 It's well known now that engagement in online environments is a very important goal. Students that aren't engaged while they're learning online will tend to drop out. Most of the, from my knowledge, the massive open online courses that are out there have a completion rate of about less than 5%. So engagement is one way to increase that, to have students follow through. If I'm teaching face to face with students, there's an expectation that I will lecture and that they will take notes and from those notes they will study and from that studying they'll pass their exams. The problem with that model is that there's such a dependence on the instructor and you can flip the classroom and do all those other kind of pedagogically wonderful things even if the names are stupid. You can do all of that. But the student is still focused on the instructor. While I'm not lecturing in an online course, I don't have that 3 hour chunk each week that I'm doing that, I can now use that time to interact with my learners. The other aspect is in terms of making sure that your learners know that they can communicate with each other with the teaching assistants if there are those resources available. But a key part is make sure that your learners know that they can interact with each other. Provide them the mechanism, the tools and the environment where they feel that they can share and ask questions from each other. And so you're empowering your learners to help each other. Given that you're not seeing students face to face, you're not having the same kinds of interactions, you need to really design those things in. So I think developing the skills and abilities to engage students in an online format so whether that's via online discussions or activities, etc. is really important. Thinking about how to give effective feedback, because again in a face to face setting we have body language and visual cues and words that all help us to communicate to students how they're doing in an online course. We really only have some limited options there, so we can provide written feedback to them and engage them that way. We can provide audio feedback to them, which I really like in some settings, particularly when I'm saying get on track. And I like to use e-portfolios in my classes as well, because again I can provide comments to the students and engage them in meaningful learning that makes sense to them, so they get to make connections between what they're doing. So I think there's a whole variety of skills there that really have to do with how you engage the students and how you communicate expectations to them clearly and then provide feedback throughout the online course. To increase student engagement in online education in online communities and participating in these different forums, I've found that the thing that works best for me is to really work hard at tearing down the screen between me and the students to make the students realize that I'm a real person too and that they are real people to me as well. So there's a lot of legwork on my part that I try to get to know the students to a degree so that I can always be addressing them with something that is personal so that they are not the nameless, faceless mass. In the early going I have to be engaging with them a lot. The first two or three or four, the first month of class the engagement is almost non-stop. So I mean anyone who thinks you just load it up there and let it go and it'll run itself, I have found that no. You can get students out into groups there's breakout room tools and you can task them to do various things and they're on the internet so tasking them to do stuff is great. You can ask them to go out to Medline and find evidence for a question you post to them. You can ask them to go out and find a video or something that might support a teaching topic that you are discussing and then they can bring back and present that to the rest of the class. They can take over the class and teach each other all live and online and those are fantastic engagement strategies. Asynchronously with pre-recorded online lectures that's where I think the design and production values come in production techniques come in. So for instance you might have quizzes and questioning spaced through your tutorial or your lecture. You might have, you could have tasks where students have to go and find some piece of information and come back and answer a red question before they can continue. So those are ways to engage and if you can provide discussion boards or opportunities to chat as close to live as possible I think that really helps with courses. My role is not to go and gather this information. The information is already available online. So this means no sit down in the classroom and watch a movie together. It means showing them the internet link for that movie, working out a note-taking sheet for them that then they could bring to class afterwards after watching the movie. That means go and explore and critique two existing websites for instance and come back to the classroom with your notes and we will discuss it in the classroom. It means for me as the teacher to make sense of the information. So to draw concepts, to focus on the overarching themes but not on the actual pieces of information they can access to online. It means no for instance classroom trip to the library but an activity designed to help them use better the online library. It means not necessarily a debate in the classroom where shy people won't speak and a young mother with a child can't come on that day and miss the whole discussion. It's having this unsynchronic discussion online for instance that could be extremely rigorous following a very clear rubric that would permit even students that could not be in the classroom to have sophisticated discussion. So there are many, many ways one could think of blended teaching and take the most important or the most valid aspects of teaching in both words and bring them to the classroom.