Remote and Hybrid Learning Environments: A Case for Promoting Student Engagement

Due to the changes implemented by many colleges and universities around the country in response to the novel coronavirus, many faculty have been forced to implement fully online learning strategies with little to no prior experience and minimal preparation. Additionally, due to the restrictions placed on classroom occupancy to ensure proper social distancing, some faculty have moved their class to hybrid models, with a portion participating in-person while the remainder participate remotely. This adds an additional layer of complexity to an already complex system as the faculty must ensure that both the in-person and remote students are being engaged. Engagement is a multidimensional concept and is challenging to capture in a single instant in time due to its longitudinal impact. The learner is often said to become an ENGAGED learner when they are searching, evaluating, constructing, creating, organizing to better develop ideas, skills, understandings, solutions, and decisions, amongst others. While engagement has been studied primarily in the context of motivation, other theoretical frameworks also need to be explored that could help better understand this abstract concept within the perspective of a student's socio-ecological environment and use of provided opportunities. Additionally, this needs to be considered in the context of non-human agencies like the remote learning environments which are even more pronounced now and rapidly becoming a staple in many programs throughout the country. This full research paper will explore the impact of different strategies on the engagement (affective, cognitive, and behavioral) of students participating in fully remote and hybrid learning experiences through the lens of a socioecological (engagement in terms of social and ecological factors such as availability of resources, communication, organizational and instructional support), and opportunity-propensity frameworks (learning opportunities and students willingness to avail to these opportunities). With this as our theoretical underpinning we plan to develop two surveys: (1) a faculty survey to identify engaging strategies, and (2) a student survey to evaluate these strategies and incorporate their feedback using a pragmatic lens. The surveys will be developed and administered at a large, urban, midwestern university for both a fully remote and hybrid approach for comparison. Two of the twenty-two sections of a first-year engineering course were designated as fully remote while the remainder utilized a hybrid approach. In this hybrid approach, half of the students (36) attend in-person while the other half attend remotely for the first weekly class meeting. Students then switch roles for the second meeting. Course content, in-class activities, assignments, and exams are common among all twenty-two sections, regardless of modality. In the face of the changes wrought by the pandemic, faculty are adapting to ensure high-quality learning while also maintaining the health and safety of their students and themselves. It is important to understand the impact of the changing landscape of educational practices on our students, as many elements will persist even after the restrictions imposed by the pandemic are lifted. This research hopes to provide faculty with both proven strategies for engaging their students in remote and hybrid learning environments as well as tools to investigate the level of engagement of their students.