apply or build on them. Presentation can be via poster, video or live demonstration, with the whole class joining discussion about what should happen next:
  • Overview of how MS Teams can be used as a Digital Community

• Deploy Microsoft Sway as a collaborative tool to allow students to produce a journey through ideas, resources or solutions: co-creation of a learning resource / revision guide in MS Sway which can then be shared with their peers.
  • Sway Overview

• Use ‘co-production' and ‘project-building’ apps such as Padlet (see ‘2. Creating a Digital Community’), Pinterest, Trello or (within Microsoft Teams) Planner to allow students to curate ideas, resources and questions to support project-based or problem-based learning
  • Using Planner in Microsoft Teams

• Take a look at Enhancing Student Engagement with Live Sessions, an online guide by Dr Rafe Hallett, Director, KIITE and Catherine Chambers, Head of Digital Education, KIITE
  Including:
  • Practical tips on increasing participation in live sessions