This document discusses using digital tools to engage students. It makes three key points: 1. Many studies of digital tools focus on the tools themselves rather than student engagement, assuming tools directly impact engagement. This is an oversimplification. 2. A critical theory of technology recognizes that while tools enable certain actions, their impact depends on how they are applied and the existing social system. Tools alone do not determine outcomes. 3. A better approach is to first identify the desired student engagement and actions, then select tools based on enabling those specific actions, rather than choosing tools first. The focus should be on using tools to facilitate pre-defined engagement goals.

1. Engaging students
with digital tools
Marcus Leaning

2. Ipad projects
• 2016 all of my 1st year students were given Ipads by the
university as part of a large project.
• Pre-loaded with lots of apps and we had to use them in
class to drive student engagement.
• We did lots of things with them, initially.
• Structured classes around them.
• We wrote a lovely report about how useful they were.
• The following year they tended to be used far less, students
left them at home and just brought their phones to class.
• Why did this happen?

3. Introduction
• Questions:
• What do we mean by engagement
• what do students engage with?
• How can we think about digital tools and
the impact such tools have on SE?
• Is there a better way forward?
• Lots of ‘listicles’ of top tips for using
tools to engage students.
• Even more lists of the top tools to use.
• Lots of marketing for apps and
products.
• Substantial investment by universities
and agencies to facilitate this.

4. Student engagement – an odd construct
• A heavily theorised concept.
• “What students do in their studies rather
than what is done to them”. (Mantz Yorke).
• Has roots in Dewey (1897) – ‘involvement’.
• Implicit model of active learning.
• Literature starts in 1960s.
• A number of different perspectives emerge:
• SE towards qualification;
• Student centred;
• Institutional management (UK);
• ‘Being’ and ‘becoming’ (French).
Google Ngram on proportion of books in their
corpus mentioning student engagement.

5. Student engagement towards qualification
• Focus upon what the institution does - Becker (1961) and
Newcomb (1969) first studies looking at impact of institution
upon students.
• Relates to the university facilitates a student’s experience –
what can the uni do (and how well they do it) to get the
student to learn?
• SE is:
• “Students’ involvement in activities and conditions that
are linked with quality learning” Kuh (2001).
• Uni’s role is to encourage the student to engage in activities
that inspire them to learn.
• A ‘Pull’ model.
• A lack of agency on the part of the student.
• Dominant model - Big in US (high college drop out) and
Australia, also used in UK and NZ and increasingly China.

6. A student centred
approach
• What do students want form a university education and their experience?
(Bryson, 2012; Leach and Zepke, 2012).
• Engagement should be about the student and the things they want such as:
• Barriers;
• Control over their workload;
• Autonomy;
• Community with other students;
• Ownership of their own studies.
• University role is to facilitate the student’s own journey.
• Development of student qualities that they value.
• Echoes / application of Amartya Sen’s (1991) ‘capabilities approach’.

7. Institutional
management
• UK makes use of large surveys to measure engagement
and satisfaction - NSS.
• Additionally, centrally funded initiative to have students
involved in the management of universities.
• Student involvement with:
• running of courses,
• programme development,
• senior quality aspects,
• Governance,
• Business functions.
• A white-washing aspect of the neo-liberal university?

8. ‘Being’ and ‘Becoming’
• Studies by Dubet (1994) and Jary
and Lebeau (2010) see
engagement as being in the
overlap of personal drives,
institutional belonging and
intellectual passion for the
subject.
• When aligned the student is able
to ‘become’ rather than ‘be’.
• The degree to which each is met
results in one of eight ‘archetypes
of student being.
Personal
project – why
go to
university?
Integration into
university life
Passion for
subject

9. ‘Location’ of engagement
• ‘Where’ the student is
engaged is also
important.
• Bryson and Hand
(2007) identify 4
spheres or levels of
engagement.
• I propose we add three
further levels:
With the
activity
With the
lesson
With the
assessment
With the
module
With the
programme
With the
University
With
University /
HE
Bryson
and
Hand
(2007)
Student committed / interested in
discipline, subject or field –
identification as a practitioner.
Student passionate about
university / institution.
Student particularly motivated by
specific focus of unit / module.
Assessment engages student to a
high degree.
Particular topic or class.
Specific activity engages students.
Student motivated to HE –
instrumental or intrinsic reasons.
Not a ‘local’ engagement.

10. Using digital tools for student engagement
• Lots of optimistic marketing of digital tools and it is
a large and well resourced area of research.
• In academic studies the emphasis very much on
what the tools ‘do’ to engagement.
• Experimental studies on the use of digital and social
media to improve engagement.
• Digital tool introduced into an environment and
engagement measured before and after.
• E.G. Junco, Heiberger and Loken (2011) looked at how
Twitter use increased scores in nationally calibrated
studies.

11. The technology for student
engagement ‘industry’
• Significant grants given to research the area
and universities conducting studies:
• Government and sector agencies:
• UK JISC – FASTECH.
• Private sector grants:
• Adobe,
• Microsoft,
• Facebook and others
all fund research identifying benefits to SE
of technology (specifically their technology).

12. Problems
1. Studies and projects often ignore unintended consequences of
digitally engaged students.
• Information engagement problems – selective FB friends.
• ‘24 hourism’, personal / private bleed – impact on staff well
being, sustainability.
2. Techno centric top down solution to complex problems.
• In many instances technology takes centre stage rather than
student engagement.
3. Often unstated assumptions about technology.
• Linear, deterministic model of technological impact.
• Technology will directly transform social action.
• There are alternate ways of thinking about technology let alone
technology and student engagement…

13. Technological impact
• Technology (and especially digital technology) has escaped critical examination
(Escobar, 1994).
• Feenberg (1999, 2005) provides a useful typology of theories of technology:
• Instrumentalism – We are in control of technology and it has no values.
• Determinism – Technology causes change but has no values.
• Substantivism – Technology causes changes and has values.
• Critical Theory of Technology – We are in control but technology has values and
potency.
• CTT allows us to think of the ‘Affordances’ of technology to being used in a education-
led approach to the use of technology in education.

14. Critical Theory of Technological
affordances for building student
engagement.
• Developing a CTT approach looks to the act of
engagement first prior to the application of
technology.
• Involves careful consideration of educational eco-
system – there may be places where technology is
very useful but there are also places where it is not
and can actually be more problematic than helpful.
• Sometime inserting technology does not build
engagement.
• But determining where requires a lot of effort.

15. Questions to ask before deployment.
• What form of engagement are we seeking?
• SE towards qualification - the pull model?
• Student centred – what the students value?
• Institutional management – being a better academic citizen?
• Where do we want engagement –
• University, programme, module, assignment, class or activity.
• What actual actions do we want to address?
• Do we want something new to occur?
• Something to stop?
• Something to be produced?

16. The technological
• Once we know:
• what we want to build; ,
• where we want to build it.
• We move to identify the actions to do so.
• We want students to share ideas outside of class in a non - assessed space,
• Students desire a way to produce, store and share their understanding of a
difficult idea;
• Students want to be able to access and amend lecture notes in multiple
formats.

17. Tools to afford action
• Only once we have the actions identified do we look to
the affordances of technology to facilitate and accelerate
these.
• E.g.
• Communicative,
• Community building,
• Sharing,
• Adding rich data to visual images,
• Animated content creation,
• Dissemination,
• Task management;
• The need for these affordances drive / determine the use
of digital tools.

18. Conclusion
• Suggest we start with the social action we desire rather than
the tool.
• Identify:
• the action,
• the affordance that will facilitate it,
• the tool to do this.
• Deploy the digital tool.

19. Questions?