SIDLIT 2024

When I began redesigning my courses online in 2018, I longed for a way for them to be interactive, engaging, and fun like my in-person courses. I wanted to make sure that students could see and hear one another each week and that they could interact with the content and me, while having the feel of being “in class” despite being on the other side of a computer screen.

I wanted students to gain a sense of community and to experiment with the course content (and in many cases with the target language they were learning) with other students and not just through auto-graded activities with their textbooks. I wanted them to share their experiences, thoughts and ideas, and to hear other students’ stories too.

It took a long time and a lot of experimenting with many platforms and tools, but I found one that really took my asynchronous courses to the next level – VoiceThread!

In this session, we will present examples of how to utilize VoiceThread to make online asynchronous classes engaging, maximize student-to-student connection, create community, connect with your students, and to provide a space for students to explore content in an interactive way.

We will demonstrate examples of how this has been successfully used to enhance engagement, how it has increased student participation and their sense of community and showcase the instructor and student experience.