‘Isn’t It Just Like Our Situation?’ Engagement and Learning in an Online Story-Based Environment

Abstract

Teamwork skills such as conflict resolution and communication strategies are challenging to teach. The use of stories may help develop these complex skills. Although engagement is generally seen as a key component of learning environments, what constitutes engagement has not been fully explored. The purpose of this study was to examine how graduate instructional design students engage with and learn from stories in an online environment. This WisdomTools Scenario (Scenario) was designed specifically to facilitate the development of teamwork skills. Students followed the experiences of two fictitious student teams and discussed what happened asynchronously with small dialogue groups. Through a qualitative case study analysis, four themes emerged which captured how students engaged with and learned from this environment. First, engagement was evident through students' emotional reactions to the characters. Second, this engagement was affected by perceived credibility and relevance of the scenes. Third, students often reflected on their prior experiences and demonstrated an increased awareness of teamwork issues. Fourth, students reported various degrees of application of what they learned to their team practice. Implications for the design of story-based learning environments are explored.

Student Engagement in Online Learning: What Works and Why

“…Case studies need not be created in a particular model, but can be useful as long as the situation to be studied engages students in real‐world situations. Paulus, Horvitz, and Shi () used fictitious stories of students undertaking projects requiring teamwork whose projects sometimes went awry, that were then critiqued online by instructional design students. Engagement was evident in the students’ emotional reactions to the fictitious students, and this engagement was found to be the result of the credibility and relevance of the stories to the students’ experiences with their own instructional design projects.…”

“…Instructors who choose collaborative learning may find that students are better at synthesizing material and drawing conclusions for their learning (Fu et al., ). Active learning produces greater engagement and student learning (Paulus et al, ). But instructors should not choose active or collaborative learning solely because it engages; they also need to have a clear educational purpose for its use.…”

Alienation, agency and authenticity: a synthesis of the literature on student engagement

“…In practice is was clear that approaches to engagement here reflected transitional agency, of not making connections between new content and worldview (Cooper, 2000) to developing awareness and insight for self and career (Case, 2007), albeit with limited application (Paulus et al, 2006). For example, students' commitment to improvement emerged, including motivation to improve on using formative feedback (Cooper, 2000), in learning academic discourse (Kettle, 2011) and improving disciplinary knowledge (Paulus et al, 2006). In other examples students' resourcefulness to students' resistance to share work was of note (Cooper, 2000), including a fear of revealing too much of the self (Paulus et al, 2006).…”

A phenomenological approach to experiences with technology: current state, promise, and future directions for research

“…It includes studies of higher education students' experiences with and perceptions of e-learning (Concannon et al 2005;Gilbert et al 2007;Norton and Hathaway 2008); studies of experiences and outcomes in distance education and assessment in comparison to traditional formats (Carswell et al 2000;Knipe and Lee 2002;Thomas et al 2002); and studies of students' experiences resulting from specific technology applications such as interactive multimedia resources or group process support technology (Davies et al 2005;Jones et al 2001;Paulus et al 2006;Wood et al 2003).…”

“…Other studies concentrate on selected aspects of experience such as the outcome of learning, feelings, or attitudes (e.g., Carswell et al 2000;Davies et al 2005;Paulus et al 2006). Yet, using technology has immediate, intermediate, and long-term outcomes.…”