VLEs – engaging students (but what about the staff?)

In ALT-J March 2009 an article by Alice Maltby and Sarah Mackie from the University of the West of England explores the extent to which use of a VLE can help or hinder student engagement.

The article describes a project in which student activity in the VLE was tracked and this was mapped against their performance. The aim was to assess whether tracking VLE use could help to identify students at risk of disengagement, who are less likely to complete their programmes of study.

Findings of the study varied between the 2 cohorts involved. In the first year Organisational studies group assessment performance steadily increased in relation to the number of times students accessed the VLE. With the second year Marketing cohort however there appeared to be an optimum level of VLE use above which assessment performance dropped. In other words too much use of the VLE could have a detrimental effect. The authors suggest that this may be due to what Mason (2002) describes as “The flexibility of the medium itself …. the ability to jump from one resource to the next on the Web can be over-used so that relatedness becomes an end in itself, and meaning is lost.”

The authors emphasise the importance of self-efficacy in learners as a way of supporting engagement. They define self-efficacy as “the belief that one can do a task and can transfer the learning of that task to similar tasks”. Prompt feedback can help to build students’ notions of self-efficacy, and VLEs offer a range of opportunities for this.

To a certain extent the authors conclude that their findings are consistent with Lee’s (2001) model of learner engagement in Web-enhanced environments, which identifies 4 learner types: Model students , traditionalists, geeks and the disengaged. However they acknowledge that further investigation is necessary especially into potential reasons why some students access the VLE less than others.

This is certainly one of the questions that arose for me out of reading the article. Also how can lecturers affect student levels of usage to promote engagement, especially early on in a course? (Gilly Salmon’s 5 stage model springs to mind here). According to the article, the VLE is used for “pre- and post- session learning activities … preparatory work, readings, links to a wide range of resources, advice, formative assessment and revision”. How these activities are set up is not described in detail. To what extent is the lecturer’s engagement with and use of the VLE affecting learner engagement here? For example if learners are accessing readings through the VLE, how is the lecturer facilitating reflection on these, and what feedback are they receiving from their peers and/or the lecturer? As I have commented in a previous post on the JISC learner experience of e-learning research, their findings suggested that:

• tutors’ use of technologies is an important influence on learners, especially early on in their studies
• many students are not sure how to use technology to aid their learning
• new learners tend to be conservative in their study habits, having fixed ideas about how technology will be used.

The lecturer’s role would therefore seem to be of utmost importance here: for example ensuring that learners are clear about how they are expected to use the VLE, how its use relates to their F2F contact and what benefits online activity can have for their learning. Also lecturers can have an influence in modelling effective use of technology for learning. Some staff will be able to adapt easily to this online facilitative role, but for others it will be a challenge which will require significant amounts of support. Surely we cannot consider student engagement without also facing up to the challenge of engaging staff in the effective use of technology to enhance learning?

References
Lee, M.G. 2001. Profiling students’ adaptation styles in Web-based learning. Computers and Education 36, no.2: 121-32

Maltby,A. and Mackie,S. Virtual learning environments – help or hindrance for the ‘disengaged’ student?  ALT-J Vol 17, no 1, March 2009

Mason, R. 2002. Review of e-learning for education and training. Paper presented at the Networked Learning Conference, March 26-28 n Sheffield, UK