Thanks to all who came along to our March Reading Club and joined in our discussions of the 12 papers which make up the ‘Fostering Student Engagement’ theme of the Compendium of Innovative Practice: Learning Development in a Time of Disruption.
We had a wide-ranging discussion, sparked by the different ideas and themes across these 12 papers. As with all discussions about student engagement in live online sessions, we talked about students’ use or non-use of webcams. However, we quickly agreed that this was students’ choice, and shared ideas on how students can show their engagement in other ways – using emojis, Chat, using polls and other tools. In this discussion, we all praised Karen Symons’ metaphor of the iceberg of student engagement in online classes from her paper, “Can you hear me? Are you there?”: Student Engagement in an Online Environment’.
Following this, prompted by Vicky Collins’ and Sue Blackett’s phrase of feeling ‘flipped out’ in their paper, ‘How it Adds Up: Dual Reflections on the Online Engagement on One Cohort of Accounting Students’, we discussed the limitations of the flipped approach in engaging students, We shared examples of the struggles we had all experienced in encouraging students to engage with our flipped, asynchronous materials before a live class, and discussed how this may likely be due to the different relationship we, as Learning Developers, have with a cohort or group of students compared to the subject-lecturer. We came to the conclusion that flipped learning may not be the best approach for embedded learning development sessions.
Lastly, we discussed some of the things we miss about online teaching now that we have mostly gone back to predominantly on-campus teaching again.
Our next Reading Club will be held on Wednesday 11th May at 5:30pm.
We will be in touch in advance of the meeting with a selection of JLDHE articles for you to choose from. We will then confirm the piece with the most votes and share the zoom link before the day. Please contact Jenny if you would like to be added to the Reading Club mailing list.