Promoting online engagement
In the review by Redmond et al. (2018), the authors found that online engagement can be categorised under five headings: emotional, social, collaborative, cognitive and behavioural engagement. It’s worth noting that there is opportunity lurking in the crisis, in that there can be some real benefits to students to learning online, for example:
- Online learning is flexible in terms of time and place.
- Online learning can be more inclusive. Since there are a variety of alternative ways to participate, the students who tend to speak the most in class might be less dominant online, and the quiet learners might contribute more ideas in writing.
- Written records can be kept of the learning, for example in discussion forums, which students can refer back to later.
- Students will learn new ways of communicating and managing relationships online, which may be useful in other situations, such as in employment.
Promoting Engagement With Intelligent Agents
One way of keeping on top of student engagement is to automate reminders to students using the Intelligent Agents tool.
This tool records the names of students that have / haven't met certain conditions - such as accessing your module in the last week or viewing a particular content topic - and can also email them if necessary.
Some possible use cases include:
- Students automatically receive an email thanking them for five contributions to a discussion forum
- Students who have not logged in for one week receive an email reminding them to do so
- To point students towards a particularly important topic if they have not viewed it yet
- To remind students who haven’t completed certain activities to do so before their next face-to-face session
- To provide further prompts or remediation for students based on quiz scores
- Without using emails to students, they can be used as an automated reporting tool for you (for example, as a way of seeing who has passed with flying colours on all assessments)