Harvard Studied Active Learning. How to Make Online Classes More Interactive on Mac

Online classes are easy to run like a video call and hard to run like a classroom.

A teacher shares a slide deck. A trainer walks through a dashboard. A developer explains code. A founder teaches a customer how to use a product. Everyone can hear the speaker, but the students may still be passive, quiet, and unsure where to look.

The better outcome is not a flashier lecture. It is an online class where learners do something with the material: answer a question, follow a worked example, mark the important part of a screen, compare two options, sketch a model, or explain the next step.

On a Mac, that means treating your shared screen as a teaching surface, not just a broadcast window.

Quick Takeaway

The best way to make online classes more interactive on Mac is to build small active moments into the lesson and make those moments visible on screen.

Use this pattern:

Teach one concept or workflow at a time.
Ask learners to predict, choose, calculate, annotate, or explain before you reveal the answer.
Use the shared screen to mark the exact area they should inspect.
Switch to a whiteboard when the idea needs a quick sketch.
Pause after each active prompt so learners have time to think.
Use cursor highlighting, spotlight, zoom, and annotations only when they guide attention.
End each segment with a short check for understanding.

Presentify fits naturally into this workflow. It is a Mac app for screen annotation, whiteboarding, cursor highlighting, spotlighting, and zooming into small details during presentations, online classes, tutorials, demos, and video calls. It is also available on the Mac App Store.

Why Interaction Matters

Active learning is not just a preference for lively classes. It is a research-backed teaching approach built around students doing cognitive work during class.

In the PNAS paper "Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom", Louis Deslauriers, Logan McCarty, Kelly Miller, Kristina Callaghan, and Greg Kestin studied introductory physics classes at Harvard. Students experienced both active instruction and passive lectures with identical content. The paper reports a useful tension for teachers: students in active classrooms learned more, but they felt like they learned less than students in passive lectures.

A Harvard Gazette summary explains the same finding in plain language. Students felt more fluent during polished lectures, but test results after active-learning sessions were higher. The point is not that lectures are useless. It is that the feeling of smooth explanation can be misleading when students are not being asked to work with the material.

The Harvard Bok Center for Teaching and Learning makes the practical teaching advice clear: instructors should plan around what students will do, not only what the instructor will cover. It recommends simple techniques such as quick writes, minute papers, think-pair-share, polling, and other interactive class activities.

That lesson applies directly to online classes on Mac. If your class is only a screen share plus narration, students may follow the story without building the skill. If the class includes small visible tasks, students have more chances to test whether they understand.

Turn the Mac Screen Into a Shared Workspace

Online classes often fail because the teacher's screen is too dense.

Students may be watching on a laptop, an iPad, a second monitor, or a compressed meeting window. They may see a slide deck, Safari tab, PDF, spreadsheet, Figma file, Xcode project, terminal window, LMS page, or Notion document at a size you did not plan for. Tiny labels and quick cursor movement make the class feel harder than the topic itself.

Before class, prepare the Mac like a teaching surface:

Close unrelated apps, private tabs, and notifications.
Increase the zoom level in browsers, PDFs, code editors, and slides.
Put notes on a second display or another device.
Open only the files, tabs, and apps needed for the lesson.
Test the class window at the size students will actually see.
Decide which parts need a cursor highlight, circle, arrow, spotlight, or zoom.
Keep a blank whiteboard ready for explanations that should not happen on a crowded screen.

The goal is not to make the screen decorative. It is to reduce the amount of visual guessing students have to do.

Add Active Moments Every Few Minutes

Interaction works best when it is small and specific.

Instead of asking, "Any questions?" after ten minutes of explanation, build short active prompts into the lesson:

"Which part of this chart changed after the filter?"
"Write down the next command before I run it."
"Look at these two settings and choose the safer default."
"Predict which row will fail validation."
"Circle the input that caused this result."
"Take 30 seconds and write the rule in your own words."
"Vote: would you debug the API call, the database query, or the UI state first?"

Then make the answer visible. Draw an arrow to the field. Circle the row. Spotlight the setting. Zoom into the error message. Sketch the flow on a whiteboard. Clear the mark when the point has passed.

That sequence matters:

Ask students to think.
Give them a short pause.
Reveal the answer visually.
Explain why it matters.
Move on only after the screen is clear again.

Online classes feel more interactive when the activity is tied to the content, not bolted on as a poll for the sake of polling.

Use Annotation for Thinking, Not Decoration

Screen annotation is most useful when it externalizes the thought process.

Good uses include:

Drawing a path through a workflow.
Marking a variable, form field, button, label, chart value, or code line.
Separating "before" and "after" states.
Sketching a small diagram while explaining a concept.
Highlighting the exact mistake students should notice.
Showing the relationship between two parts of the screen.
Leaving a temporary note that students can copy before it disappears.

