The coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has severely crippled our globalized society. Despite the chaos, much of our civilization continued to function, thanks to contemporary information and communication technologies. In education, this situation required instructors and students to abandon the traditional face-to-face lectures and move to a fully online learning environment. Such a transition is challenging, both for the teacher tasked with creating digital educational content, and the student who needs to study in a new and isolated working environment. As educators, we have experienced these challenges when migrating our university courses to an online environment. Through this paper, we look to assist educators with building and running an online course. Before we needed to transition online, we researched and followed the best practices to establish various digital educational elements in our online classroom. We present these elements, along with guidance regarding their development and use. Next, we designed an empirical study consisting of two surveys, focus group discussions, and observations to understand the factors that influenced students' engagement with our online classroom. We used the same study to evaluate students' perceptions regarding our digital educational elements. We report the findings and define a set of recommendations from these results to help educators motivate their students and develop engaging digital educational content. Although our research is motivated by the pandemic, our findings and contributions are useful to all educators looking to establish some form of online learning. This includes developers of massive open online courses and teachers promoting blended learning in their classrooms.

中文翻译：

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在危机中将主动学习课堂迁移到网上的挑战


2019 年冠状病毒病 (COVID-19) 大流行严重削弱了我们的全球化社会。尽管混乱不堪，但得益于当代信息和通信技术，我们的文明大部分仍在继续运转。在教育领域，这种情况要求教师和学生放弃传统的面对面授课，转向完全在线的学习环境。对于负责创建数字教育内容的教师和需要在新的孤立工作环境中学习的学生来说，这种转变都充满挑战。作为教育工作者，我们在将大学课程迁移到在线环境时遇到了这些挑战。通过本文，我们希望帮助教育工作者构建和运行在线课程。在我们需要转向在线之前，我们研究并遵循了最佳实践，在我们的在线课堂中建立各种数字教育元素。我们介绍这些元素，以及有关它们的开发和使用的指南。接下来，我们设计了一项实证研究，包括两项调查、焦点小组讨论和观察，以了解影响学生参与在线课堂的因素。我们使用同一研究来评估学生对我们的数字教育元素的看法。我们报告调查结果并根据这些结果提出一系列建议，以帮助教育工作者激励学生并开发引人入胜的数字教育内容。尽管我们的研究是由大流行推动的，但我们的发现和贡献对所有希望建立某种形式的在线学习的教育工作者都是有用的。这包括大规模开放在线课程的开发者和在课堂上促进混合学习的教师。