Chronicling engagement: students’ experience of online learning over time

ABSTRACT

Although there is ample research into student engagement in online learning, much of this investigates the student experience through surveys administered at a fixed point in time, usually at the exit point of a single unit of study or course. The study described in this paper, by contrast, aimed to understand online student engagement over a whole semester, guided by two overarching questions: What factors impact students’ engagement over a semester? What factors account for fluctuation in engagement levels over time? This paper presents results from weekly feedback on online education students’ engagement over the length of one semester at a regional Australian university. It also chronicles in more depth the experiences of one student across the same semester. The findings offer longitudinal accounts of student engagement, demonstrating that levels of engagement fluctuate and are influenced by a variety of factors.

KEYWORDS:

• Engagement
• online initial teacher education
• flexibility
• online education
• mature-age students

Acknowledgments

This research received internal funding from UTAS Hothouse Funding Scheme.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an internal UTAS CALE Hothouse Scheme grant.

Notes on contributors

Tracey Muir

Tracey Muir is an Associate Professor and Deputy Head of the School of Education at the University of Tasmania. Her research interests focus on student engagement, particularly in mathematics education, and online teaching and learning.

Naomi Milthorpe

Naomi Milthorpe is Senior Lecturer in English at the School of Humanities, University of Tasmania. She researches twentieth-century British literature, and English pedagogy. Naomi is the author of Evelyn Waugh’s satire: Texts and contexts (2016) and editor of Digital English, a web handbook of practical exercises for tertiary English teachers.

Cathy Stone

Cathy Stone is a researcher in the field of post-secondary student equity, retention and success. She is a Conjoint Associate Professor in Social Work at the University of Newcastle and an Adjunct Fellow with the National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education at Curtin University.

Janet Dyment

Janet Dyment is an Associate Professor and Deputy Head of the School of Education at the University of Tasmania. Her research interests focus on high quality teaching and learning in initial teacher education courses, particularly in regard to online pedagogies.

Elizabeth Freeman

Elizabeth Freeman is a historian at the University of Tasmania who lectures on medieval European history and researches Western Christian monasticism, especially the Cistercian monastic order (12th to 16th centuries). Recently, she has developed an interest in the scholarship of learning and teaching, including the area of student engagement.

Belinda Hopwood

Belinda Hopwood is a researcher and lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Tasmania. Belinda specialises in the areas of English and literacy education, with particular interest in teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge for the teaching of reading.