Optimizing ENGAGEMENT in UDL means providing students with a number of ways to participate and giving them a reason value the time they spend with us... unfortunately, the biggest obstacle to this is that an upsettingly large number of students are simply bored to tears by the prospect of staring at a screen for five+ hours, no matter what they see, and disengage before we're even done saying, "Good Morning". Students who enjoy spending lots of time in front of their PC, or on their phones, probably also have a dozen places they'd rather be (Tiktok, Reddit, YouTube, Insta) and we have to compete with these sites to hold their attention. Phones are distracting enough when they're in the classroom, where we can at least tell them to turn them off or leave them in a cubby but, with the kids at home, keeping them from being distracted is nearly impossible.
Trying to be more entertaining than TikTok is a futile undertaking, but it is possible to compete with these sites by being more relevant.
If there's one thing we can offer the students that YouTube can't, it's the chance to interact meaningfully with their friends, in real time. Many of the more outgoing students, I have noticed, are eager to work with their classmates on even the smallest of projects because it's a chance to feel useful and efficacious. Students who tune out when we put on a video or ask them to read something to themselves are likely to return to the classroom when we place them in breakout rooms and give them a shared assignment, especially if it gives them the chance to show off their competency in front of one another.
The trick then, I feel, is to find ways to give all students opportunities to feel like they're "nailing it", regardless of their individual skill levels.
One way to do this, is to ask the kids their opinions, and give them room to share. My CT has included time every day for students to speak in the classroom about their views on one thing or another, and I think this has worked well. When done near the beginning of class, I have noticed that student engagement seems higher.
I have not, however, seen as much student choice as I would like, in terms of giving them multiple ways to complete assignments or demonstrate learning. I'll admit, I'm kind of lost, myself, as to how one can accomplish this in an online setting. They basically have to interact with the applications they are using in the ways they are designed to be interacted with; creativity is hard to accommodate in Schoology or Amplify, and I can't think of many ways to get around that.