Student engagement has been a challenge to the field of higher education for decades, a challenge that reached new heights after the pandemic ushered in the age of digital learning. With hybrid learning becoming the norm, it has never been more imperative for the field to evaluate how we engage our students.
At Fierce Education’s virtual event, Helping Faculty Navigate Top Challenges In This New Blended Learning Environment, leaders and innovators in the field gathered to share their insight on the various challenges in the blended learning stratosphere. Sean Michael Morris, Vice President of Course Hero, delivered a thought-provoking keynote speech to urge educators to rethink what it means to engage students in the classroom. As Vice President, Academics, Morris leads Course Hero’s educator team and initiatives including partnerships with faculty, development of Course Hero’s educator platform and the creation of educator-focused content, events and workshops. He brings 20 years of experience in academia to Course Hero and is an expert in student-centered learning and critical digital pedagogy. You can view the on-demand version here.
With multiple learning platforms and modalities in use across higher education institutions, how do educators engage students? Morris opened his keynote speech by posing first the question: How do we define a learning platform? Engagement, after all, is a highly individualized, subjective experience. Particularly in a digital environment, but still true of a physical classroom setting, gaining undivided attention is near impossible as there will always be rival stimuli.
Instead, when teaching, the speaker or instructor is tasked with the responsibility of sharing information that is deemed profound enough to capture the attention of those in the audience. Morris postulates that gaining undivided attention shouldn’t necessarily be the goal or the expectation, but rather the hope is that students will pick up on the points of information that matter to them.
Morris reported his sadness in reading a quote from Beckie Supiano at The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Everyone keeps telling professors to ‘meet students where they are’ — even if it takes more time and effort… Increasingly, though, professors aren’t so sure that this level of flexibility is working.” Educators have begun to frame students' needs for flexibility as a kind of entitlement and Morris maintains that this mindset exacerbates the teacher/student divide, highlighting the old question of who knows education best—the teacher or the student?
Educators are charged with ensuring that the students under their care learn what they need to learn, a burden that is unique to the teacher. This expectation is systemic, and Morris argues that it can cause systemic distress. The expectation is for students to show up when and where assigned, to submit work and present when assigned, to cite sources exactly as mandated, to fit their work into a fixed rubric. Morris points out that students are expected to do this regardless of whatever they are dealing with in their personal life (hunger, homelessness, abuse, financial insecurity, alienation, despair and empathy for current events, mental health issues, etc.). Educational systems often assume students are guilty until proven innocent, that they are all failing until they pass, and that the only way to pass is by following the very specific, very rigid path assigned.
Morris divulges that there is no way to force student engagement. He emphasizes that the goal should not be to entice students to learn because by signing up for the course, students already show their desire to learn. Metaphorically, the fire does not need to be lit, but rather stroked and fed so it continues to burn bright. Morris quotes bell hooks from Teaching to Transgress, “The first paradigm that shaped my pedagogy was the idea that the classroom should be an exciting place, never boring. And if boredom should prevail, then pedagogical strategies were needed that would intervene, alter, even disrupt the atmosphere.”
Education is not meant to necessarily make masters out of students. Morris proposes that education is meant to liberate from the rigidity of mastery and instead empower learning through inquiry and imagination. Students need to be encouraged to learn from themselves, synthesizing classroom teachings with their own experiences and given opportunities to vocalize their thoughts and findings. Morris assures that this approach could work just as well for the hard sciences as it does for the humanities, the imagination is just as present in mathematics, physics, medicine, and chemistry.
The idea of blended learning allows educators to view learning in a brand new framework. Where learning has previously been contained within the walls of a classroom, within a semester or a singular course, Morris asserts that hybrid learning can help educators break free of this rigid structure and recognize that learning also takes place in homes, in living rooms, on public transportation, and so on. Turning away from traditional ideas of education gives teachers the opportunity to think about learning as something that permeates our lives as opposed to something that occurs in a particular place at a particular time according to a syllabus. Learning becomes something that is constantly present, and classrooms become continuous rather than confined.
In closing, Morris says, “If we want to engage students, we don’t need to mandate that engagement, or try to trick them into it. All we need to do is find those pathways—regardless of platform—that will release our students’ imaginative capacity and help them see that knowledge is ecstatic.”
For more articles from the Fierce Education event, see:
Top Gun Instructor: Engaging Students On All Learning Platforms
Schools Develop Programs to Raise Student Preparedness Levels
Course Design Strategies for Hybrid and Asynchronous Learning