Like many educators, the first experience of online teaching came several days after a nationwide COVID lockdown was announced in early 2020. I was teaching high school social science and religious education at the time, and rapid shifts between online, hybrid, and in-person formats left little time to think carefully about how to structure online teaching.

In late 2025, I taught an online-only summer intensive introduction to anthropology called “Anthropology of Current World Issues” at the University of Queensland in Australia (UQ). While I was initially hesitant to apply for this role, as anxieties associated with the unprocessed feelings of COVID came welling up, I also recognized it as a chance to pause and think meaningfully—philosophically and pedagogically—about building online learning communities and explore the affordances of accessible education in online spaces.

The short teaching semester happened to come on the tail end of me completing my PhD thesis, which discusses how contemporary churches in Australia use media and entertainment technologies to craft comfortable and familiar atmospheres that feel accessible to a wide range of worshipers. During my fieldwork, I spoke with and interviewed so-called digital ministers who are in the business of translating the in-person Sunday worship service into a format that engages online audiences. Combining multimedia technology and smart stage design, they try to capture the experience of the church auditorium and bring it into the world through social media platforms and YouTube.

The services I studied are highly structured and instructional. Sermons, in particular, are not unlike lectures. Inspired by how these churches leverage social techniques and digital technologies to create engaging, community-centered experiences, this article considers some techniques I drew on when trying to engage my own students in online communities. Even though I first applied these techniques in an online-delivery context, I see these as more widely applicable pedagogical tips for teaching in the online era where digital tools are deeply ingrained in educational life.

Digital ministers in the Pentecostal churches I visited see themselves as creating and capturing an “atmosphere” using the various technologies at their disposal. This atmosphere needs to be welcoming and engaging, but at the same time culled of possible distractions. A buzzing microphone or out-of-focus camera shot might cause people distraction, which makes communication less effective. At the same time, the designed space and environment need to feel safe—soft lighting, familiar faces, and recognizable songs feature in every service to make the service comfortable.

Students, like congregants in modern churches, are used to high-quality and engaging content on their social media feeds and streaming platforms, which can be accessed from the comfort of their home. Churches understand themselves as directly competing with these platforms, and perhaps so should we as teachers. That is not to say that we should all become “content creators.” Rather, I want to share here some small techniques I used in the online-only summer semester course to engage students and provide them with a sense of community, all the while nudging them to participate in the uncomfortable act of challenging one’s thinking, from the comfort of their home.

The Course and Pedagogy

Anthropology of Current World Issues (ANTH1030) is structured around a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) developed a decade ago by anthropologist Gerhard Hoffstaedter and a team of UQ colleagues and learning designers called “World101X.” The MOOC is split into eight episodes, divided into three modules: Anthropology 101, Indigeneity, and Living Within Limits.

Where the first couple of episodes feature interviews with well-known anthropologists about what anthropology is and means, most episodes center around an anthropologist from UQ’s anthropology department in their field. They are filmed engaging with research participants and explain in interviews with the course coordinators how their research speaks to current world issues such as nationalism, pollution, migration, cultural heritage, scarcity, and indigeneity. The videos and questions in the online modules provided context or mini lectures, which could be expanded on in the lectures and workshops.

With the MOOC functioning as our “textbook,” the one-hour lectures delivered via Zoom provided time to contextualize concepts and themes. The ninety-minute workshops held synchronously (also via Zoom) following the lectures were used to deepen academic skill development and ground the discussed concepts in the lived reality of students.

In my pedagogical practice, I find much inspiration in the anti-hierarchical and liberatory pedagogies of bell hooks and Paulo Freire. In Teaching to Transgress, hooks describes community as the key ingredient in teaching for critical thinking and a focus toward social change:

I enter the classroom with the assumption that we must build “community” in order to create a climate of openness and intellectual rigor. Rather than focusing on issues of safety, I think that a feeling of community creates a sense that there is shared commitment and a common good that binds us. (hooks 1994, 40)

To achieve this sense of community, it is important to let each voice be heard so that everyone feels seen as a valued contributor. Doing this effectively means to flatten the classical teaching hierarchy, by positioning oneself as a fellow learner alongside students.

