Creating engaging online learning

Most of us recognise that students in higher education in the 2020s are very different from the full-time school-leavers accessing their education for free which made up most university populations in the late 20th century. Students now are often working full-time, coming back to (or starting) university after years in the workforce, supporting families, and coping with all of these distractions to study. And of course we had the huge upheaval of COVID-19 and the changes it made to university education in 2020 and 2021, which will never go ‘back to normal as we knew it’.

This is a great list of reasons for us to ensure that any online learning we offer is engaging, supportive, and inclusive. Online learning needs to grab and hold our learners’ attention, it needs to encourage and facilitate deep cognitive engagement, and it should also take into account the aspects of andragogy, or adult education, as described later in this chapter (see Pedagogy and andragogy in an online environment).

Student engagement is also related to student retention, another argument for ensuring that online offerings comply with best practice. Think of how grateful our institutions will be …!

Based on the literature, and on colleagues’ practical experience, there are four key principles for creating engaging online learning:

1. Presence

2. Interactivity

3. Need to Know v. Nice to Know

4. Accessibility (Irwin and Nance 2021).

We go into more detail about these principles later in this chapter.

The above principles support the following elements of engagement for online teaching and learning, guided and facilitated by educators but ultimately the responsibility of the learners themselves (Redmond, Heffernan et al. 2018):

1. Social engagement (building community, creating a sense of belonging, developing relationships, establishing trust). It can be fostered through online social forums and open communication platforms.

2. Cognitive engagement (thinking critically, activating metacognition, integrating ideas from multiple sources, justifying decisions, developing deep discipline understandings, distributing expertise, aligning new information with previous knowledge).

3. Behavioural engagement (developing academic skills, identifying opportunities and challenges, developing multi-disciplinary skills, developing agency, upholding online learning norms, supporting and encouraging peers, communicating an interest in learning).

4. Collaborative engagement (learning with peers, relating to faculty members, connecting to institutional opportunities, developing professional networks). It can be fostered through study groups, group activities and/or assessments, and discussion forums.

5. Emotional engagement (managing expectations, articulating assumptions, recognising motivations, committing to learning). It can be observed from learners’ “… attitude, enthusiasm, interest, anxiety or enjoyment in the learning process….” (Redmond, Heffernan et al. 2018)

In the online environment, student engagement is as important as the content (Ziegenfuss and LeMire 2019).

Presence

Use teacher presence to create a connection with students – this is the key to successful online pedagogy.

How do you create teacher presence in a virtual classroom? Demonstrate that there’s a person behind the content by using one or more of these strategies:

• use ‘talking head’ videos throughout your resource. Try to keep them under 5 minutes where possible, and it’s fine to use your computer’s camera and mic. Do test your audio though, and if necessary use headphones and an external mic. Record in a quiet place. Make sure your face is lit well – don’t record with a window behind you.

• incorporate screen recordings which show you doing things – use a tool such as Panopto which can record your screen activity and your face (and voice) in a smaller window as you navigate. This format is perfect for demonstrations of navigating websites or drawing simple diagrams. Students learn better when they are actively engaged in tracking movements. Accessibility note – talk through and describe any visual elements.

• use podcasts or audio recordings if relevant (for example, an interview or discussion between two people). (Irwin and Nance 2021)

Think carefully and purposefully about where a video of you talking through something might be more useful than text or images on a page.

Make sure all of your videos are captioned, and always provide a transcript of your audio or video recording – this is good not just for people living with disabilities but also for learners who might be watching on a train or bus! Ensure also that vision-impaired learners will be able to use a screen reader and audio descriptions.

Interactivity

Include ‘doing work’ wherever possible, to act as concept checks to reinforce understanding. Supply the answers or models for students to check their answers – remember with asynchronous learning, you won’t be in the ‘room’ to provide feedback.

Try using “formative assessment with performance-based tasks ….” (Tao Testing 2021)

Need to Know v. Nice to Know

Keep things short and sharp – include only ‘need to know’ information on the main pages of your resource. You don’t want your resource to look onerous! Provide achievement markers, complemented by your concept checks, along the way.

Accessibility

It’s not all about high contrast and font size. Accessibility relates to cognitive and emotional circumstances as well as physical, and these can change from day to day (as we all know!). Our student cohorts and their situations are diverse, so our online teaching needs to address as many of those situations as possible. For example:

“Keep activity and assignment instructions simple and brief. Written directions … will support learners with attention or memory difficulties while also helping all students stay on task ….” (Saunders & Wong, 2020, Accessibility and Universal Design for Learning section).

For a great example of presenting your online teaching to as wide an audience as possible, look at Mish Boutet’s Ateliers sur demande, a collaborative project for producing bilingual online information literacy instruction for Canadian university students. Each lesson provides a short introductory video, teamed with an interactive transcript and written instructions. This is a demonstration of accessibility for everybody – because all of us might prefer different learning techniques at different times.

Bibliography

Irwin, E. and S. Nance (2021). Online pedagogy principles and practice, University of Newcastle.

Redmond, P., A. Heffernan, L. Abawi, A. Brown and R. Henderson (2018). "An Online Engagement Framework for Higher Education." Online Learning 22(1). https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1179626.pdf

Tao Testing (2021). "What students are looking for from classroom technology." Open Assessment Technologies 2021.

Ziegenfuss, D. H. and S. LeMire (2019). "Backward design: A must-have library instructional design strategy for your pedagogical and teaching toolbox." Reference & User Services Quarterly 59(2): 107-112. https://journals.ala.org/index.php/rusq/article/view/7275/9958