The learning experience should be consistent whether remote or in-person
Students should have the same learning experience, irrespective of whether they are online or in-classroom, said Matt Baker, senior vice-president of international strategy at Class Technologies.
“We want a consistent learning experience across their platforms – the success should be the same,” he told an audience at THE Digital Universities Week UK 2022.
When the pandemic struck, teachers – often without training – began offering their courses online. For many, “the tools that were available didn’t give them the right platform to be successful, and student engagement became low in that online setting”, said Baker.
Educators who simply broadcast their lectures to students via platforms such as Zoom were not able to harness “active learning” with their students or alter their lecture delivery by gauging student responses, he said.
Through its virtual classroom software, Class Technologies enables educators to measure student engagement in real time and extend and expand online breakout rooms. “We want to take the classroom, traditionally in-person, and bring as many toolsets to the online component [as possible],” Baker said.
One of the most important capabilities is being able to track engagement, he said. “Who’s talking? Who is raising their hand? Who is chatting with who? That data can all be captured in a single place.”
Class Technologies’ software can also track how focused students are by noting, for example, if they leave the lecture webpage to look at social media. “That information can be captured in real time so that teachers can better set the level of the course and manage the engagement,” Baker said. It can also indicate to a lecturer that they need to offer students a quiz to recapture their attention.
That data can be exported as an Excel file and the company is also engaging with institutions to put the data into an easily accessible dashboard. By harnessing the power of big data, institutions can marry engagement data with big data about their student demographic or teacher performance.
An audience member questioned whether it was ethical to harness student engagement in this way, and Baker noted: “We are not experts in analysis, but we believe that institutions are and we’re giving them the data they need to make the best decision for the institution. It also allows students to have a say in their teaching and learning experience.”
Ultimately, student engagement will become increasingly important as institutions settle into hybrid or blended forms of instruction. “We want a consistent experience across their learning platforms rather than having people say, ‘I went to a school in brick-and-mortar’ or ‘I went to school online’,” Baker said.
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