re:Learnings

Engagement.  There’s $500 million Australian university’s CGS cluster funding potentially at stake, turning on the definition of that word.  If the plan goes ahead (Department of Education and Training 2017, p27), it will be a financial incentive to bring student experience of higher education into sharp focus. As one of the four key quality measures, how you define engagement is, therefore, all important. In sum, there is little agreement as to what engagement is or how we might measure it. It seems that we are often describing different parts of the elephant, rather than the whole. Baron and Corbin 2013, Herein lies the problem. There are two QILT Student Experience Satisfaction indicators that refer to engagement; one for Teaching Quality and seven for Learner Engagement: Teaching Quality Learner engagement During 2015/2016, to what extent have the lecturers, tutors and demonstrators: engaged you actively in learning? During 2015/2...

Video hardware and software is cheaper. It’s quicker and easier to achieve a good standard.  Publishing is now the same as distributing. Yet, if we want to make engaging educational videos, we need to understand how it works and what it’s affordances are in the educational context. How does video work in education? Video’s sound and image fills the visual and auditory senses.  Our working memory decodes according to verbal and visual models for integration with our own understanding of the world.  This new understanding get transferred into long-term memory – but this last point, of course, is subject to remembering and forgetting processes.  It is the strength of the dual-encoding experience that makes video so powerful but there are limits.  Spot the bottleneck in this simple diagrammatic representation (Mayer and Moreno 2003, p44) of how video works in education: Cognitive theory of multimedia learning The bottleneck is Working Memory’s capaci...

Designing specifically for emotional side of learning will help create deep learning experiences.  The key is to understand how to harness this emotion to trigger engagement with learning. Student Interest and Engagement This understanding is what Ella Kahu , Karen Nelson and Catherine Picton have successfully described with their paper Student interest as a key driver of engagement for first year students . It’s significant because with emotional engagement comes increased behavioural  and cognitive engagement.  They provide a framework and a language for understanding why students come to and engage with learning. They start by defining two broad domains. Firstly, a student’s Individual Interest is derived from their personal goals which affects their choice of course.  This interest could stem from either: A passion for the topic A pivotal personal experience and/or A talent Secondly, Situational Interest speaks to how a student’s ...