Online tutorials and active participation – what do students think?

The Open University (OU) carried out a pan-university research project, ‘Synchronous Online Learning: Addressing the Challenges of Student Engagement’. This research was to gauge students’ thoughts on active participation in online tutorials. It found that a significant proportion of students, despite acknowledging the benefits, had concerns with the idea of active learning. 

OU content is delivered predominantly online, asynchronously. Online tutorials are an exception to this, giving students an opportunity to partake in synchronous learning with direct engagement with tutors. 

It has become somewhat of a given in higher education, especially for online delivery, that active learning, involving collaborative activities, for example, leads to better learning outcomes (e.g. Lear et al., 2010; Caliskan et al., 2020). However, it is worth noting that resistance to active participation has been detected before (e.g Vivolo, 2016). The OU’s survey sought to establish the extent to which students find active participation in online tutorials desirable or beneficial.

In the complete study, 620 students and 197 tutors answered a range of questions about online tutorials. This blog will focus on just a few of the questions posed and their student responses.

The survey tells us that 59% of students agreed with the statement ‘I enjoy online tutorials where I can actively take part’. This is a promising start; there are links between enjoying learning and successful motivation, interest and engagement (see for example, Okada & Sheehy, 2020).

Indeed when we move from ‘enjoy’ to recognising ‘benefit’ 66% of students agree with the statement ‘I think there is a benefit to me if I actively take part in online tutorials’. 

However…

When asked to comment on the statement ‘I feel stressed in online tutorials when I am expected to actively take part’ 33% of students agreed. This is a sizeable proportion of students. Indeed, this may be driving an observed trend whereby students prefer to watch recordings of online tutorials rather than participate synchronously. For example, on a recent Faculty of Business and Law (FBL) module with over 1,800 registered students, analysis shows that recordings of tutorials were watched by 51% more students than attended synchronously. 

In an associated question, the statement ‘I feel confident speaking in online tutorials’ attracted only 35% agreement.  

These findings suggests that online tutors need to be aware of the stress that participation may cause. Accordingly, imposing participation may cause a negative association with online tutorials.  This is particularly challenging in an online environment, where tutors may be deprived of the visual cues showing discomfort that might be more obvious in a face-to-face setting. 

We also need to ask whether the style of online tutorial has an impact:

49% of all students agreed with the statement ‘In online tutorials, the tutor's role is to teach facts’. However, this rises to 69% for FBL students.  In a similar vein the statement ‘Thinking and reasoning processes are more important than specific module content’ only 34% of students agreed. 

Just under half, 48%, of students preferred online tutorials where the tutor does the talking. Only 31% of students agreed with the statement ‘Students learn best by finding solutions to questions and problems on their own’. 

This suggests students, and especially business and law students, prefer to be given information and methods in the traditional manner, rather than being taught learning processes or encouraged to learn by discovery.

Why do students choose to not participate actively?

We can bring these last two findings together and ask why students have not participated actively in the past. The top responses are given in this chart:

The top reason given was that students simply did not wish to participate actively, ‘I was happy to just listen’. This lends some support for traditional ways of teaching, with the expert transferring knowledge to the student. Also students express a lack of confidence in their knowledge. Other reasons include being worried about what other students might think. This is presumably the perennial fear of asking a ‘stupid’ question. There is also the problem that the student had not yet arrived at the appropriate part of the module. Clearly, a lack of confidence is behind a few of these responses. If teaching teams are going to encourage active participation, confidence building activities require inclusion as part of the design.

Conclusions

It has become a modern-day mantra that learning is most effective when it involves learning through active participation, by for example, collaborating in authentic activities. Indeed, the survey shows that over half of the students enjoy such activities and recognise their benefits. However, not all students feel comfortable actively participating and this is not their preferred approach to learning.

A third of students find the expectation of active participation stressful and just over a third reported feeling confident speaking in online tutorials. 69% of FBL students thought that tutors should provide facts in online tutorials rather than teaching how to think and learn. Less than a third of students thought that the best way to learn was through personal discovery. 

This suggests that current academic approaches to learning with respect to active participation in online tutorials are not aligned with all students’ comfort zones or beliefs in how they should be taught. Such misalignment may cause friction between tutors and students and lead to disengagement and demotivation from significant cohorts of the student community.

Kevin Amor, Senior Lecturer in Accounting and Financial Management, Business School
Allan Mooney, Senior Lecturer in the Business School

Kevin Amor

Kevin Amor is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Accounting and Finance. He has spent most of his career in real estate investment, ending up as the director of various investment funds. He has also been a tutor on both the MBA and MSC Finance since 2008 and an OU student for over 20 years. Kevin is currently the qualification lead on the Business School’s new degree, BSc Accounting & Finance.

Allan Mooney

Allan is a Senior Lecturer and Assistant Head of Student Experience at The Open University. He completed his MBA and MSC in HRM at Glasgow Caledonian University. He was previously Head of Learning and Development within Forestry and Land Scotland, an agency of the Scottish Government. Before that, he was a CIPD lecturer at City of Glasgow College and Chair of the CIPD Organisational Development Group. He is currently a Chartered Fellow of the CIPD,  Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and a Certified Management Business Educator.