Discover how a cross-discipline collaboration revamped an online programming course using industry-inspired stand-up discussions. This simple, structured approach fosters student engagement, accountability, and belonging while integrating professional communication skills into the curriculum. Consider ways to enhance your online courses with your own practical, low-stakes/high-impact interactions.

Topic and Relevance

Meaningful engagement between students and faculty in asynchronous courses is incredibly important to student success but is not easy to achieve with online students’ various needs and schedules. The well-worn weekly discussion often leads to busy work for students to complete and for faculty to monitor and assess. This session presents an alternative: a collaboration between a CIS faculty member and an instructional designer, focusing on the implementation of industry-inspired stand-up discussions to increase student interaction and build a sense of community in an asynchronous Python Programming II course.
The diversity in students’ programming experience, combined with the inherent isolation of asynchronous learning, makes it challenging to create opportunities for connection. This leads to lower levels of engagement, reluctance to ask for help, and a lack of timely feedback from students about the difficulties they encounter. Drawing from industry practices, our approach adapted weekly stand-up discussions, a common framework in the programming profession, to create structured, low-stakes interactions that encouraged students to regularly communicate their progress, challenges, and upcoming goals. The result was not only increased engagement but also a stronger sense of belonging and peer accountability, particularly important in the online learning context.

This session is relevant to instructional designers, faculty, and administrators interested in enhancing student engagement in online courses through practices that integrate real-world professional skills with active learning. The approach also aligns with equity-focused pedagogical practices by decentralizing assessment, fostering learner agency, and increasing student belonging. Finally, the open-ended structure of these discussions creates the opportunity for more meaningful student/student and student/faculty interaction, and student feedback without increasing faculty workload.

This structured, low-stakes stand-up discussion format ensures students check in with their peers and faculty regularly, fostering both personal accountability and positive peer pressure. By participating real-world practices like stand-ups, students see this class activity as relevant to their future professional roles, reducing perceptions of busywork and creating meaningful engagement opportunities. These impressive online student gains can be achieved with less effort than faculty may think–allowing them to spend more energy interacting with students than in grading them.

Takeaways for Attendees
By attending this session, participants will gain:
1. Practical strategies for increasing student/student and student/faculty interaction in asynchronous or online courses through simple, structured prompts.
2. Insights into how team-based, low-stakes discussions can foster a sense of belonging, accountability, and peer support.
3. An understanding of how professional communication skills can be integrated into course design in ways that are easy to implement and assess.
4. Ideas for using cross-disciplinary collaboration to enhance course design by blending instructional design principles with subject-matter expertise.