Webb’s Media

So after one week of blogging, we have two reactions to an article entitled: Student Engagement in Courses from …um, I’m not sure which publication it’s from. I have read the two responses here and here and I am facing the same problem I have faced in many a course. I just don’t care about this topic. The article is too limited, and though I certainly care about student engagement, like Bob, I want to know WHY students engage, not just break apart their types of engagement. Further, a one page research article does not provide me with enough depth to even determine whether I find their methods valid.

This article touches on the holy grail of education. How do we engage students and encourage their motivation so that they can be successful in our courses. And lately, a lot of the blame for lack of student persistence seems to fall on higher education. Our courses aren’t entertaining enough, flexible enough, and we’re not “keeping up with the times.” We should be designing edutainment to appeal to the fragile minds of the Internet generation who have been brought up on a steady diet of cable TV, internet, and video games.

However, there is a deeper reality for students. Many students are not in school for the education part of it. They are in school, particularly community college, for the training and skills that will help them get a better job—and it is our duty as designers to sneak in the education while they’re looking for training. And I do think, as Joan mentions, that the rules for online student engagement will be different than for classroom instruction. In online learning is is imperative that the instructor be even more responsive to students. Faculty need to build opportunities for student interaction. After all, isn’t interaction closely tied with the second and third factors of engagement: emotional engagement and interaction engagement? However, what we see in online courses ALL the time is a lot of emphasis on skills engagement, some on performance engagement, and a whole lot of ignoring the emotional and interactive (Interactive being between people, not human-computer).

I’m not sure I agree with Bob’s interpretation that:

The measure seems to have about a 25-30% correlation with achievement.

The article is poorly worded. It sets up the four factors of engagement and then describes a second study which did find the correlation between engagment and achievement being explained in this percentage. HOWEVER, it does not indicate whether the second study was looking at all of these different types of engagement and how they were measuring engagement (I assume a survery). Thus, without knowing their instrument, there is no way of knowing if it is one or two of the aforementioned types of engagement or a totality of all of them, that is contributing to this analysis.