While this is difficult enough to achieve in an in-person setting, the online (and often asynchronous) environment makes it extra difficult to realize this sense of community. Especially when students are hesitant to speak up or turn on their camera, alternative ways of letting their voices be heard need to be found.

Outfitting the Lobby

The first points of contact in any course, even before the lectures start, are the syllabus and the learning management system (LMS: Blackboard/Moodle/Canvas). Even if these platforms are often unintuitive to navigate at best and feel more like bureaucratic necessities, they do provide a platform to connect and include opportunities to make students feel heard and seen.

For example, in addition to the required multi-page written syllabus that tends to read (and act) more like a legal contract between student and teacher, I provided students with visual and interactive syllabi to engage with (Canva templates are available for this). I used some simple HTML to generate a stylized table (figure 1) that includes clickable links to the MOOC modules, readings, and Zoom meetings to make navigation to the different meeting sites easy and visually pleasing. I used Claude (AI) to generate the HTML outline to be integrated into Blackboard and then customized the code to adjust to the relevant content for each week.

Spending the time to make the LMS look good or creating a visual syllabus (Figure 2) not only makes the course content more accessible but also communicates care toward students, which helps them feel seen. Several students, some of whom are neurodivergent or experience learning difficulties, noted that the visual tools really helped them. Besides serving a practical function, the tools played an important role in helping these students feel seen and included in the learning community.

From the start of the course, on the LMS and in lectures, I communicated to students to consider others in their community when they have questions of their own. This was a direct response to the wave of emails I received from students even before semester had started. Rather than emailing me directly, I encouraged the use of a discussion forum on Blackboard that was renamed Q&A, writing, “If you think about messaging/emailing us directly, reflect for a second and ask: Might the answer to this question be useful to others? If yes: Post here. Don’t be shy or selfish: Assume that others are on a similar journey to you!” The Q&A page was well-used, and as the semester progressed students started responding to others’ questions instead of waiting for a response from the TA or lecturer.

These techniques, and the effective use of the LMS, helped students to feel seen and supported, even before teaching commenced. There are, of course, many more digital tools that can be leveraged in this way. However, I have also found that students (especially online-only) get rather tired of having to juggle multiple platforms. While LMS’s are often less than ideal to use and navigate for teachers and students alike, I have come to see them as the school foyer or a conference center lobby. It is not where the action happens, per se, but people can come together there, go to the front desk for advice, or follow the signage to find where they need to be.

Designing an Environment for Engagement

This might be a hangover from my brief stint as a high school teacher, but I care deeply about classroom aesthetics. The week before semester, I usually spent considerable time I could have spent on teaching materials redecorating the room: I’d put up fresh posters on the walls, set new trinkets on my desk, and would even put up pictures on or hang drapes from the ceiling. I taught religious education, and was inspired by houses of worship like cathedrals and mosques with decorated vaults and domes. These visual elements allow people to look around while still being reminded of the space they are in and the message they listen to. Moreover, changing things up between semesters and academic years helps to clean the slate and keeps things interesting.

For this reason, university lecture halls and tutorial rooms have always tremendously frustrated me. Avenues for keeping things visually interesting are limited. Apart from perhaps your own outfit and performance, lecture slides are your only recourse.

Fortunately, that is less of a problem in the online classroom. Whether you teach from a home or an on-campus office, you can (re)decorate to your heart’s desire. The challenge lies in balancing consistency with surprise to keep things interesting.

In this course, I delivered a sixty-minute lecture almost directly followed by ninety-minute workshops. I aim to stick by the 20-20-20 rule (take a twenty second break looking at something twenty feet away after twenty minutes of screen time), which handily overlaps with the oft-reported but most likely outdated average twenty-minute attention span of adults. In practice, this means that I aim to provide three interactive moments, often for individual reflection exercises, in a sixty-minute lecture. The workshops after lectures are then characterized by more constant interaction between myself, the TA, and students, often focused on course readings for the first half and academic skill development in the second half of the ninety-minute session—with a short five-minute stretch break in between. Despite providing interactive exercises across lecture and workshop in various formats, that is still a long time to keep students engaged while looking at a screen, so visual diversity is a must.

