Student Engagement in Online Classrooms: How to Measure It and Act on It

Teachers are always looking for ways to improve student engagement. Measuring engagement is the first step to managing it. In our university lab, we use innovative systems and methods and a unique software package to generate reliable, objective, and detailed information about student participation in online synchronous classes. From standard Zoom recordings, we measure the speech time of individuals in a meeting and plot it in revealing ways. Our “discussion dashboards” help teachers engage students more equitably and effectively and give students actionable feedback on their performance. A free version of our software is available. The software heeds security and privacy concerns in a typical university setting. We have been deploying and testing various prototypes at our university for three years. In this session, we will share dashboard output from actual online classes that used a discussion pedagogy. The data yield insights into the dynamics of class discussion, the balance and inclusiveness of the discussion, and the class performance of individual students. The insights can be used to improve instructional design, to create an inclusive learning environment, and to help students improve their in-class learning. The data and methods presented in this session are new to the market and this conference, having been developed during 2020-2023. An early review appeared in Harvard Business Publishing’s Inspiring Minds.