How Strut Learning’s New Concept is Revolutionizing Student Engagement and Online Learning

Leverage this innovation to improve student engagement 100% in both traditional on-ground and online classrooms.

Student engagement is an often-discussed concept in education. In a traditional in-person environment, educators can more easily see and feel how engaged their students are by how interested they seem in what they’re learning. The ways students interact with the content, instructor, and peers dictate their affinity with the material.

Online learning, however, presents a new set of obstacles in terms of gauging students’ interest. Students are separated by a computer. Faculty must now work to not only engage students in this new environment, but also keep them motivated despite the heightened potential for feelings like frustration and isolation. Educators must find new, innovative ways to maintain the same levels of engagement students experience inside a classroom.

Thankfully, advancements in technology allow educators to engage with students like never before with interactive digital content. We’ve created a hyper-efficient, single click ability for faculty to quickly answer and grade students posts. This revolutionary new concept of discussion ideas is poised to change the game.

Do you struggle with in-class or online student engagement?

Student engagement can vary whether your class is online or on a college campus. Even in an in-person environment, select personality types tend to dominate college classroom conversations. How can we increase diversity and equity in terms of ensuring all students are equally engaged?

Generational elements affect how we prefer to learn today, too. Millennials are less accustomed to direct verbal exchanges and more prone to online conversing through channels like text messaging, Instagram, and instant messenger.

Strut analyzed these two issues and asked ourselves: How can we address these two challenges while also improving student learning outcomes? How do we ensure the faculty that use our software are able to have regular substantive interactions with all students, and in a way that resonates with them? How do we accomplish all this while also improving student outcomes? The answer is our interactive discussion dialog feature.

Creating regular substantive interaction with interactive discussions

With this new module, instructors can embed private threaded discussion questions directly into students’ reading assignments. Imagine if you’re reading a book, and a question is placed after a pivotal section of the story to invoke thought about a specific point or theme.

The interaction capabilities here are truly next-level. Students can respond via an audio and/or video recording. This makes it possible to assess not only written communication skills, but verbal and interactional communication skills as well. No other LMS can do this.

Before, you could ask the class a question and would get feedback from the same students that always engage. Students who aren’t prone to verbal exchanges likely wouldn’t speak up. Now, you can diversify your questions, create ongoing dialogues, and give everyone a chance to participate. It provides the opportunity to up engagement to almost 100%.

This functionality is simple to use, too. If you’re in the courseware, it’s easy to add a question to reinforce key concepts. It can require a response from the student, and that response can be graded. The threaded discussion can go on as long as needed. The modality allows you to engage with each students’ responses.