Influence of Interpersonal Interactions on Student Engagement: Online Undergraduate Engineering Students’ Perspectives

Abstract In recent years, universities have seen an increase in online course enrollment. In 2005, online enrollment had begun to increase, with 3.2 million people enrolling in online courses. During the Covid-19 pandemic, online course enrollment skyrocketed, with 11.8 million undergraduates taking online courses. However, even with classes returning to normal in the fall of 2021, the number of students enrolled in online courses was larger than pre-pandemic levels. With better schedule flexibility, lower costs, and pacing, online courses offer specific benefits that face-to-face courses cannot. These benefits allow students to complete the course around their schedule, which allows non-traditional students (veterans, working full-time, married, married with dependents, transfer students, etc.) to enroll in online courses. Although online courses offer some benefits compared to traditional courses, online courses have been criticized for their potential negative effects. Online courses offer limited interaction with peers, content, and instructors. Interactions are often facilitated through online discussion boards, Zoom, and other online facilitators. These facilitators offer sparse interactions, which lead to feelings of isolation and a lack of motivation. Students in online courses drop out for a variety of reasons including lack of time, course difficulty, lack of support, etc. These factors provide larger dropout rates for online courses compared to traditional courses. There are several research studies published in the online education space however, there are limited research studies that specifically focus on online engineering education. There have been quantitative studies to find the disparities in engagement between online and traditional courses. However, this study hopes to find out why these disparities occur using qualitative research design. This study will specifically highlight how interpersonal interactions affect engagement in online engineering courses and answers the following research question, 'How do undergraduate engineering students enrolled in online engineering programs perceive interpersonal interactions and how do these interactions influence their engagement?' Online undergraduate students from a large public university in the US were invited to participate in a screening survey of this research study and four participants were selected. These four participants were invited to participate in a 45-60-minute interview. The interviews were conducted online (Zoom), were audio recorded and transcribed. The participants were from the following engineering majors: two students from information technology, one from software engineering and graphic information technology each. The participants' age ranged from 25 to 65, two participants identified as male, one identified as male, and one identified as Genderqueer/ Gender Non-Conforming. The qualitative data was deductively coded to examine the three types of interpersonal interactions: interactions with course content, interactions with peers, and interactions with instructor. Hence, three main categories based on the interpersonal interactions were derived from the data. The data showed that students' interactions with instructors and peers positively influenced their engagement in the online engineering course. However, students' interactions with the course content showed mixed results. Some participants said it helped them engage with the course and others said it did not. The study showed new areas that need to be studied and possible new teaching methods.