Why Engagement Matters
At Honor Education, we believe that collective engagement is the key to transformative education. Learning in the presence of others means observing unique responses and approaches, fostering new insights, empathy and objective self reflection.
Students are asking for more opportunities for online learning because it fits better with their busy lives. Online education offers flexibility, but also raises concerns about independent learning pathways impacting engagement and completion rates.
Balancing flexibility with collective engagement is key to providing dynamic and impactful learning experiences. Read more about why we think thoughtful design and engineering can address this challenge with meaningful results from the lens of our CEO and co-founder Joel Podolny.
One of our fundamental beliefs at Honor Education is that transformational education depends on collective engagement. Content matters. Teaching matters, but so too does being able to learn in the presence of others — to see how they respond and react to the same stimuli to which we are exposed. Not only do we benefit from others’ insights — from what others say — but we benefit from watching how they approach the material with which we are wrestling. If they approach the material differently, that provides us not just with new insight, but with greater empathy. If they approach it similarly, it gives us an ability to observe our own learning strategies — but with some objectivity and distance. We benefit when others challenge us; it requires us to check our thinking more than we would otherwise, and we benefit from learning how to more productively challenge others — to word a challenge in a way that it is heard.
This proposition — that transformational education depends on collective engagement — isn’t by itself particularly controversial. The proposition can be traced back at least as far back as Socrates. In the Phaedrus, written around 370 BCE, Plato records Socrates as challenging the value of written texts in part because written texts offer “pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant.” The problem of course is not inherent in the technology of a written text, but in the lack of collective engagement around that text. Socrates’ concern was that the easy availability of written text would make it too easy for individuals to forego engagement with others as part of their learning.
I am reminded of this dialogue as those of us in higher education wrestle with how the pandemic fundamentally altered student preferences around learning. Over the last year, I have met with administrators and faculty at more than seventy-five institutions, and without exception, they note that one of the consequences of the pandemic is that students now want and expect their courses to be woven into their lives to a much greater degree than they did pre-COVID. Even if Zoom-based education had serious drawbacks, students — especially those with complex, demanding lives beyond their schoolwork — appreciated the flexibility of not having to take a class at a particular location and a particular time. A broadly cited Cengage survey in May 2021 found that 73% of students prefer some courses to be fully online post-pandemic.
Importantly, such student preferences were often based on online learning experiences that were an emergency response to the pandemic, not proactive thinking about pedagogical techniques that would most enhance the online learning experience. As Stanford’s Vice Provost of Digital Education, Matthew Rascoff, said in the preface to Stanford’s Pandemic Education Report, “Emergency remote teaching was an urgent response to a global crisis. Well-designed online learning is the product of patient ‘backwards design,’ an intentional, collaborative process that begins with the needs and learning goals of the student.”
For higher education institutions, these shifting preferences represent an extraordinary opportunity to expand impact beyond their physical walls and to reach students who meet their admission standards but are unable to physically attend. A shift to online implies a shift to more digital material that can be taken in asynchronously by students — for example, a student watching a video on their own time, pausing and replaying those parts of a lecture that they find difficult to understand. Live sessions — whether in person or online — can be more efficiently and effectively used as flipped classrooms, where teachers and students come to those sessions prepared to engage in conversation about lessons and exercises rather than simply consume live lectures.
However, in a way that very much echoes Socrates’ concern about written texts, those same administrators and faculty who recognize the opportunity also see the downside of students being able to engage with digital content where and when they want. The more that a student’s learning journey is an independent pathway, the more likely that the student’s engagement drops. And as engagement drops, learning outcomes drop, and completion rates drop. Significantly, the students that are most adversely affected are those who have not had as adequate preparation for post-secondary education and those whose lives make it most difficult for them to pursue a more engaging alternative.
To put all of this as a question, “How do we respond to the student need for greater individual flexibility without sacrificing on collective engagement?” At Honor Education, we treat this as a design and engineering challenge.
Discussion boards, Slack channels, and email threads are definitely not the answer because they end up sidelining the curricular materials that are supposed to be front and center. Suppose a student is taking an art history class, and the focus of the class is on a particular piece of art — say, Munch’s The Scream. If a faculty member poses a question to a discussion board, the work itself recedes into the background as students provide their responses to that question. Stated differently, discussion boards and the like create a multi-tasking problem; unlike when a professor is in front of the room and drawing the students’ attention to particular aspects of the artwork, discussion boards compete for the student’s attention with the artifact that is the subject of the board. If the student is attending to details of the artifact, the student is not immersed in the discussion board, and if the student is immersed in the discussion board, the student can’t possibly be focusing on the artifact itself. And what is true for a work of art is also true for a challenging formula, a difficult piece of text, a graphical representation of a relationship between two trends, or practically any other curricular artifact. This multi-tasking problem undermines collective engagement.
What is needed is a way for the curricular artifact to remain front and center while the instructor and students are asynchronously exposed to one another’s thoughts and comments about the artifact itself. Bringing the power of collective engagement to asynchronous online learning requires solving a number of design and engineering challenges, but when solved through patient backward design, asynchronous online learning not only provides students greater flexibility at lower costs, but also enables the type of education that is truly transformative.
— Joel Podolny, Honor Education CEO and co-founder
