A webinar on engaging students in online teaching was hosted by CLEAR at 7:00 pm on March 17^th 2022. Prof. LI Lan, Director of CLEAR briefly introduced the problems reflected in the recent online teaching survey. Four winners of the Presidential Exemplary Teaching Award shared their online teaching tips. They were: Dr. SUN Cong from SME, Prof. Daniel WONG from SSE, Prof. HE Jinbo from HSS, and Prof. DU Yang from LHS. Their sharing was inspiring with distinctive nature of the courses they teach.

Dr. SUN Cong adopted the on-camera delivery to share videos so as to decrease the intension of the internet bandwidth. He used Poll to ask students questions based on the content of the video. Dr. SUN summarized five tips for us. To attract students’ attention and improve their engagement in online lecture, teacher can: find more diversified and visualized materials; use handwriting, self-assessments and Polls to keep students’ attention and interaction; and encourage them voice out their opinions or type in the Chatbox, etc.

Prof. Daniel WONG demonstrated his lecture in Mathematics with both Ipad and notebook logging into ZOOM. The tablet is used as a whiteboard for students to see the steps of a calculation clearly. Prof. WONG believes that writing out calculation in an online class is one of the most effective ways to keep students’ attention.

The third speaker was Prof. HE Jinbo. His strategies to keep students engaged in online teaching are: 1. Randomly check student attendance; 2. Keep an eye on the Chatbox on the screen and give responses to students’ messages frequently; 3. Design in-class assessments in different formats; 4. Ask students to type in messages in the Chatbox before answering questions.

Prof. DU Yang strongly recommended the software Downie 4 for downloading videos from YouTube. He has successfully collected nearly 100 high quality videos in in the field of Biology. With these interesting videos, students can learn with joy and passion. Amongst the seven tips he summarized he emphasized the last two: Constant repetition of important concepts, and frequent communication in WeChat group with students.

Four teachers from HSS also volunteered to share their online teaching experiences. They were: Dr. YANG Xiaoyin, Dr. HONG Mingyan, Dr. Melvin STERNE and Dr. GUO Xin.

During the webinar, participants exchanged their ideas on how to engage students in ZOOM classes, introduced some software, e-tools, and tips.

At the end of the webinar, CLEAR collected the feedback from the audience. 100% of participants regarded the webinar satisfactory, rewarding and helpful to online teaching.

The video of the webinar is now available here at the SharePoint of CLEAR, to benefit more teachers.

With the success of this webinar, CLEAR will continue to organize more activities to promote best practices in online teaching.