Student engagement in a fully online accounting module: An action research study

Abstract

Student engagement is crucial for learning, and especially so in online learning. For a student to be a successful online learner, they need to engage with the online content, with their peers and with the educator. This article presents an accounting module of a fully online degree where engagement was purposefully integrated using an online engagement framework. Within this framework, the educator regularly interacted with the students to ensure that they were engaging with the online material and a group task was assigned where students had to collaboratively construct knowledge and display it in a video. An action research design was followed to determine the degree of engagement within the module and to improve on it for future modules. Results indicate that regular interaction did result in more students being active and ultimately successfully completing the module. Student reflections on the group task indicated that there are definite benefits in creating knowledge collaboratively although the format in which it should be presented needs to be reconsidered.

Active learning in an online postgraduate research module: Perceptions of accounting students and lecturers

“…Students find group assignments especially motivating and engaging, as they can learn from each other and it thus adds another layer of accountability (Malan and Van Dyk 2021;Malan 2020).…”

“…Researchers agree that lecturers should redesign their modules to increase student engagement and learning by ensuring that sufficient and appropriate active learning tasks are included in the classroom (Beyleveld, De Villiers, and Fraser 2019;Malan 2020;Papageorgiou 2021;Sugahara and Dellaportas 2018). Active learning involves students in the learning process by requiring them to perform tasks on the theory learnt, individually or in groups, during a particular class (Felder and Brent 2016;Prince 2004).…”

Exploring student engagement in virtual classrooms: a person-centred approach using cluster analysis

“…Compared to in-person classrooms, virtual classrooms have very different settings where students can not access the facilities of the institution physically and freely interact with their peers and teachers in person (Malan, 2020). Teaching and learning in virtual classrooms may suffer with the problem of one-way transmission of information by the teacher where students remain passive and disengaged (Mijatovic et al ., 2013).…”

“…, 2021). However, the role of teachers' behaviours in promoting student engagement in virtual classrooms needs to be examined further (Malan, 2020).…”

“…Previous research emphasizes on the importance of student-teacher interactions and positive relationship between students and teachers for increasing student engagement in traditional learning environments (Cents-Boonstra et al, 2021). However, the role of teachers' behaviours in promoting student engagement in virtual classrooms needs to be examined further (Malan, 2020).…”