Katrina A. Meyer - Student Engagement Online: What Works and Why: ASHE Higher Education Report, 40: 6

Student Engagement Online: What Works and Why
Katrina A. Meyer
ASHE Higher Education Report: Volume 40, Number 6
Kelly Ward, Lisa E. Wolf-Wendel, Series Editors

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ISSN 1551-6970 electronic ISSN 1554-6306 ISBN 978-1-119-00075-4

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The ASHE Higher Education Report Series is sponsored by the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE), which provides an editorial advisory board of ASHE members.

• Ben Baez
• Florida International University
  
• Amy Bergerson
• University of Utah
  
• Edna Chun
• University of North Carolina
  Greensboro
  
• Susan K. Gardner
• University of Maine
  
• MaryBeth Gasman
• University of Pennsylvania
  
• Karri Holley
• University of Alabama
  
• Adrianna Kezar
• University of Southern California
  
• Kevin Kinser
• SUNY Albany
  
• Dina Maramba
• Binghamton University
  
• Robert Palmer
• Binghamton University
  
• Barbara Tobolowsky
• University of Texas at Arlington
  
• Susan Twombly
• University of Kansas
  
• Marybeth Walpole
• Rowan University
  
• Rachelle Winkle-Wagner
• University of Nebraska Lincoln
  

With more students needing a higher education and less resources available from the states, the productivity of higher education institutions has become of greater interest to state governments, national foundations, and other assorted groups. Given its importance to individuals and the economy, President Obama has stressed the need for higher education to control its costs and produce more and better graduates. By moving academic programs and coursework online, higher education institutions must ensure that students succeed in their online programs.

Given the highly visible research on the National Study of Student Engagement (NSSE) and what it has revealed about engagement in the facetoface environment, it makes sense to investigate the ways that engagement strategies can keep students enrolled in their online programs to completion and ensure they are learning what they need to succeed. This monograph presents the research on student engagement online and draws recommendations for instructors designing or teaching an online course.

Students lives tend to present serious limits to what can be achieved with engagement strategies. They have employment or family demands that force them to attend parttime or they may be inexperienced students and need to learn how to learn or to understand the basics of online learning. They may need to develop selfregulatory behaviors, motivation to succeed, and the ability to defer gratification. They may also have to develop an understanding of and skills for active learning and find time and willingness to put effort into their learning.

Instructors also sometimes act in ways that impinge on student engagement, by offering poorly designed online courses, dominating course interactions, and being unclear about the educational goals of course activities and what students are expected to achieve. These instructors may need to improve their online teaching skills or their understanding of how students learn; this may involve examining their expectations of what instruction is and what it is that instructors do to bring learning about.

The main goal of the monograph is to identify the approaches or techniques that have been proven to increase engagement. To achieve this goal, the monograph draws upon learning theories and research studies conducted in online learning courses and also some facetoface situations.

Put simply, engagement strategies work because they are based on learning theories that stress student activity rather than passive learning. Active learning, collaborative learning, authentic and experiential learning, as well as several other theories that focus on getting the student to do somethingbe it cognitive or physicalwork to engage them in their learning. These learning theories are why engagement works.

Pedagogies that stress student effort or work tend to engage more effectively. That means using assignments that ask students to do somethingsuch as work in a group, solve a problem, prepare a project, and experience a situationwill more likely produce student engagement in his or her learning.

Be it for online discussions, group work, or simple email exchanges, students need to know the goal and reason for the assignment. Instructors need to provide not only the goal, but also the rationale for the assignment, explaining what it will help students learn and why it is being done in this way.

Whether in the design of assignments, directions to students about the assignments, or the evaluation criteria for students work, instructors need to ask questions, critique student responses, and provide additional context for the learning. Instructors also need to show students what deep thinking is.