Student engagement is a buzzword in most universities, and it is a key pillar in the QMUL 2030 strategy. But what do we actually mean by student engagement and what does engagement mean to the more than 1400 postgraduate students who are enrolled in online courses at QMUL? How do online students engage and balance the competing demands of work, study, and family/social life?
Dr Vanessa Muirhead (Institute of Dentistry, Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry) will be exploring these questions and unpacking the enigma of online student engagement from the postgraduate student perspective in her research project funded by the Westfield Fund for Enhancing the Student Experience – The “Understanding and developing Strategies to Enhance student engagement in postgRaduate online courses at QMUL” (USER) research project.
The USER project will engage postgraduate online students in focus groups to explore what good engagement looks like to students and to find out more about the barriers that they encounter engaging online with the course content, with tutors and with other students. Vanessa will be analysing QMplus data and using Learner Engagement Analytics (LEA) to identify how different students (typologies) use forum posts and other online tools to interact. Finally, students will be invited to join workshops to create a rubric to measure online student engagement. This “students as partners” approach will allow students to be co-creators, designing an online student engagement assessment that meets the needs of diverse learners.
Please contact Vanessa Muirhead (v.muirhead@qmul.ac.uk) if you want to find out more about the project or if you want to get involved as a student or a member of staff.