More than a YouTube Channel: Engaging Students in an Online Classroom

The global pandemic has made the symbiosis between technology and education even more inescapable and urgent. Without the possibility of face-to-face instruction, lecturers around the world need to re-think and re-conceptualize their teaching in order to avoid a return to predominantly frontal instruction in higher education. Otherwise, a university becomes an educational and rather expensive YouTube channel and students turn into passive consumers of knowledge. Against this backdrop, our chapter highlights the benefits of active learning and teaching methods that could be adapted to online seminars. As an illustration, we use the examples of two seminars at the Universities of Groningen and Bremen which originally had been planned as interactive and research-based learning scenarios but which had to be moved online abruptly during the COVID-19 pandemic. On this empirical basis, we discuss possible strategies for maintaining student engagement and activity in mid-size online seminars that put emphasis on developing higher-order cognitive, social, and practical skills as well as critical thinking while utilizing simulations, discussion boards, blogs, and other digital tools. We also stress the need to offer empathy during pandemic teaching.