The main technique I used to keep the visual “landscape” interesting was to pre-record sections of the lecture. While I had to deliver several lectures completely prerecorded during the semester, I mostly integrated these short, pre-recorded videos into my lectures. Doing this takes some work and involves getting oneself into the often-uncomfortable guise of a content creator. Setting up a tripod and microphone, I often filmed myself in public places relevant to the week’s content.

For a section on museum anthropology, I filmed myself in front of the local Queensland Museum and shot some b-roll inside. I filmed an introduction to doing literature research in the on-campus library. In this way, students who are tuning in to a course from their bedrooms or home office are brought on to campus or into the world where anthropology is being practiced.

Of course, it is also possible to play a YouTube video doing exactly that, but what I learned from the MOOC content, as well as the churches I did research with, is that it is the consistency and the familiar faces that show up week after week that make the content engaging and feel coherent. This, in turn, helps to build that sense of community that is needed for effective teaching in anthropology.

Between the MOOC content, the lecture delivered synchronously (live) via Zoom, and the pre-recorded “shorts” shot on location and played during the lectures, students were already presented with three distinct visual styles. For the workshops, I again tried to “switch things up” by keeping things visually different. This is to avoid “Zoom fatigue” that is so prevalent.

During the five-minute break between lecture and workshop, I quickly reset my camera and lights to show a different angle of my office. Having things (books, trinkets, lights, a door) extending into the background not only creates a sense of depth which is pleasing on the eyes, but also gives students something to look at while listening or conversing with one another—just like the drapes, posters, and images on the walls and ceiling of my high-school classroom. This is especially important if students are hesitant to turn on their cameras, which makes direct eye-contact (and therefore feedback) impossible. A Zoom background, on the other hand, is flat and therefore visually exhausting, making students more likely to divert their attention.

Speaking of cameras and lights—quality visuals and quality audio are a must in the current media environment. As with the LMS design, high-quality materials signal a sense of care towards the content and the students engaging with it. Using the high-quality cameras on your iPhone instead of the built-in webcam, mounted to a tripod, and an inexpensive ring light to evenly illuminate your face do a lot to increase quality. A proper podcast microphone that sits just out of frame, or a lapel mic from a reputable brand are inexpensive and accessible ways to make content more engaging.

Expressing Oneself Online

To create an online community means to find techniques that make students feel seen and cared for. Workshops, therefore, were centered around student participation and input, and were about making anthropological concepts and methods relatable to students.

It is true that is more difficult to get students to talk in online tutorials, and while I encourage vocal participation, I am certainly not going to mandate it (or cameras). Luckily, there are other ways through which students can have their voices heard.

One activity asked students to look through their own camera roll and share a recent photo they took that elicited a sense of home or belonging for them. Responding verbally to students sharing this piece of themselves in the chat did prompt some students to turn on their microphone when the TA and I asked follow-up questions.

In another exercise, students were separated into breakout rooms (small groups) and were asked to build their own “DIY” nation-state, complete with institutions to solidify their “imagined community.” While some students spoke to one another in their breakout rooms, other groups chose to use the chat to communicate, or used the Zoom whiteboard to make a collage of what their imagineered nation would look like.

Students want to feel part of a learning community, even if they sign up for an online-only course. We saw direct evidence of this several weeks into the semester. In preparation for an assignment on museum anthropology, I organized an in-person museum visit in the city. Even though this extracurricular activity took place mere days before the Christmas break, thirty students joined for the visit and many stuck around after to discuss our experiences, ask questions about the assessment, and chat about the semester thus far.

Conclusion

This short summer semester showed me that students want to learn and, while circumstances sometimes prevent them from being able to join on-campus life, are keen to connect to others. I believe that we, as anthropologists, should embrace that human impulse in our teaching, showing our commitment to care, while building a reciprocal community of learners.