Translating Best Practices for Student Engagement to Online STEAM Courses

As universities continue to offer more distance education through online courses, they face the challenge of translating onsite best practices into online courses in order to enhance student engagement, improve student persistence, and optimize student retention in STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math) programs.This paper describes how we adapted face-to-face classroom engagement techniques related to group discussions (both synchronous and asynchronous) and labs into online courses in applied engineering and digital media design at National University.