Addressing accessibility and inclusion in remote learning requires many of the same tools required and used when in the classroom setting. Understanding these similarities means that educators who have adapted and adopted strategies to address accessibility and inclusion in the classroom will not necessarily be needing to “reinvent the wheel.” in a move to remote teaching. At the same time, there are some unique challenges to remote teaching that classroom teaching strategies cannot address. These unique challenges must have separate strategies.

RESEARCH

Research on student engagement is plentiful, and indeed, includes mechanisms such as the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). While the NSSE is a survey of colleges and universities in Canada and the United States, it may still provide insight into K-12. In particular, student engagement in an online environment differs in some aspects from student engagement in the classroom, so a book such as Student Engagement and Participation: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications includes more current research directly addressing the remote learning environment, as well as issues with synchronous versus asynchronous lessons. While there are articles that address student engagement both in classroom and online settings, there is also mention of research into disengagement. Gary Natriello (1984) found students tended to be behaviorally disengaged when they perceived lack of fairness in enforcing rules and policies. In Raymond Francis’s article, he relays the well-established research on engagement:

“As current literature indicates, student engagement is impacted by several factors. Among those factors are the student’s self-intrinsic motivation, connection with the course content, and the student’s perception of the faculty member’s attitude and engagement (Gasiewski, Eagan, Garcia, Hurtado, & Chang, 2012). This section discusses the importance of setting up students for success in their learning through the use of engaging instruction and the use of technology.(my emphasis)” (Francis, Davis and Humiston, 2018)

In the current educational world that has pivoted abruptly to remote teaching and learning, engagement for students in higher education looks different than in K-12 settings. Sang Chan (2018) looked at the cognitive, social and emotional engagement at the higher education level. Chan writes that since “In high school settings, adolescent online learners rated student-instructor and student-content interactions higher in educational value than student-student interaction (Borup, Graham, & Davies, 2013),” Chan (2018) this shows that attention should focus more on the student-instructor interactions to increase engagement.

In a publication that directly addressed the pivot to synchronous remote learning, Dwi Rahayu explored Indonesian university students’ responses to the use of Zoom for synchronous classes. (Rahayu 2020) Among the findings, Rahayu states that,

“The students agreed that they could communicate at ease before the lesson starts, question and answer during the study process, and could work collaboratively through the breakout rooms. Through the whiteboard/shared screen feature in zoom conference, students described that they were able to give feedback to each other. Moreover, they mostly agreed that materials to the lesson could be accessed and understood in e-learning.” (Rahayu, 2020)

This is encouraging for teachers making the pivot to remote teaching, however the Indonesian students also agreed that, “the traditional face-to-face still gives easier and better access from the factors of communication and materials compared to the e-learning.” (Rahayu, 2020)

What has not yet been studied is whether synchronous meeting platforms such as Zoom and video applications such as Snap Camera can be used in ways to add dimensions to synchronous meetings that face-to-face cannot, and have a positive effect on engagement and inclusion. This would be an interesting Master’s project idea.

 

 

References

Borup, J., Graham, C., & Davies, R. (2013). The nature of adolescent learner interaction in a virtual high school setting. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 29(2), 153–167. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2729.2012.00479.x

Chan, S., & Bose, D. (2018). Engage Online Learners: Design Considerations for Promoting Student Interactions. In Management Association, I. (Ed.), Student Engagement and Participation: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications (pp. 96-118). IGI Global. http://doi:10.4018/978-1-5225-2584-4.ch005

Francis, R. W., Davis, M. J., & Humiston, J. (2018). Engaging Students in Large Classes Through the Use of Blended Learning Instructional Strategies (BLIS). In Management Association, I. (Ed.), Student Engagement and Participation: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications (pp. 306-318). IGI Global. http://doi:10.4018/978-1-5225-2584-4.ch015

Gasiewski J. A. Eagan M. K. Garcia G. A. Hurtado S. Chang M. J. (2012). From gatekeeping to engagement: A multicontextual, mixed method study of student academic engagement in introductory STEM courses.Research in Higher Education, 53(2), 229–261. 10.1007/s11162-011-9247-y23503751

Management Association, I. (Ed.). (2018). Student Engagement and Participation: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications. IGI Global. http://doi:10.4018/978-1-5225-2584-4

Natriello, G. (1984). Problems in the evaluation of students and student disengagement from secondary schools. Journal of Research and Development in Education, 17(4), 14–24.

Sotillo, Susana M. (2000). Discourse functions and syntactic complexity in synchronous and asynchronous communication. Language Learning & Technology, 4(1), 77–110. http://dx.doi.org/10125/25088