This document discusses creating an online learning community in the metaverse to improve student engagement. It analyzes how technology was hindering engagement in online classes due to issues with group work and interaction. The solution created was to hold low-tech classes in the metaverse, allowing informal social interaction between teachers and students in a shared virtual space. This balanced the use of technology to support pedagogy rather than override it, improving cognitive, affective, behavioral and social engagement through a sense of community. A demo of the virtual campus shows how this works in practice.
3. In this session: our journey
● Our problem: lack of engagement in online T&L
● Our analysis: pedagogy adapting to technology
● Our solution: low tech classes in a high tech
environment
● Our result: online teaching and learning community
5. Our problem: lower engagement online
● Engagement in online learning hindered by:
○ Group work in Break Out Rooms
○ Issues with monitoring, TTT and high prep time
○ Little room for natural interaction (eg, bumping
into people, hanging out on campus for
homework)
6. Analysis
● Tech should support pedagogy, not override it
● Engagement is a product of motivation
● Motivation comes from the environment we operate
within
Sato, M., & Loewen, S. (2019)
7. Our solution
● Community → motivation → engagement
○ Social engagement: allows informal interaction for Ts and Ss
in a tangible space
○ Cognitive and affective engagement: low tech classes in
the metaverse let us focus on pure pedagogy + monitoring is
back!
○ Behavioural engagement: can’t login and forget
about class
8. Demo: what happens on campus
Click here to see a quick demo of what happens on campus
9. Some homework
● How can you free pedagogy from tech in your
classes?
● Are your students engaged across all four aspects of
engagement?
● Are your tech solutions creating too much work for
you?
10. References
● Sato, M., & Loewen, S. (2019). Evidence-Based Second Language Pedagogy (1st ed.).
Routledge.
● Robinson, C. C., & Hullinger, H. (2008). New benchmarks in higher education. Journal of
Education for Business, 84(2), 101–108.
● Hoi, V. N., & Le Hang, H. (2021). The structure of student engagement in online learning: A
bi‐factor exploratory structural equation modelling approach. Journal of Computer
Assisted Learning, 37(4), 1141–1153.
● Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick : the science of successful
learning. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
● Loewen, S. (2020). Introduction to instructed second language acquisition (Second edition.).
Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Hello everybody and thank you for showing interest in our project. In the next 10 minutes we’ll show you how we are tackling the problem of engagement in online teaching by focussing on two things: (i) community building and (ii) balancing the relationship between technology and pedagogy, making sure technology doesn’t take over. We are doing this in our interactive online campus.
Since there is no Q&A time today, here are our contacts. Feel free to reach out, and we will also see you at the mingle session later, which we are excited about because it uses the same platform we are about to show you.
So, how did we go from delivering online classes to operating within a teaching and learning online community? Well, the first step was admitting to ourselves that our online classes were very good but not excellent.
Firstly we identified that the platforms we were teaching on were not providing the teaching and learning environment that we value in terms of engagement
Next, we set out to only employ technology when we were confident it was serving our teaching goal, and enhanced the learning experience.
Once we found the tech that served this purpose, we went straight back to good old teaching principles and focused on the elements that trigger engagement: motivation and connection. This involved lots of reading and experimenting. (lit ref)
Now, with the tech covered, we’ve been able to focus more closely on community building as one of the social aspects that are crucial in Second Language Acquisition (reference)
“Engagement means active participation in learning” (Masatoshi, 2019)
We started Amagree in January 2022, teaching test prep classes on Zoom. Before then, we had some experience with Teams over a couple of years. Classes on both platforms were good but not excellent and we felt that while students were entertained enough, engagement could have been improved for both students and teachers.
Specifically, we were quite unhappy with
Group work in BORs: clunky, slow, inflexible and can accidentally ‘kick out’ people + ss lose autonomy
Monitoring can be time consuming (visiting 5 groups means abandoning the main room - students come in late and we don’t see them or ss get kicked out of their rooms )
Little room for natural interaction (eg, bumping into people, hanging out on campus for homework)
So we asked ourselves whether tech, or maybe just the way we were using it, was hindering engagement.
We started Amagree in January 2022, teaching test prep classes on Zoom. Before then, we had some experience with Teams over a couple of years. Classes on both platforms were good but not excellent and we felt that while students were entertained enough, engagement could have been improved for both students and teachers.
Specifically, we were quite unhappy with
Group work in BORs: clunky, slow, inflexible and can accidentally ‘kick out’ people + ss lose autonomy
Monitoring can be time consuming (visiting 5 groups means abandoning the main room - students come in late and we don’t see them or ss get kicked out of their rooms )
Little room for natural interaction (eg, bumping into people, hanging out on campus for homework)
So we asked ourselves whether tech, or maybe just the way we were using it, was hindering engagement.
After much reading and thinking, we came to the conclusion that most platforms that had been adapted for teaching (Zoom, Teams and the likes) might do the job for university style lectures, but don’t work as well for dynamic and communicative language classes and we felt like we kept on forcing teaching principles into the available tech
On top of that, we realised that the crucial elements that fosters engagement was missing: motivation. Engagement stems from motivation, which comes, amongst other things, from the environment we operate within.
More simply, we missed hanging out with students before and after class, as well as important teaching moments that come from monitoring, giving feedback and all of the small but meaningful exchanges that were missed in online classes. We missed having a community.
Once we found the tech that served this purpose, we went straight back to basics and focused on the elements that trigger engagement: motivation and connection. ( lit ref) WHAT IS THIS TECH?
With this in mind, we looked at how we could create an an environment that allowed students to interact much more informally, and to add ‘tangible space’ to the online classroom. We chose to build our online campus with ‘Gathertown’, which you’ll have a chance to see in today’s mingle session. This allowed us to create classrooms, virtual cafes and teacher rooms. Now students are able to come to school early to catch up with classmates, do their homework in a familiar setting, and simply ‘hang out’ in a way that makes the whole experience more ‘real life’. Likewise, having a teachers’ room to prepare classes, do marking and swap ideas turned out to be something that added great value to the teaching experience.
And now, we would like to show you a bit of what happens on campus.
Coffee table - warmed up / bonding - community building (social engagement) No mpre suddenly appearing as box on screen with students and teacher
Scramble off to class - interacting with tangible space / familiarity of going to class ( no cameras off) (behavioural engagement)
Off to the work stations - low tech google docs need no explanation - easy / messy like a whiteboard - mean cognitive engagement is easier to achieve ‘ sts they can also go visit other pairs or come have a queit word with the teacher
Monitoring was something we struggled with - seamless transition between rooms - no more clunkiness and speech bubbles mean we can see if a student is alone or lost etc.( increased one on one time - room for personality to come out (affective engagement)
We chose gather Town because it has what we wanted, but it is not the only platform out there. We want to encourage every teacher to reconsider the role tech has in the classroom and focus on student experience before anything else.
Every time you bring any tech to the classroom, as yourself “why am I using this?” and what learning purpose is is serving?
All of our work has brought us to the conclusion that motivation and engagement remain strictly connected to each other and language learning is a social endeavour
Tech is is the medium, not the message
These definitions are important to keep in mind when planning an activity, so your activity is not just ‘fun’ or ‘useful’ but it covers everything that is involved in the learning process.
Thank you for coming along, we hope this has been food for thought and we look forward to seeing you all in the mingle session later!
