Ten Tips for Self-Paced Lessons in Nearpod

published by Mike Neumire on 9/23/2024

Self-paced learning is an impactful strategy for meeting all the variability that your students bring to your classroom. It provides flexibility, allowing students to learn at their own speed, and encourages deeper engagement with content. When paired with a versatile platform like Nearpod, self-paced learning shines even brighter, offering teachers a unique blend of creative pedagogy and precise, data-driven insights. Through the thoughtful integration of interactive tools, multimedia elements, and personalized learning experiences, educators can guide students to explore concepts in ways that align with their individual learning styles. Here are ten useful tips for crafting engaging and effective self-paced lessons in Nearpod, ensuring that students remain engaged, accountable, and reflective as they progress through their learning journeys. 

Record audio over slides

Nearpod has built-in audio recording options for your content slides. This is a powerful feature for self-paced lessons because you can narrate slides just like you would live in class. This also helps you avoid the dreaded full blocks of text on slides. Instead, you can pair simple visuals with your recorded explanations. For instructions, it is always easier to feel confident you’re doing the right thing when you can hear a human voice laying out the steps- especially when it’s a voice you know. A hidden benefit for recording over content slides is that this process is a natural way to be sure you are being concise. It is easy to be long-winded or go on tangents when talking over a slide in class, but when you record yourself, you have every chance to revise and edit your script to be just what is necessary.

Require student responses and prevent skipping

A common, anxious refrain from teachers attempting to implement self-paced learning structures is that they won’t be able to ensure that students are engaging and completing work. A handy little feature available in Nearpod is a toggle button called “require student responses and prevent skipping” which locks a Nearpod lesson down so that they can’t get to the next slide until they fully complete the activity on their current slide. This is a relief because if a student finishes your lesson, you can be confident that they at least did something. For interactive videos, students have to watch all the way to the end and answer any questions you may have embedded. You could even gamify this by including something at the end of the lesson for students to discover. This could be a hidden code or phrase to encourage students to persist to the end.

Use interactive video

Video is a common tool of blended and self-paced learning. With a video, students can pause, rewind, rewatch and adjust playback pace. These features empower students with some agency over their learning. Nearpod takes this building block of self-paced learning a step further by offering interactive video. This means that teachers can embed questions throughout the video that students have to answer before they can continue watching. This in-the-moment questioning is more effective than saving a set of questions for students to answer once they’ve watched the video in full. Questions in this format can be open-ended or multiple choice.

Use collaborate boards for students to interact with each other

One of the drawbacks of self-paced learning is that it is much harder to tap into the social learning structures that are more easily done in a classroom of students all moving together through instruction. One small way to tap into that social value on Nearpod is with collaborate boards. Collaborate boards are like digital bulletin boards where students can post short responses for others to see and respond to. Collaborate boards are great for brainstorming, reflecting, and more. As the teacher, you have total moderation controls as well. If you’re worried about students posting inappropriate content, you can set up moderation so that you have to approve posts before they’re visible to other students. The same goes for comments, and other visibility choices.

Adjust the lesson’s expiration date

By default, a self-paced lesson on Nearpod expires in 30 days. However, if that is not enough time, you can manually extend the expiration date up to a year from the time you launch it. This can be especially useful if you want to lean on your Nearpod lessons for spaced retrieval practice. Students can return to previous lessons to engage again in spaced intervals and really code the learning into their long term memory.

Decide if students should see quiz results

In your lesson settings, you can decide if, in general, students can see the results of their quizzes right after they complete them. You may not want this kind of immediate feedback if you want students to answer the same questions again at some point.

View Progress

While reports are useful ways of viewing your students’ understanding, it is often helpful to see how students are progressing in the same way you would during a live Nearpod lesson. This is possible with the “view progress button” when you pull up a self-paced session. You can then move through the slides of your lesson and for any that have student interaction, you can see that data just as you would during a live lesson.

Balance content with interactivity

Nearpod is valuable, in part because of all the interactive features it allows you to incorporate into your instruction. Things like polls, open-ended questions, quizzes, drag and drop, fill in the blank, matching pairs, gamified quizzes, and draw it slides give students opportunities to actively make sense of what they’re learning in the moment. This is just as important with self-paced lessons. Going heavy on content slides is likely to disengage students, and at the same time, give you no window into their understanding. Balance content with interactive options to provide students novel ways to engage and show what they know. These interactive options are also great ways to get students reflecting and tapping into executive functioning strategies, like goal setting or working through checklists. You can also include outside websites as slides to keep the format fresh and standards-rich.

Provide choice where possible

Learner agency is a major reason self-paced learning is so valuable. When students have the autonomy to control their own pace of learning, they can focus on what they’re learning instead of focusing on keeping up with the class. This student-centered design can be enhanced further by incorporating more choice in how they engage. Some easy ways to include choice in Nearpod are to use slideshows (a vertical set of slides for students to scroll through), linking out to different resources on a content slide, or adding a hyperdoc as a web content slide, from which students can choose different options like which article they want to read, etc. Of course, you could always add each option as its own slide in Nearpod, but it is best practice to avoid making students have to navigate all those slides to get to their choice.

Provide opportunities for reflection

When teaching a lesson to your students in-person, you have the benefit of being able to see and talk to them as you go. You can get a pretty quick idea of when students are checking out or need a different strategy. You don’t necessarily have this luxury when students are completing self-paced instruction, and so building in opportunities to reflect can be a powerful design choice. You may choose to just have them respond to a poll question, or even use a collaborate board and have them find a GIF that best represents what their level of overwhelm is at that moment, for others to see and connect to. One of my favorite tricks is to include a Google Form as the last slide, asking students to reflect on the experience. This helps me improve my self-paced instructional design. It also is a handy way for me to be notified when a student completes a lesson. Nearpod does not have its own internal notification system, so there’s no inherent way for me to know that a student has finished. However, I can choose to get email notifications when someone fills out my Google Form, so if it is at the end of my lesson, I know to check in.

Self-paced learning in Nearpod isn’t just about letting students work independently; it’s about crafting an environment where students feel empowered to take control of their education, reflect on their progress, and engage with content in meaningful ways. By carefully balancing interactive elements, monitoring student progress, and incorporating opportunities for reflection, you can create a learning experience that not only supports academic achievement but fosters critical skills like self-regulation and metacognition. As you implement these strategies, remember that the goal is not only mastery of content but also nurturing students' autonomy and confidence in their ability to learn. With these ten tips, you’ll be well on your way to creating lessons that are as engaging as they are educational, setting your students up for success in a world that increasingly values personalized, lifelong learning.