Students as Co-Owners of the Online Synchronous Learning Community

Session Description

This forum will explore the use of polls and virtual field trips to structure  live seminars that encourage student engagement and co-ownership of the synchronous learning community. Both strategies are based in the finding by Stoerger and Krieger (2016) that student evaluation suggests that the learning experience is improved when students are involved in the construction of knowledge.

Conference participants will be invited to take a poll early in the presentation to gauge their current use of some variation of the strategies to be explored so that we can adapt the presentation to the experience level of the audience.  Continued engagement will be encouraged throughout the presentation by asking open-ended questions to give participants the chance to share experiences and ideas about their own use of polls and virtual field trips.  Attendees will  benefit from this presentation by gaining new perspectives on ways to use existing technology to maximize student engagement and learning during synchronous online learning.

Presenter(s)

Brenda Beach is a fulltime faculty member in the Department of Humanities and Social Science. She earned her PhD in Sociology from the University of Virginia at Charlottesville. Prior career fields include corrections program planning, criminology for the defense, and social services program management. Brenda’s research interests are the centered in the state response to the aging inmate population.


Mary Laska
Purdue Global University

Mary Laska is a full time faculty member in the Department of Social Sciences in the School of General Education at Purdue Global University. She joined Purdue Global University as an adjunct professor in the fall of 2008 and was hired full time in 2009. She currently teaches career development strategy courses, social science survey courses, and introduction to sociology.
Mary Laska received her BA in Sociology from the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 1995 and her PhD in Medical Sociology from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 2001.
Mary lives in Huntsville, Alabama with her husband and four children. When not being a sociologist, Mary loves to find time to sew and be creative.

Posted in Uncategorized.