KEY CONCEPT
Why Use Icebreakers?
Ice-breakers are techniques and/or strategies used during the beginning of a class or unit to reduce tension and to immediately involve students in the class in a light and effective way. Online ice-breakers, specifically, include additional techniques that utilize various technologies to develop a sense of community further. Ice-breakers are especially important for online learners because face-to-face interaction is not readily available.
Using Online Icebreakers to Promote Interaction
In an online environment, human interaction does not just happen naturally. Your online students need a way to get to know you, the instructor, and others. There are several ways to encourage your students to interact with each other. Ice breakers can occur synchronously or asynchronously. The idea is to be creative and set several guidelines for students to follow in order to stimulate asynchronous discussions using the FOL discussion tool.
Social Presence and Engagement
Icebreakers can promote social presence in an online course. This is what students experience when they feel connected to their fellow students, their instructors, and their TAs. Students are more motivated to learn and succeed when they feel connected to their online course community (Jaggars & Xu, 2016).
Social presence can be achieved by promoting emotional and cognitive engagement in a course. Icebreakers play a role in facilitating interactions between members in the course and can encourage meaningful engagement with course content.
Facilitating Icebreakers
Set the stage for engagement
As the instructor, you have an important role in modelling engagement for your online course. Start by introducing yourself and inviting students to do the same. Post an announcement so that all students can see it or start a discussion board topic for students to respond. Be creative – share a photo, record an audio message, or film a quick video introduction! Include information that you would also like to know about your students to give them an example of what their own introductions should look like.
Think about your goals for the icebreaker
Knowing what you’re trying to achieve will inform what types of activities you will do. Common goals of icebreakers include:
- Helping students feel like they’re part of a community
- Finding out students’ existing knowledge and attitudes about course content
- Facilitating groupwork and uncovering each group member’s strengths
Relate the activity to your course
Use icebreakers as an opportunity to get students thinking about course content and to gauge their expectations for the course.
- Ask questions related to the course content.
- Looking through the course outline, what topic looks the most interesting to you?
- Questions can also be discipline-related.
- Literature: What is your favourite novel/written work?
- Health: What does being healthy mean to you?
- Engineering: What is one thing you use all the time that is designed well and one thing with an inconvenient design that you would change?
- Ask questions that could inform your teaching.
- What can I do to make learning in this course more engaging for you?
- What is your favourite method of studying?
Icebreaker Ideas
Asynchronous
Asynchronous ways of engaging students are most effective in online courses. In FOL, consider setting up a discussion board to facilitate simple, asynchronous icebreakers.
- At the start of the course, ask students to introduce themselves and embed an icebreaker activity in their introductions.
- Ask fun questions or prompts you would like to know about your students beyond their academic term and program. Encourage them to share an image with their response.
- How would you describe yourself in 3 words/images? What is your favourite _? If you were a type of _, what would you be? If you could travel anywhere, where would you go? Share a photo of your favourite memory related to _.
- In addition to the course-related questions mentioned earlier, you can ask:
- Why did you take this course? What do you hope to learn by the end of this course?
- Encourage students to respond to other posts. Prompt them to reply to a peer with whom they share something in common. Start conversations by asking students to end their post with a question for other people to answer.
- For asynchronous group work, consider facilitating a group contract or group resumé activity where students collaboratively fill out a document template about what they can contribute to the project and what their expectations are for one another.
Synchronous
Synchronous icebreaker activities are limited by time constraints. Activities that require each person to respond in real-time are most appropriate for small group settings such as tutorials. Consider giving instructions for your icebreaker in advance if people need time to prepare.
- Ask a short and simple question.
- Would you rather this or that? What are you looking forward to this week?
- If webcams are enabled:
- Try an activity where you give a prompt to find an object nearby (e.g. “find something blue”) and have each participant share what they found.
- If your web conference technology supports custom backgrounds, ask students to turn on their favourite backgrounds.
- For large groups, you can pose a question using polls and share the results with the class. Experiment with the poll feature in your software, or try web alternatives like Poll Everywhere.
- Keep in mind that synchronous activities may not be inclusive to all students across time zones.
Some Common Orientation Icebreakers
Below is a list of 5 common online ice-breakers that can be adapted to your course to get you started:
- Two Lies and a Truth. Ask participants to list three interesting things about themselves. (I own two iguanas; I once shook hands with Tom Cruise, and I love to waterski.) Two must be lies and one must be true. Other participants must vote to determine which interesting thing is the truth. The participant with the most incorrect votes wins. Alternatively participants could be put into small groups and find out through teamwork what the truths and lies are. Another alternative game is three truths and a lie.
- Childhood Dream. Ask the participants to share their childhood dream (what they wanted to be or do when they grew up) and then ask them to reflect on how this correlates with their current aspirations.
- Miscomm-puter-unication. Ask the participants to share their most embarrassing mishap using a computer or mobile device. Share your own experience, for example, replying to the wrong person in an email. This will loosen them up and cause a few to chuckle before embarking on a whole new way of thinking…using technology instead of paper and pen.
- Three words. Ask participants to write a story together. The rule is that everyone is only allowed to put up three words. They are allowed to post again if at least one other participant has put up three words. At the end of the exercise, you can summarize the whole story of even read it and post it as an audio file or a video.
- Would you rather? Ask participants some ‘Would you rather’ questions and let them answer them. After this, participants can make up their own would you rather questions. Come up with a list of “Would you Rather…” questions or use some of these:
Additional Resources
The following are additional resources for this topic:References
- Portions of the information in this QRG have been reproduced and adapted from Icebreakers for Online Classes. Centre for Teaching Excellence, University of Waterloo, under a CC BY-NC 4.0 licence.
- Jaggars, S. S., & Xu, D. (2016). How do online course design features influence student performance?. Computers & Education, 95, 270-284.
Asynchronous learning, on the other hand, involves activities that do not occur in real-time and can be completed at the learners' own pace. This includes pre-recorded video lectures, discussion boards, online assignments, and self-paced quizzes. Asynchronous learning offers flexibility, allowing students to access materials when it suits their schedules.
Synchronous learning refers to real-time, interactive activities where instructors and learners are engaged simultaneously. This can include live video lectures, webinars, virtual meetings, or group discussions conducted at set times. Synchronous learning allows for immediate feedback, interaction, and a sense of community among participants.
