Online classroom engagement: A Mixed-Method Exploration of Effective Engagement Strategies of Online Classrooms in the College of Education During COVID-19

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has influenced the idea of classroom teaching in many ways, and the notion of online learning becomes more popular as teachers and students both find themselves benefiting from this learning experience. Since 2020, studies about self-efficacy, digital literacy, and online learning curricula development have promoted the quality of online learning. However, the popularity of online learning came with a multitude of issues about recreating “the classroom engagement” between students and instructors, resulting in a general decrease in student learning enthusiasm for attending schools (Elshareif & Mohamed, 2021). In this paper, I aimed to address the problem of forming a more engaging and effective online learning environment in the higher education setting, and I used the online learning experience at the University of Washington (UW) as the reference. I conducted mixed-method research to collect, analyze, and discuss the online learning engagement at UW’s COVID-19 remote instruction through students and faculty’s experiences. Data gathered from a multitude of sources revealed that both students and faculty at UW had positive experiences and attitudes about their online learning engagement during their online instruction, but they also agreed upon needing more robust improvement over the differentiated online engagement strategy in both synchronous and asynchronous environments, supports for students and faculty’s online learning effectiveness, and general increase over the digital literacy. This paper provides an authentic record of online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic for future research. It also urges higher education faculty to embrace the opportunity for improving, establishing, and researching effective online engagement methods in promoting a more inclusive and less intimidating environment that could benefit students in their future online learning endeavors.