Student Engagement – a discussion about the future

When it comes to learning technology there are no shortage of achievements you can help your students reach.There are also just a many challenges you can face trying to get them acclimated, eager, and engaged.

Engagement is tough to get let alone maintain with so many additional sources clamoring for attention. We all envision ourselves as multi-tasking masters accomplishing several tasks at a time, when in reality by dividing our attention we may not be giving any one thing the attention it truly deserves.

Engagement is a tricky thing. There are theories on how long to show a slide, how long videos can be, how many minutes before an interactive activity should be run in order to keep our audience involved and in turn engaged in the content. There are the Five I’s by Lori Freifeld for best practices on employee engagement, there are a number of resources on the web about student engagement (Eduopia did a good roundup of these last year you can find here) that you can find with a simple search as well. I think there is merit to all of these approaches but maybe ways to engage is not necessarily the answer, maybe it’s our content that’s the problem.

I can already hear the discussion about to come forth bout content. Not everyone is lucky enough to have control over their content. We have restrictions, requirements, objectives, declarations, and so on and so forth that we are bound to by state, federal, or “wanting to stay employed” laws of the land. But maybe, just maybe, that’s part of the problem. Students, employees, participants all need to know things. Your things are different from mine, and there things are different from ours, but they are all things none the less. Maybe it’s about the content itself being too detailed, not detailed enough, focusing on the wrong area of the content or even not giving the people learning the things the tools or direction they need to learn them.

A research study a few years back noted that a couple of things are needed to truly engage in content, it has to be meaningful to them and it has o relate to their goals. The article about the study is here so I encourage a look to get the most of the information but these two things are relevant and I think necessary to move engagement forward. I don’t think they are the end all but it’s a start. Undoubtedly there are more studies done like this, identifying new ways o approach engagement and some additional research on what has been found can only help us moving forward.

I think as educators, trainers, learning professionals we need to look a little closer at the things we are trying to teach and see where we can make it more engaging. Where can we streamline our approach, or content, to meet the needs of those learning our things. It’s easy to get hung up on the way it is, the tools available, our individual situation. Getting out of that, for even a little bit, as we create for engagement could start making the difference.