Abstract
Worldwide, over the past two years the pandemic has had a significant impact on methods used in teaching. Sessions have moved away from face-to-face delivery toward activities exclusively being conducted online. Difficulties have been reported, such as a reluctance amongst students to engage online (with some describing a ‘painful silence’). Students seem particularly uncomfortable engaging via screen-sharing, video-camera, and microphone facilities, but more post messages using chat. Several studies have employed student perception questionnaires to improve understanding of online teaching, but have not explicitly compared engagement facilities. This paper presents survey questionnaire results of undergraduate students perceptions of different engagement facilities during online synchronous teaching sessions, and the factors influencing engagement to improve effectiveness. More students reported a preference for face-to-face teaching sessions. However, this was divisive. There was also variation amongst students in prevalence and preference for microphone, screen-share, and video use. However, students were almost unanimous in being comfortable posting chat messages. Face-to-face sessions distinguish between speaking as part of the audience and standing on-stage as presenter. The engagement experience online is pushed toward being the presenter (which many students find difficult). There were contrasting student views, in areas such as distraction and recording sessions. An ‘online privacy-visibility paradox’ has been identified, where individuals require both visibility and privacy. The variation in student views and behaviour presents a challenge to deliver teaching sessions that meet the (often conflicting) diversity of needs to support inclusivity (in a manner that is sustainable for teaching staff and financially viable for institutions).
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Dixon, M., Syred, K. (2022). Factors Influencing Student Engagement in Online Synchronous Teaching Sessions: Student Perceptions of Using Microphones, Video, Screen-Share, and Chat. In: Zaphiris, P., Ioannou, A. (eds) Learning and Collaboration Technologies. Designing the Learner and Teacher Experience. HCII 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13328. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05657-4_15
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