Play your way to an "A": helping students engage during the social isolation of remote learning

With the increased attention focused on active learning, educators strive to find better and more innovative ways to engage students in the classroom. One of the hurtles that educators are presented with is that the classroom is no longer limited to a physical location but rather students and professor can meet via the internet, Before COVID-19, distance or remote learning was something that students, by and large, had the option of choosing in which whether to engage. Students had the option to take "online courses," whether those be synchronous remote learning or asynchronous online courses. Indeed, numerous studies have focused on investigating the efficacy of many different approaches to distance and online learning. Unfortunately, COVID 19 mandated a rapid transition to remote learning, and with this forced change has come what some students describe as "Zoom fatigue" (Wolf CR. Psychology Today, May 2020). Many students reported feeling exhausted, overwhelmed, and disengaged by the dramatic increase in mandated distance education required by the COVID pandemic. Video conferencing has become the "go-to" panacea for education during this time, and students are spending unprecedented amounts of time in front of a screen when normally they would be in a classroom. This heretofore singular and unique approach to education coupled with decreased peer-to-peer interaction has caused a problem with student engagement (Goodman BE, Barker MK, Cooke JE. Adv Physiol Educ 42: 417-423, 2018). Students' engagement and performance have decreased during COVID-19 because of forced online learning and lack of peer interaction. We hypothesize that creating a nongraded, fun, and relaxing physiology-focused "Trivia Night" will increase student engagement and performance on summative assessments. Using a master's level class progressing through the respiratory physiology module utilizing remote, synchronous lectures to deliver content, we introduced a voluntary Trivia Night review session with teams randomly assigned to increase interaction among peers and review respiratory physiology material.NEW & NOTEWORTHY This article presents the effectiveness of the use of the "pub Trivia Night" to facilitate learning, deconstruct misconceptions, and increase engagement during remote teaching due to the COVID-19 pandemic.