Abstract

In this session, we will identify some of the important reasons why millennial students are captivated by video games, and how we can use these lessons to engage students in online learning for their academic studies. This session will be informative to teachers and professors who use, select or design new online learning tools for their classes.

Using examples from practicezone.org, we will show how the strategic design of online quizzes and electronically graded homework tools can engage students in learning, promote peer instruction, and free class time for discussion. The key is to allow students an unlimited number of attempts to complete their assignments correctly. We will show data and results from large General Chemistry classes that demonstrate an exceptionally high degree of work and commitment by students to their academic studies.

The primary relationship to the conference theme is to demonstrate how the strategic design of online learning tools can promote exceptionally high levels of student engagement.

Presenter

Chuck Wight

Chuck Wight has taught chemistry at the University of Utah since 1984. He currently serves as Associate VP for Academic Affairs and Undergraduate Studies. He is responsible for guiding the development of institutional policies and support for online and hybrid courses, General Education, Continuing Education, and an institutional partnership with Dixie State College. He is the sole owner of the new online learning web site http://practicezone.org.

Abstract

Service Learning at a Distance: Engaging Online Learners in Applying Their Knowledge and Skills to Help Others

Purpose of the Presentation: One of the challenges of teaching an online course is to get students involved with the content beyond simply reading and discussing it. When students are separated from the instructor and each other by distance and time, how can they be effectively guided in arranging, participating in, and completing service-learning experiences? The presenter will share instructional strategies he has utilized to rise above such challenges.

Target Audience: Higher education faculty, but all are welcome.

Instructional Context: The presenter is a professor in the College of Education and Human Development at Southern Utah University, Cedar City, Utah. The college offers six courses for the endorsement of content-area teachers (whether pre-service or in-service) in teaching English as a second language (ESL). The program is designed to help them develop knowledge, skills, and dispositions associated with adapting, designing, preparing, and providing instruction to meet the academic, linguistic, and social needs of ESL learners in K-12 schools. Many of the university students who are interested in obtaining this ESL endorsement work full time, and some live at a great distance from the university, so they are not able to attend a traditional, face-to-face class; therefore, the program is offered as an e-learning opportunity using the Blackboard Learning System to provide online, virtual classrooms. The service-learning experience associated with several of the courses requires students to find non-native English speakers in their own geographical area and provide them with tutoring.

Presentation Plan and Objectives: Out of the 45 minutes available for this presentation, the first 20 minutes will be used to describe the context of the investigation: the courses, the instructional materials used (case studies, multimedia, practical experiences, and discussion activities), the online learners and instructor, and the various approaches used to engage learners with the content of the course and to apply their recently acquired knowledge and skills in a service-learning experience. During the next 15 minutes, the methods and results of the investigation will be explained and discussed. The remaining 10 minutes will be used for participants’ questions and discussion, sharing of their ideas and experiences, and ideas for future investigations.

Practical Applications: Participants of this proposed session will hear about and see the presenter’s processes and the end results of selecting high-quality instructional materials (including case studies, multimedia, practical experiences, and discussion activities) that were originally designed for face-to-face delivery and adapting them so that they could be effectively implemented in a completely online learning environment to engage the learners with the content of the course, with each other, and with English language learners. The participants and the presenter will gain useful insights from one another as they discuss successes and failures in actual efforts to engage online learners with case studies, multimedia, discussion activities, practical experiences, and service-learning experiences.

Relationship to the Conference Theme: Teaching with technology in an online learning environment can be made more effective by implementing instructional strategies that engage learners with the content and give them opportunities to apply what they have learned in service to others.

Information to Support What is Advocated: Examples of the instructional materials utilized, the strategies implemented in several online ESL endorsement courses, the theoretical base, and data gathered from three years of the presenter teaching these courses will be shared during the presentation.

Presenter

Thomas Cunningham

Tom Cunningham, professor of education, Southern Utah University, Cedar City, UT. Degrees: dual-major B.A., linguistics and Spanish (BYU, 1984); M.A., teaching English as a second language (BYU, 1986); Ph.D., instructional technology (USU, 1994). Career as teacher started at LDS Missionary Training Center, teaching Spanish (4 years). Taught ESL (7 years total) at Provo Adult High School, BYU, BYU-Hawaii, and USU. Faculty member at SUU since 1994 in various roles. For 8 years in Library, taught instructional technology and library media courses, directed SUU’s faculty development program, and served as reference librarian, library instruction coordinator, and collection development specialist. Next 3 years, taught information systems courses, e.g., multimedia production, systems analysis and design, and IS project management for School of Business and College of Computing, Integrated Engineering, and Technology. Since fall 2005, has been teaching instructional technology and ESL teacher training courses in SUU’s College of Education and Human Development.

Abstract

Title: Increasing Student Engagement in Distance Learning Courses

Purpose: The purpose of this presentation is to introduce participants to key elements of student retention theory and how it can inform best practices for distance learning teachers at both K-12 and postsecondary levels. The presentation is intended both for distance learning instructors and faculty/staff assistance centers and professional development personnel who work with distance learning instructors.

