Remote and Hybrid Learning Environments: A Case for Promoting Student Engagement

Abstract

This full research paper explored students' evaluation of the various engagement strategies undertaken by faculty at the University of Cincinnati, a large, urban, midwestern university in both a fully remote and hybrid first-year engineering design course. Socioecological (engagement in terms of social and ecological factors such as availability of resources, communication, organizational, and instructional support) and opportunity-propensity frameworks (learning opportunities and students' willingness to avail to these opportunities) were used as the theoretical frameworks that underpin this research. In order to explore the engagement strategies used by faculty and the ways these strategies were received by the students, two surveys were developed. Two of the twenty-two sections of the first-year engineering design course were designated as fully remote while the remainder utilized a hybrid approach. In this hybrid approach, half of the students attend in-person while the other half attend remotely for the first weekly class meeting. Students then switch roles for the second meeting. Course content, in-class activities, assignments, and exams are common among all twenty-two sections, regardless of modality. This exploratory research employed a mix of Delphi style and traditional approaches (adapting items from existing instruments) to the development of the two survey instruments: (1) a faculty survey to identify engaging strategies, and (2) a student survey to evaluate these strategies in a self-reported Likert format along with open-ended questions. This paper primarily presents the development of the two surveys and the validation of the student engagement survey using exploratory structured equation modeling technique. It only briefly presents students' evaluation of the engagement strategies as this is not the primary focus of this paper.