Less useful uses include:

Drawing over everything because the tool is available.
Leaving old marks on the screen while teaching the next idea.
Circling text that is already obvious.
Using a bright color that hides the thing being explained.
Zooming so far that students lose context.
Moving the cursor constantly to hold attention.

Good annotation is selective. It says, "Look here now," then gets out of the way.

A Practical Mac Workflow With Presentify

Presentify is built for this kind of live teaching on Mac.

The official site describes it as a macOS app that lets you annotate the screen, draw on a whiteboard, highlight your cursor, and use spotlight or zoom to focus attention. It supports pens, highlighters, text, arrows, circles, squares, lines, auto-erasing drawings, whiteboard mode, customizable colors and sizes, keyboard shortcuts, and use across apps such as Zoom, Google Meet, Keynote, PowerPoint, OBS, PDFs, images, videos, and code.

The Mac App Store listing describes Presentify as a Mac-only screen annotation app for presentations, online classes, video tutorials, demos, and remote work. The listing also notes features such as drawing on any screen, whiteboard mode, cursor highlight, spotlight, zoom, keyboard shortcuts, Interactive Mode, and no data collected by the app.

For online teaching, a practical setup looks like this:

Open Presentify before the class starts.
Choose two or three annotation colors with clear meanings, such as red for mistakes, green for correct choices, and blue for structure.
Place the annotation controls away from captions and important content.
Turn on cursor highlight when demonstrating software or moving through a dense interface.
Use spotlight for crowded screens where students need one target.
Use zoom for small labels, table values, code, or PDF text.
Switch to the whiteboard when the explanation should be a concept sketch instead of another slide.
Clear annotations after each teaching beat.

Presentify will not make a passive lesson active by itself. It gives the instructor a fast way to make active moments visible.

Example: Teaching a Spreadsheet Concept

Suppose you are teaching students how to understand a spreadsheet formula on Mac.

A passive version sounds like this: "This formula calculates the total, and then this column shows the average."

An active version gives students a job:

Spotlight the formula cell.
Ask students to predict which input range it uses.
Pause for 20 seconds.
Draw a rectangle around the referenced cells.
Zoom into the formula bar.
Ask which value would change if one input row were removed.
Use a whiteboard sketch to show the logic.
Clear the annotations and let students try a similar example.

The content did not become more complicated. The students became part of the reasoning.

Example: Teaching a Coding Workflow

The same pattern works for developers, bootcamp instructors, and technical trainers.

If you are teaching a bug fix, do not only type the fix and explain it afterward. Ask learners to inspect the failing test first. Circle the assertion. Highlight the variable that carries the wrong value. Zoom into the log output. Ask learners where the state changes. Then make the fix.

This keeps the class focused on diagnosis, not just copying a final answer from the instructor's editor.

Example: Teaching a Product or Tool

For customer education, onboarding, and internal training, the goal is often not academic learning. It is confident repeated use.

Instead of showing every feature in a product, pick one workflow:

Create a project.
Invite a teammate.
Export a report.
Approve a request.
Fix a failed setup step.
Submit a form correctly.
Find the setting that controls a behavior.

Ask learners to identify the next step before you click it. Use the cursor highlight so they can follow the movement. Draw an arrow to the field that matters. Use spotlight when the page has too many controls. Then ask learners to repeat the workflow in their own account or notes.

That is a more credible teaching outcome than "watch me use the software."

Keep Cognitive Load in Check

Active learning can feel harder because it asks students to think during class. The Harvard study is useful here because it warns teachers not to confuse discomfort with failure.

Still, difficulty needs structure.

For online classes on Mac:

Keep each prompt short.
Use one visual cue at a time.
Give enough silence for students to answer.
Do not annotate while also changing tabs and speaking quickly.
Repeat the core visual pattern for similar tasks.
Summarize the answer before moving on.
Save complex diagrams for the whiteboard instead of drawing over a crowded app.

Interaction should create productive effort, not visual chaos.

Final Verdict

Online classes work better when students actively handle the material instead of only listening to a screen share.

Harvard's active-learning research does not study Presentify or Mac annotation apps directly. It does support the broader teaching principle behind this workflow: students often learn more when they are actively engaged, even when passive lectures feel smoother in the moment.

For Mac teachers, trainers, creators, founders, developers, and course makers, Presentify is a practical way to make active teaching moments visible. Use it to annotate the exact thing students should inspect, sketch quick explanations on a whiteboard, highlight the cursor during software workflows, spotlight crowded screens, and zoom into details that would otherwise be missed.

Disclosure: Presentify is one of our own products. That is why we know it well enough to recommend it here, but the teaching advice above is based on the public research and practical workflow patterns cited in this article.

Note: Product facts and links are current as of July 2026. The research cited above supports active-learning and teaching-design principles; it does not claim that Presentify itself was tested in those studies.