Engaging Students During Synchronous Video-Conferencing in COVID19 Times: Preliminary Findings from a Design Study

Abstract

This paper explores student engagement in an undergraduate course during the pandemic-induced emergency remote teaching in the spring of 2020. Fifty preschool education students participated in a course in which synchronous video-conferencing was used. The design study that is outlined in this work focuses on the effect of an instructional approach on the rate and patterns of student engagement. The instructional approach involved questioning in multiple communication channels, chief among which was the chat. The findings indicate that despite the principled design, student engagement varied considerably. A small group of students were very active, systematically participating in the chat and answering all quizzes. Still, the large majority of students exhibited lower engagement rates as they reacted to a few posts on the chat and failed to participate in many of the quizzes assigned. Overall, the study results suggest that the patterns of student engagement identified in the study tend to approximate the ones that characterize face-to-face settings. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.