How to deal with a setting where some students come to synchronous class unprepared?
This is the online version of the flipped classroom, of course. But, I suspect that a lot of your students aren't familiar with the concept or how to behave. Like most everything else, you need to teach them what their responsibilities are. Probably they are most used to being &quot;told things&quot; and then working on their own. But that won't work here.
One possibility (the stick) is to hold a quiz at the very start of each synchronous meeting, based on the readings. Another is to start out asking individual students to respond to a question of yours. This could be at any time during the class.
But you should also probably publish a sheet that describes the expectations and what will occur (and what won't) in the online sessions.
To put a bit of carrot along with the stick, you could make the quizzes count &quot;extra&quot; toward their grades, so that answering correctly add something, but incorrectly doesn't penalize them. This works with the more motivated students, of course.
But the normal flipped classroom is normally a problem solving session where the problems are based on the previous readings/videos. These normally form the basis for a part of the grade, perhaps substantial. The face sessions aren't just for questions, but might begin that way.
But you probably need to make &quot;coursework submission&quot; more regular, so that it doesn't just come at the end. Students are busy and will ration their time and effort within the parameters they see. Tighten the parameters to see different behavior. Whether they &quot;like it&quot; or not is less important than if they learn something.