Learning Engagement Activities in Promoting Student Interactions and Perceived Online Learning Experience During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Introduction

Student engagement has been argued to promote active learning, better student’s attitude and improvement in students’ thinking and writing skills as it requires students to actively involved in their learning by participating in a discussion or collaborating with other students on solving the class activities and engage in the course content through the effort in studying the course content (Bonwell & Eison, 1991; Matherly & Burney, 2013). Students who are engaged in their learning will demonstrate three types of engagement: behavioural or physical engagement; affective or emotional engagement; and cognitive engagement (Fredricks, Blumenfeld, & Paris, 2004). Many researchers have highlighted the use of different mix of learning activities as essential to promote these engagements and to support students’ online learning as well as for an effective and engaging learning experience (Keengwe & Kidd, 2010; Moore, 1989; Moore, 2013). Furthermore, student engagement also can be promoted if these learning engagement support activities foster ongoing and meaningful interactions in terms of student-student interaction, student-instruction interaction and student-content interaction.

However, in an online learning environment it can be a challenged to observe these interactions as the instructor and students may not be in the same physical location when the course is conducted asynchronously. This challenge is especially apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic when the Malaysia government has imposed an unprecedented lockdown in March 2020 to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. The national lockdown which is imposed just before the start of a new semester has resulted in a sudden change in the teaching modality, from the usual physical face-to-face instruction to a remote online instruction. Therefore, this lockdown has raised a significant challenge for the instructors as not only the students were the first timer in the online learning, but also the instructors in their teaching. Thus, to ensure students are continuing engaging in their online learning, it is imperative for instructors to take proactive steps to support students’ learning with meaningful learning engagement activities (Keengwe, Adjei-Boateng, & Diteeyont, 2012). This can be achieved with a well-designed online course that support and incorporate appropriate learning engagement activities in promoting student engagement allowing them to have a holistic interaction for a better learning experience (Keengwe & Schnellert, 2012).

Various previous studies have separately explored the use of learning engagement support activities either in the synchronous classroom or in asynchronous classroom (Borup, West, & Graham, 2012; Griffiths & Graham, 2009; McBrien, Cheng, & Jones, 2009). However, not many studies have examined the use of both the synchronous and asynchronous learning engagement support activities except those who used the flipped classroom model in the online classroom (Knapp, 2018; Lin, Hung, Kinshuk, & Chen, 2019; Playfoot, 2021) and the effect of synchronous discussion in a fully asynchronous classroom (Farros, Shawler, Gatzunis, & Weiss, 2020). To fill this gap, this chapter will explore the use of different learning engagement activities to support both the synchronous and asynchronous learning in a fully online classroom, which includes the use of: 1) live consultation as a form of synchronous learning engagement support, and 2) online discussion forum; and 3) online formative follow-up quizzes, as a form of asynchronous learning engagement support.