Monitoring online student engagement better than in person?

When instructors think about online courses, one dimension that bothers them is the sense that they lose insight into what is going on—they lose the ability to monitor what students are doing and what groups are doing.

It doesn't have to be that way.

At Engageli , we like to tout that our platform is "purpose-built" for education. I think the extent of the platform's abilities here—how the features essential to the teaching and learning process are integrated throughout the platform—best demonstrate what we mean by this.

When an instructor is in a physical room with students, they can do the following to monitor activities going on at the tables scattered throughout the room:

• See if particular tables seem to be on-task and engaged with the task,
• Determine if specific students are unengaged with the table's activities, and
• Talk with the table and see their work in progress.

Let's take a look at how the Engageli platform enables these exact same activities and insights.

Gallery view

Recently, I helped run an online roundtable discussion on our platform in which we broke the participants up into separate tables. Here is a screenshot of the class gallery (with images redacted for privacy). They happen to be in Table mode (that is, they are working at tables; students at each table can only hear themselves and whoever is on the podium):

Look at this screenshot of Gallery view .

Let's first take a moment to understand what you see here:

• These are the 13 participants, 2 Engagers, and 1 subject matter expert. The last three people (videos 14, 15, and 16) are the two muted session members plus the one identified by the blue "TA" label.
• One participant (video 13) was having hardware difficulties so she couldn't have her video on. Everyone else did turn on their video feed.
• The meeting host (or instructor; that would be me in this case) is not shown as he is up on the podium, at the top of the screen, separate from the learners.

Okay, now that you understand the basics of the screen, here are the two points that I want to highlight:

• Recent engagement: In the bottom right corner of each video feed, you can see a green circle. The size of this circle indicates how much the student has been engaging (talking, in the current exercise) in the last minute or so. Video feed 6 shows a smaller dot, while most others are full-size.
• Currently speaking: In the bottom left corner of each video feed is an indicator of the audio signal ("speaking volume", in this case) associated with that video feed. The faint red circle around the indicator means that they are in Table mode and, thus, cannot be heard outside of their own table. You can see in video feeds 1 & 2 that those participants are not currently talking; the participants in video feeds 3 & 11 are currently talking.

So, look what this gets you:

The instructor can scan the Gallery and quickly see who is speaking and, more importantly, who has been recently engaged. Just because you look at a person and they aren't talking doesn't mean that they haven't been talking! Engageli will help you avoid this judgment mistake.

Table view

Engageli's Table view can be accessed through a tab at the top of the window. Clicking on it brings up this view:

Click on this link to see Table view .

This shows all of the participants. The subject matter expert and the two Engagers are at another table. Again, let's take a moment to understand what is shown here:

• Three tables, one with 6 participants and the other two with 5. At Table 3, I have redacted a participant's photo for privacy.
• The table capacity here is 6 seats, but it can be expanded up to 10 seats.
• Other views are available that give each participant's full name.

Here are the points that I want to make:

• Table-level engagement: The green circles are an indication of the engagement level at the table. You can see that the circle for Table 3 is slightly thicker than those for the other two tables. This is meant to indicate that Table 3 is having a more lively discussion than the others.
• Visit a table: The instructor can visit any table from this view by clicking on the numbered circle in the center of the table. This allows him/her to see the table members (as in the gallery view) and see whatever document or whiteboard that they are currently working on.

What does all of this get you?

The instructor can scan the Tables and see which tables are engaged and which aren't. If they are not, then the instructor can easily visit the table to check in on their progress.

Note that the two views—Gallery and Table—are never more than one click away, so it's easy to toggle back and forth between the two.

Conclusion

I believe that the tools that the @Engageli platform provides make it comparable to, if not better than, an in-person experience. Look back at the three requirements at the top of this article. 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.

The recently modifier on the student and table engagement is huge! It's not just what you happen to observe right now—it's all that has been happening even while you're not watching.

In the next article I'm writing, I lay out how all of this feeds into dashboards that the instructor can use to get a holistic view of student engagement and overall learning session engagement. This is really the cherry on top of why monitoring student engagement with Engageli is better than in-person.

Let me know if you'd like to chat about this , or leave a comment below.