Improving Student Engagement In Online Courses

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

6-15-2014

School

Construction and Design

Abstract

Distance education is a learning model in which students and instructors are separated by location and/or time, and in which students may complete courses or programs without attending scheduled classes in a specific location (E-learning). Distance learners are growing in numbers and universities capitalizing on this segment by expanding their course offerings. Online courses are becoming popular, but it has some drawbacks including lack of interactivity. Institutes of higher learning are still discovering that teaching methods implemented in traditional courses may not necessarily translate directing into the distance learning model. This paper will highlight a number of issues concerning distance learning and what teaching methods may be implemented by professors to facilitate student engagement in online courses. There are a number of teaching approaches that institutions of higher learning may implement in order to engage distance learners in online courses, one of which is the Engagement Based Learning and Teaching (EBLT) approach. According to the Engagement Based Learning and Teaching (EBLT) approach there are two basic elements that provide an effective method of establishing a facilitation technique for more student engagement. These elements are pedagogy and preconditions where pedagogies are techniques that must be followed in instructions and preconditions are set of guidelines that need to be present in effective teaching. This paper discusses various methods of improving students' engagement in online course delivery with examples at the implementing university. The Industrial Engineering Technology (IET) program at our university has been converted to an online program as other programs are also following the same pursuit. As we are switching to online course delivery, we are actively researching ways to foster critical thinking and maintain adequate real time communication and interaction with students. Our task was to design online course delivery that offers students a variety of learning styles and preferences in interactive ways. We have implemented various techniques including enforced sequential viewing of lecture videos and virtual class meetings in some of our courses as part of students' engagement initiative. We have found interesting and positive correlation of improved students learning with those techniques. This paper will discuss the detail design of experiments and results of the implementations. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2014.

Publication Title

ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, Conference Proceedings

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