Objectives: During this session, we will:
- Explore key elements of student retention theory, including academic and social integration, academic engagement strategies, and social engagement strategies.
- Explore ways in which student characteristics influence engagement.
- Discuss how to connect students with academic and social support services normally available to on-site students.
- Share proven practices and tools for promoting and assessing student engagement.

Practical Applications: Participants in this session will be better prepared to implement practices that promote student engagement, retention, and success. Additional resources for further exploration will be introduced for those who wish to pursue this topic in additional detail.

Relationship to Conference Theme: For those who teach with technology, promoting student engagement is critical to combat the potentially de-humanizing elements of technology-delivered instruction.

Theoretical Base:
Educational institutions have long puzzled over how to help students succeed. Successful outcomes include degree attainment, intellectual growth, social growth, job placement, and so forth (Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991, 2005). Two closely related areas of concentration in the field of student success are research on student retention (how institutions retain students) and student persistence (what factors lead a student to persist to graduation). While much of the literature base for this presentation comes from the higher education literature, the ideas also apply to secondary students participating in non-traditional educational experiences.

Of all the recent models of student retention, perhaps none is more influential than the model first proposed in 1975 by Vincent Tinto. Tinto proposes that voluntary student withdrawal from higher education institutions, like suicide, results from “insufficient interactions with others in the college and insufficient congruency with the prevailing value patterns of the college collectivity” (1975, p. 92). Specifying two realms of interaction within colleges and universities, the academic and social realms, Tinto forms a conceptual schema that “argues that it is the individual’s integration into the academic and social systems of the college that most directly relates to his continuance in that college” (p. 96). He uses two constructs – goal commitment, or dedication to finishing a program of study, and institutional commitment, or dedication to staying at a particular institution – to explain student retention and proposes that the degree of academic and social integration experienced by a student in the college environment directly influences these two forms of commitment (see Figure 1 on p. 95).

Tinto (1975) defines academic integration as the degree to which a student is incorporated into the academic fabric of his or her institution. He argues that academic integration can be measured both in terms of grade performance and the more nebulous construct of intellectual development. While the former refers to how successfully a student meets explicit academic standards, the latter, he asserts, is more closely related to how well the student comes to identify with the norms of the academic system (p. 104). Calling upon the work of Rootman (1972), Tinto proposes that “voluntary withdrawal can be viewed as an individual’s response to the strain produced by the lack of ‘person-role’ fit between himself and the normative climate of the institution that establishes certain roles as appropriate to the institution” (p. 106). Hence, the retention of students depends heavily upon how successfully the institution can integrate students into the academic realm of the college or university. In a similar vein, social integration “involves notions of both levels of integration and of degrees of congruency between the individual and his social environment” (p. 107) and is also a key predictor of student retention.

For nontraditional students, the implicit norms of an institution are just as powerful as explicit expectations in their effect on students (Weidman, 1989). In addition, factors outside the institution exert a strong pull; nontraditional students tend to experience lower degrees of social integration on campus because of their off-campus obligations (Bean & Metzner, 1985). Academic integration seems to have a greater effect on the persistence of nontraditional students than social integration by having a direct effect on commitment (Cleveland-Innes, 1994). Tinto also acknowledged this more recently: “In most cases, academic integration seems to be the more important form of involvement” (1998, p. 169).
Other authors have highlighted the critical role of the classroom experience and the role of faculty in fostering academic integration and goal commitment (Sandler, 2002; Sorey & Duggan, 2008; Weidman, 1985). Though he did not include it as a part of his original conceptualization of academic integration, Tinto himself later highlighted the critical role of the classroom: “student engagement is, for most institutions, centered in and around the classroom” (1993, p. 132). In creating a model of college outcomes, Donaldson and colleagues have placed the “connecting classroom” in a prominent position, calling on prior research to highlight its importance (Donaldson, 1999; Donaldson, Graham, Kasworm, & Dirkx, 1999; Graham, Donaldson, Kasworm, & Dirkx, 2000). Said Donaldson concerning nontraditional students, “their class-related learning and their relationships with faculty and other students become the most powerful influences on their campus experiences” (Donaldson, 1999, p. 28).

Elsewhere McGivney identifies high-quality course content and presentation together with a supportive learner group as critical success factors for nontraditional students (McGivney, 2004). Negative academic experiences, such as lack of access to counseling, mentoring, and academic advising, are identified as primary causes for adult student dropout (Hensley & Kinser, 2001a; 2001b; Sissel, Hansman, & Kasworm, 2001). From the sources cited above, it becomes apparent that for the nontraditional student with substantial off-campus obligations and limited social interaction on campus, instructional experiences play a major role in institutional persistence. That is, positive instructional experiences lead to stronger commitment and a greater likelihood of retention.

Presenter

Nate Southerland

Nate is an Instructional Services specialist at the Utah Education Network. A former high school physics teacher and educational technology specialist on the Navajo Reservation, he is currently finishing his PhD coursework in Educational Leadership and Policy department at the University of Utah. Nate’s research focuses on student retention in higher education.