Encouraging Student Engagement Through Storytelling

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a severe impact on higher education. Universities worldwide had to transition abruptly to online teaching, which was unexplored territory for most academics. The transition came bearing a new set of challenges: while on-campus lectures allow direct visual contact with students, enabling academics to use body language and eye contact to help encourage student engagement, these are absent in online sessions. As a result, lectures can become monotonic, with little interaction and indeed lacking the depth that engagement can motivate. This paper describes efforts by one academic to address these challenges, motivated by student feedback. The challenges were addressed by bringing in a more storified approach based on sketches, relegating the usual PowerPoint presentation to a supportive rather than a central role in the lecture sessions. An interesting change observed as a result of this approach was that the academic's style changed from an expert teaching style to a facilitator teaching style.