engagement – csaphd | Crystal S. Anderson

One of the most common concerns about moving courses online is that engagement is lost. However, it could be useful to draw on the kind of engagement that is central to contemporary Korean popular music (K-pop) culture.

Most articles you may read about the need to teach online courses (as opposed to the emergency remote teaching that most instructors engaged in in the spring) contains the often unchallenged assertion that online courses cannot replicate the engagement of the face-to-face course, seen by many as indispensable to learning. John Kroger recently wrote in Inside Higher Education: “In the process, we have gained a much clearer understanding of what online education cannot do — or, in other words, the ways in which traditional in-person cannot be replaced. The most obvious area in which online delivery simply cannot replicate the value of in-person learning is in science and technology education. ” For many, this extends to other disciplines as well. Many people believe that being face-to-face is essential to learning. Period. Related to this critique is the characterization of online courses. Drawing on their experience this past spring or bad online course experiences, some argue that online courses are merely videos and quizzes.

We know that learning is a social activity. Instead of trying to replicate the face-to-face experience, we might look to modes of engagement that already work online. K-pop artists and fans have used the digital space to form connections and have engaging and memorable interaction for years. K-pop artists use social media such as Twitter, Instagram, VLive and YouTube to communicate with fans and share content. Fans reciprocate, as evidenced by the large numbers of followers artists have on these outlets. From old-school sharing platforms like MediaFire to closed discussion forums to collaborative Twitter accounts, K-pop fans have been deploying social media to communicate with each other for years. This was particularly the case in the early years of the global spread of K-pop. If you were a fan of K-pop, it was unlikely that you knew anyone in your real life who was also a fan. As a result, fans turned to the internet. And while many people negative characterize K-pop fan activity, fans more often deploy online modes to collaborate on philanthropic projects, organize promotion support and just engage with each other over a common passion. K-pop fans often talk about the bonds they form with other fans without ever having met them.

Instructors could use these platforms in their courses to support the kind of engagement that is crucial for learning. How can we create opportunities for students to create community in our courses? Do we have a space where students can post things they find related to the course and learn to look at such artifacts critically? Do we provide a way for students to talk to each other? Do we encourage students to form chat groups with other members of class for that important back-channel back-and-forth? Do we limit our interaction with students to just sharing information and content from the course, or can we envision a space in our online course where we just chit-chat with students?

When I mentioned this to a colleague, he responded that people spend untold hours watching YouTube or on Twitter because it is something they like. Could this be the real crux of the challenge facing instructors in the move to online, namely, to make our courses interesting enough for students to spend the kind of time on them as they spend in other activities on the Internet?

Sources

John Kroger. “The Limits of Online Education.” Inside Higher Education. 6 May 2020. https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/leadership-higher-education/limits-online-education (14 May 2020).

What K-pop Can Teach Us About Engagement for Online Courses by Crystal S. Anderson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

In discussions about remote learning and future online teaching that many educators may face in the fall, concerns about engagement dominate. They often include the unchallenged claim that online instruction cannot replicate the engagement found in face-to-face teaching. But is that true?

Many erroneously equate the emergency online teaching that most institutions relied on this spring with the kind of online teaching many institutions may be considering for the fall. As a result, they often claim that online teaching generally fails to engage the student as face-to-face classes and result in actual learning. Students have expressed attitudes that the remote education they received during the pandemic has failed them. Commentators on education, like Jonathan Zimmerman, equate most modes of online education to the early days of educational TV, declaring that “Real conversation happens when people are in the same room, not when they’re on the same channel” and “Social distancing is necessary to preserve good health, but it’s not good for education.” Both students and educators point to engagement as a crucial part of the teaching and learning experience and assume it is lacking in online education.

However, we shouldn’t assume that engagement occurs just because student and instructors are in the same room or that one cannot achieve such engagement in an online course. Stephanie Moore and Phil Hill point to the substantial scholarship on the effectiveness of online learning compared to classroom-based learning: “What these studies show, time and again, is no significant difference. In fact, this has been labeled the ‘no significant difference phenomenon’ with a website and book by Thomas Russell (2001) dedicated to documenting the studies and the trend.”

What can make a difference in effective teaching in both settings? Actively engaging students in the course material, with the instructor and with each other. IU – Teaching Online notes that:

The concept of active learning encompasses a wide variety of learning activities in which students engage with the course content. The focus of active learning is to foster that engagement. When students sit and passively watch or listen to lectures – whether in person or on video – they are not actively engaging with the content.

We also know that students learn more effectively when they are involved in their own learning. A cursory look at activity on the Internet and social media reveals that we can have a high level of engagement in an online environment. Individuals spend hours engaging with each other, learning how to do a variety of things. Moreover, I know from personal experience that it is possible to involve students in collaborative research on the Internet. We should view the current situation as an opportunity to develop our best teaching to achieve a similar level of engagement for fall courses that may be online.

Sources

Jonathan Zimmerman. “Video Kills the Teaching Star.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. 24 Apr 2020. https://www.chronicle.com/article/Video-Kills-the-Teaching-Star/248631?cid=wcontentgrid_41_5 (Accessed 5 May 2020).

“Learning Activities and Active Learning Online.” IU – Teaching Online, UC-Davis, n.d., https://canvas.ucdavis.edu/courses/34528/pages/learning-activities-and-active-learning-online?module_item_id=4973 (5 May 2020).

Stephanie Moore and Phil Hill. “Planning for Resilience, Not Resistance.” Phil On EdTech. 28 Apr 2020. https://philonedtech.com/planning-for-resilience-not-resistance/ (Accessed 5 May 2020).

Engaging Engagement in Online Courses by Crystal S. Anderson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.