The tensions of student engagement with technology

In just the last 12 months, 10 articles published in this journal relate directly to student engagement. This is a considerable increase this year, as the Covid pandemic drives remote learning, and we find ourselves in a new land, a post-2020 land where turbulence is the norm. This is not an easy time for educational institutions. In the constant search for rigorous, thoroughly researched papers and conclusions which offer our readers thought-provoking ideas, it is perhaps time to consider the notion of student engagement with technology. Rather like “learner-centred” and “blended learning”, the term student engagement can be used glibly and without intellectual scrutiny. Such theoretical laziness devalues the term. This piece aims to give a brief review of current analyses of student engagement and offer a benchmark for its use when considering the claims of interactive learning technology.

The broad consensus on student engagement definitions, which are relatively few in the literature (Bond et al., 2020), considering the pivotal importance of the connection between learner and that which is to be learned, in our case via technological mediation, identifies three main dimensions: behavioural, cognitive and affective engagement. Trowler’s extensive literature research (2010) offers a definition that brings these dimensions to attention, noting that there are two key actors on the scene: The students and their educational institutions, both of which participate in the construction or otherwise of engagement. In the interaction, the students are said to seek learning outcomes, self-development and the best experience they can gain, while institutions seek performance and reputational gains. In a possibly more institution-focused review in 2022, the UK JISC (2022) elaborates the interest in student engagement, particularly with technology about artificial intelligence and learning analytics, focusing primarily on student engagement with choice of institution, choice of course, platform for learning, tools and devices.

Meanwhile, Zhoc et al. (2019) proposed a five-factor scale of dimensions of student engagement, their Higher Education Student Engagement Scale (HESES). Eschewing the word behavioural, this scale uses academic (outcome-focused), cognitive (learning-focused), social with peers (in and beyond class), social with teachers (positive interaction with faculty) and affective engagement. This does bring up the notion that peer-to-peer interaction and student–teacher interaction with a learning focus may be able to mediate cognitive engagement. The authors argue that many discussions of student engagement conflate the effort and involvement of the student with the independent variable or facilitator of student engagement which comprises the learning environment.

If we talk about student engagement, then it may be less important to fragment the concept into varying dimensions than trying to see whether this is a realistic concept, why it should be measured and who and what it affects. From the position of the teacher in the classroom, engagement is an appearance of interest in what is going on, which can be depressing when students are mostly sitting gazing at cell phones in sessions. Does that mean they are not engaged? Not necessarily, of course, they may be checking ideas being discussed, references or taking part in games, tests or surveys run by the teacher via mobile apps. In any case, the appearance of engagement may be missing the point. If the point is to help students learn, then what they are gazing at when being talked to does neither give us information on their learning nor their satisfaction or motivation.

Similarly, teachers are most often haunted by attendance or the lack of it. This may be physical or virtual, neither is particularly strong in Covid/post-Covid times. What does that mean? Are we to assume that not turning up to a session online or face-to-face means a student is not engaged? We are all aware of many other reasons for lack of attendance, including transport problems, family issues, health issues or dare we say it, a view that the session will not deliver sufficient value exchange. Gamification is the current trend to deliver an engaging experience in the classroom, especially online. We need to take care that this is not an attempt to improve our ratings as teachers but has a genuine relationship with the learning we aim to facilitate.

Teachers are of course not the only actors here who worry about engagement; we have mentioned educational institutions, but even more importantly for digital interactivity, engagement can be mediated favourably or unfavourably by those who make decisions about learning platforms, policies on devices in classrooms, use of VR and AR and AI in and out of class, compatible records systems, administrative processes, access to information resources and support, and that goes much further than offering the odd FAQ.

Peer-to-peer engagement is well documented as a sign of academic engagement and social engagement for students, but efforts to facilitate this, for example, through peer feedback, through group assessed tasks, and even through extra-curricular peer-organised activities which connect with qualifications, can be very labour-intensive to organise and fail to connect with those students who may show no other signs of engagement. Guadagnolo (2020) advocated for peer support teams, hiring students and training them to support other students, under the guidance of professional support advisors. This can be one effective way to challenge inertia and deter disengagement and ultimately dropout. A positive slant on this is that students do not classify into traits or states of engagement, engagement is dynamic and interesting, and focused attention and participation in learning can be stimulated by any of the actors discussed.

In terms of technological engagement in our online platforms, in live online sessions, discussion boards, blogs, video-conferencing, co-creation of text and graphics within courses and many more, there remain challenges as noted by Chiu (2021) of varied communication interfaces between students, teachers and institutions. He points out that teachers may have insufficient knowledge of cognitive and affective engagement dimensions and both teachers and students may still demonstrate digital incompetence (hence the value of peer-to-peer support teams).

Managing and measuring student engagement would seem to be an inappropriate exercise, we may be better advised to measure its dimensions; however, we prefer to classify them, provided we remember that today’s measurement is not necessarily a predictor of tomorrow’s student engagement. If discussing student engagement leads to an improved understanding of how the learner connects with their learning, all well and good; it is the product of a reciprocal relationship between learners, facilitators of learning and the environmental context of that learning. Digital tools may once have been seen as the solution to low student engagement levels. Now they are becoming the norm for learning, we can see more clearly that they too can be exciting or boring and are even more likely to produce cognitive overload than traditional approaches unless there is a strategic approach to learning design.