Monitoring online student engagement after a class
Scott Moore
Spreading the data science approach to organizational learning | Thought leader and strategist
In a previous article, I described how a synchronous online learning experience (specifically, on the Engageli platform) makes the online experience comparable to, if not better than, an in-person experience:
The instructor can monitor students while they are at tables to determine if tables are engaged, if students are engaged (currently and recently!), and can then visit any table for more in-depth discussions and observations.
In this article, I very briefly describe how the combination of those in-class tools with the post-class tools that I describe in this article—shared documents and whiteboards, learner dashboards, and underlying data—gives the instructor better insight into student engagement than what can be gleaned from in-class experiences (especially for classes of more than a handful of learners).
Learner dashboards
During the class, Engageli captures the following information:
Certainly, information about the quality of participation needs to be captured, but the above information about the quantity of participation can also be helpful, especially in larger classes where the instructor cannot monitor everything that is said and done by each student.
This information is available in graphical dashboards at class, session, and student levels. These can help inform answers to questions about the overall engagement level in a specific session or trends across multiple sessions—where, again, the questions can be about a class, a specific session, or a specific student.
Shared documents & whiteboards
When students are to work in groups during class on an activity, the instructor distributes either a document or a whiteboard. (These documents can be either Google or Microsoft Office, and they can be text documents, slides, or spreadsheets. These whiteboards can be either Miro's or Engageli's own whiteboards. None of these details matter to the following, so I'll just refer to this as a shared document.) Each group of students works at a Table—this enables the students to work together without having to worry about hearing or being heard by other students while also having that document shared among just their group.
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After the activity is completed and the instructor "collects" the documents from all of the groups (by clicking a button within Engageli), then the instructor will have all of the documents available for scanning after class. I can report that it is very useful to scan every team's work after a class to find which subjects were learned and which need more emphasis.
Further, if the instructor saw that some particular student seemed to have low engagement during a session, then this record of activity during a session can show what the student's group accomplished. This can help follow-up discussions and questioning with that student and that group.
This all happens as a matter of course with Engageli.
Underlying engagement data
In terms of the overall management of multiple programs, it is also possible, with a bit of extra work, to build your own dashboards that compare results across the programs and over time. The data is available—all that remains is to determine the questions that you want to be able to investigate. You can use the data captured by Engageli (in the first section above) to construct answers.
The only comparable analysis currently possible is in the usage of learner evaluations of the session. Managers can aggregate these across programs in order to determine how evaluations have changed over time. This is certainly productive. However, adding the Engageli data to the investigation can inform answers about why these evaluations have been changing and what might need to be changed in order to improve the scores.
Summary
In this article, I described how an instructor, program manager, and learning manager could use learner dashboards, shared documents & whiteboards, and underlying engagement data might gain better insight into student engagement than what they might have learned if those programs had been run face-to-face. These advantages are stronger for larger programs.
If you want to increase satisfaction and/or engagement with your learning programs, I encourage you to talk with me about Engageli.