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Digital Learning

EDUCATION DESIGN RESEARCH ・ COMMUNICATION DESIGN

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Overview
01

Helping educators understand the student perspective on what makes online classes more engaging.

LCC’s Digital Learning Champions are students hired to run their own projects in partnership with the Digital Learning Team.

 

This role as a Digital Learning Champion gave me an opportunity to reflect on the challenges I had faced in my own learning experience at LCC. Discussions with the team made me realize that the online classroom experience offers various advantages that can be leveraged to improve overall learning outcomes. But something that concerned me was how little my peers participated during online lectures, which made me slowly lose interest too, subsequently making me feel demotivated to attend further online lectures.

 

This project aims to study what impacts students’ attention in online classes. It then attempts to bridge the communication gap between educators and students by bringing forth the student perspective.

Info
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Organization
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Teaching & Learning
Role
Digital Learning Champion
Timeline
Jan - Jul 2023
Skills
Research Design
Focus Groups
Interviews
Project Management
Education Design
Communication Design
Video Production & Editing
Problem
Online lectures provide various advantages such as exposure to speakers from different parts of the world, ease of recording lectures for later consumption, and smoother digital collaboration. However, students can often feel disengaged during online lectures. Educators know this and over time develop different techniques that work for different student cohorts. However, an educator who has recently started teaching online at UAL, having not had enough exposure to the student voice, might experience a lack of student engagement in their sessions. As a result, there is a net loss of value gained from these online teaching and learning experiences for both students and teachers.
Outcome
As a solution, this project offers a short video that, without placing heavy demands on the educator’s time, helps them understand the student perspective about online lectures. But insights from primary research conducted for this project are perhaps the important output of this project; they can be utilised by the Digital Learning Team to design more solutions briding the communication gap between students and teachers.

Scroll to the end to watch the video. ↓
Process
02

How did we get here?

Through brainstorming sessions with the digital learning team, the larger problem area was identified as engagement in online lectures. I then conducted secondary research to understand challenges of the online teaching and learning environment. Jisc’s Student digital experience insights surveys 2020/21 and 2021/22 were particularly useful in identifying common reasons for students being disengaged in lectures, and suggestions from students to solve these issues. Stakeholder mapping helped identify the key stakeholders within UAL who could shed more light on the current teacher training processes, barriers faced by educators, and online classroom engagement techniques that do and don’t work.

This was followed by interviews with 1 permanent lecturer and 3 associate lecturers at UAL, and a focus group with 6 LCC students. A thematic analysis of these interactions revealed insights shared in the next section. After defining the problem statement, further research was done to identify effective means of bridging the gap in student-teacher communication. This involved secondary research, as well as interviews with a member of LCC’s Teaching and Learning Team, and an external blended learning expert. A short video to help educators hear the student voice was identified as a key intervention. This was followed by designing, production, editing and delivery of the video.

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Research Insights
03

Educator Interviews

01

Educators get very limited time for lesson planning

 

Staff who have experience of coordinating with external instructors and speakers said they don’t feel comfortable sending them lengthy guidelines which they may not have time to read, or which might discourage them from delivering a lecture at all

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No silver bullet for engagement that works for every cohort

 

Interviewees revealed that over time they have developed various techniques to engage students in online classrooms. But as they get to know each cohort better, they tailor these techniques to suit the cohort's needs.

Lack of educator training by the university for online teaching

 

Induction for associate lecturers involves helping them develop their overall teaching skills since they might be industry professionals without a teaching background. Educators are also trained for improving classroom experience in terms of student mental health. There is a digital learning induction that involves onboarding staff to digital teaching tools like BB collaborate, Moodle etc. However, there is currently no induction, training or upskilling resources provided by the university to help educators conduct better online sessions. 

  Interview Questionnaire

 

  1. Could you briefly describe your journey of teaching at LCC?
     

  2. Since UAL started hybrid teaching, have you deliberately chosen online teaching for any of your lectures? Why? 
     

  3. What challenges have you faced in online teaching? 
     

  4. What techniques or best practices do you utilise to keep students engaged in online sessions?
     

  5. Have students shared feedback with you about online sessions? If yes, can you share that with me? 

Quotes from educator interviews

"When inviting external speakers to deliver a virtual talk, expectations are discussed over a quick 10-minute call. They might choose to spend more time asking questions, but we try not to take too much of their time on such calls because they aren’t paid for that time separately."

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Student Focus Group

01

Students want teachers to accept that it is not possible for them to always be paying attention in online lectures, no matter the teacher’s efforts. But they are particularly likely to zone out when:
 

  1. The speaker talks in detail about a single topic for a large chunk of the session. Students suggest only key points being mentioned during the class, with links shared for further reading.
     

  2. The session is information heavy but the session is unstructured with the same topics or discussions repeating at different points during the session. Students suggested a structure of the session being shared in advance so that they might plan their attention better
     

  3. The lecturer has a very gentle and monotonous voice!

02

Students believe they would be able to pay more attention in online sessions if they were planned as interactive meetings or workshops where everyone participates. They suggest:
 

  1. Having parts of the session where everyone has to participate while keeping their cameras on. This can add a layer of informal student engagement through the use of differen camera backgrounds.
     

  2. More workshop-like sessions that make use of collaboration tools like padlet, Miro etc
     

  3. Frequently asking thought-provoking questions to the class and inviting answers ond encouraging peer discussions on the same through breakout groups
     

  4. Being open and human in front of the class through body language, hand gestures and even small acts like drinking coffee during class – this helps students feel comfortable and see it as an interaction that is supposed to go both ways

Focus Group Structure
 
Ice-breaking
 

  1. Introductions - names and pronouns, which program you are part of at LCC

  2. What is your single most useless talent?

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Questions
 

  1. Do you prefer online lectures or on-site? Does it vary based on the subject? Elaborate.
     

  2. Think about all the online lectures/ webinars/ talks you have attended recently - in or outside UAL. List them down. 
     

  3. When was the last time you attended an online lecture that was so boring that you zoned out? What made it boring?
     

  4. Think about some online sessions that you found particularly engaging and useful. What do you think made it so good?

03

Where online sessions need to be information heavy, students would prefere if they were curated as pieces of ‘content’ that they are accustomed to consuming via other channels. They suggest:

 

  1. Starting the lecture with a pitch about the topic being discussed, explaining why the topic is important, making a case for why students should pay attention
     

  2. A lecture punctuated with rich media, eg. a video, ted talk, podcast etc. There is often content available online around the topics being discussed in class. Such content is designed to hold attention of viewers through performance and storytelling and can be a useful tool for educators.
     

  3. Using storytelling, metaphors and analogies tying the topic back to what students relate to, drawing parallels to real-world examples and case studies.

Quotes from focus group:

"This one teacher always starts lectures with a pitch - selling to us the reason why what we are going to study that day is important enough to pay attention to."

Solution
04

Communicating the student voice, but with empathy for educators

Since there is an abundance of expert opinions, tips and tricks, and industry best practices available online, this project’s primary output is a short video that focuses on just LCC students’ opinions on what can make online lectures more engaging and valuable for them. These student opinions are based entirely on findings from the student focus group.

The idea is that this video can become a resource that may be circulated with tutors and speakers to give them a quick insight into the student mindset and help them make more informed decisions while planning online lessons. I hope this helps to improve students’ overall online learning experience.

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