Why Your College Should Consider the Rules of Engagement in Distance Learning

Through all five years of her teaching career, Von Thompson always had her personality and hands-on approach to keep her students engaged in the traditional classroom.

However, when she taught a hybrid online class to complete her master’s degree at Pine Manor College in July, Thompson said she lost her most powerful engagement tool: her physical presence.

“[In the traditional classroom], I can tell when someone is not paying attention,” she says. “I just have to walk over, and my mere physical presence re-engages them.”

As a result, Thompson dedicated her class to puzzling ways through which she could keep her students engaged on the other side of their computers.

Thompson’s class was a community teaching class on poetry, meaning her class was taken by people who were interested in learning about and writing poetry for fun instead of grades. She met her eight students (ages ranged from 11 to 70 years old) once a week face to face to discuss poetry crafting techniques, and then sent them home to write their own poetry. Her students then emailed their own poetry to each other, followed by emailed critiques.

Thompson said that when the class came together to discuss their work face to face, her students were excited to exchange ideas. However, when they had to maintain discussions online, the enthusiasm dimmed.

“The problem was that this was a no-stakes class, so there were no grades,” Thompson says. “The motivation is low to engage them. The students who cared did poems, and I gave them three questions to answer” while looking at each other’s work. “Some students didn’t respond.”

Eager to find ways to re-engage her students, Thompson says she dug deeper into the definition of “engagement.” She turned to the National Survey of Student Engagement for answers, but found its guidelines to be restrictive. She also felt that it focused too tightly on participation.

“Participation is good,” she says. “But some were not participating on the internet for certain reasons.”

In the thesis she wrote on her online class, Thompson says that students’ participation was a key indicator of student engagement, but not the sole indicator.

“Judging a student’s level of engagement strictly through their active participation in class discussion…leaves out an entire segment of students who do not feel comfortable engaging in class discussion, but who perhaps engage at a deep level through making connections with outside information,” she says in her thesis. “Students engaged in this manner are responsible for their own learning and help to create a learning community where students and teachers explore the subject together.”

Thompson ran into more challenges during her research on engagement, including ways to keep lectures fresh and interesting, overloading students with reading material, coping with at-home distractions (for online learners), email troubles and finding reliable and accessible technology (for online learners who do not have a computer at home).

“The technology wall is a barrier,” she says. “Students are dependent on access, how to use it, if a school provides it. There are other ways they have to consider when creating lesson plans. It’s a barrier to engagement.”

 

Solutions

Despite the downsides to distance learning, Thompson found ways to keep her students engaged:

Instructor participation

Thompson says the most effective method to keep students engaged is through instructor participation.

“If students are more engaged with the instructor, then they’re more engaged with the content,” she says.

In her thesis, Thompson also says that “I believe this comes down to a matter of basic respect for a student’s time…just as a student expects that the instructor will show up for a traditional face-to-face class, that same student will expect an instructor to “show up” in some way in an online class.”

Internet Relay Chat (IRC)

In her thesis, Thompson says that students can engage in collaborative learning with IRC.

IRC is a forum that students can utilize to talk to their classmates in real time. It even supports multiple conversations at the same time. The only downside is that students cannot see each other, as they would during a video chat scenario or traditional classroom.

“There are opportunities for it to make a difference,” Thompson says. “This is a fantastic solution for a language class. Students can have conversations about it; you have to make mistakes to learn a language.”

Collaborative Learning Tactics

In her thesis, Thompson suggests that carefully crafted collaborative learning strategies can help engage students in an online class. Examples of these strategies include:

Task Ownership “is concerned with both individual responsibility within the group and the dependence of group members on the group as a whole. Individuals in the group are held responsible for their own work within the group.”

That way, “if someone doesn’t participate, then the whole group won’t be penalized,” Thompson says.

Task Character “is the complexity and construction of the task at hand.”

In her thesis, Thompson says that Task Character learning enables an instructor to evaluate how much work they are giving students, and helps them gauge their assignments so students aren’t overwhelmed.

Task Control “is the degree to which students control their learning experiences.”

Thompson’s thesis describes this method as one that enables students to learn at their own level and pace. It also enables students to work in groups and use the format output that best suits their individual strengths, skills and interests.

Weekly Starter and Wrapper Comments

Thompson says this method worked well in her own class: she assigned one student to open a lesson, and another student to close a lesson.

“I would assign a reading to an opener, and they would read ahead and formulate reading questions for the class,” she says. “Then they’d pass out those questions to the rest of the class, and they’d come together to discuss those questions. Then, a closer wrapped up the discussion and summarized everything.

“We had pre-reading questions and post-reading questions, and did this once a class,” she says. “This speaks to instructor engagement.”

Online Learning is Here To Stay

While Thompson discovered multiple solutions to improve student engagement, she says that it is not a one-size-fits-all answer.

“There’s no resolution,” she says. “Every online class room will be unique, with student, their needs and strategies. You have to figure out how to engage them.”

Thompson also says that even though online learning is permanently ingrained in college education, it will not dominate the way students learn in the future.

“I don’t see distance learning supplanting traditional classrooms altogether,” she says. “Technology will be present in traditional classrooms, and there will be more opportunities for online learning to expand.”

She also says that when she starts applying for teaching jobs, she will more than likely wind up in an online teach position.

“I came from a traditional background,” she says. “I taught because I was loud, by the force of my personality and with kinesthetic learning. I’m afraid to teach online.”

 

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