Engagement Series: Student-Student Engagement

This is the third in a series of pieces exploring different types of course engagement. This piece focuses on how course developers and instructors can foster student-student engagement in online courses.

The traditional classroom environment routinely offers opportunities for students to organically engage with their peers, as students can strike up conversations before or after class. Most online courses do not readily provide the same opportunities, so instructors must intentionally design and implement opportunities for student-student engagement. Asynchronous activities such as discussion boards, group projects, informal polls, and peer review assessments provide opportunities for this type of engagement in online courses and are particularly effective when aligned with course and program goals.

Strategies for fostering student-student engagement are explored below.

One of the most common approaches to fostering student-student engagement in an online course is to integrate graded discussion boards, wherein the instructor provides a prompt and asks students to respond and interact with their peers. While discussion boards are crucial learning tools, students also benefit from low-stakes or no-stakes opportunities to interact with peers. Providing opportunities for social interactions with peers can help attain group cohesion and enhance students’ sense of belonging (Yuan & Kim, 2014). The inclusion of informal and formal interaction opportunities in a course will ensure that students can connect with peers for academic, professional, and social conversations.

To achieve this goal, consider the following:

• Include an ungraded Q&A forum for each module or for the overall course. The guiding language on this discussion forum can be customized to the needs and topics of the course. For example, a Q&A forum might be used specifically for students to ask questions and share tips and tricks for formative homework assignments.
• If included, monitor the Q&A forum to identify students who may need additional support. This might include students who ask questions in the Q&A forum but do not frequently provide answers for their peers (Ong et al., 2021). 
• Provide peer networking opportunities in the course. This might look like asking students to share professional backgrounds and goals in a discussion forum or during a synchronous session.
• Encourage students to form study groups to prepare for exams or other course assessments.
• Build peer reviews into the course design so students can benefit from peer feedback. This can be especially impactful for early drafts of a larger course deliverable, as students will have time to implement feedback from their peers and create higher-quality deliverables.

Creating community in an online course can help deepen student learning (Young & Bruce, 2011). Creating and nurturing community in an online asynchronous course is especially challenging, so it must be done intentionally.

To achieve this goal, consider the following:

• Include clear expectations for student-student conduct at the beginning of the course.
• Consider asking students to collaborate to create a class contract at the beginning of the course that outlines expectations for interaction and communication.
• Consider including icebreaker discussions or activities to encourage students to get to know each other. This can help establish a collegial atmosphere and supportive environment (Martin & Bollinger, 2018).
• Include informal polls throughout the course to allow students to share their opinions and key takeaways from the course content.
• Model collaborative community-building communication when participating as the instructor in course discussion forums and course announcements. Ask curious questions that will spark deeper conversations.

Team learning stimulates students to think at higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy, including application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation (Williams et al., 2006). When developing assessments for higher-level course or module outcomes, consider including a group project or peer review assignments.

To achieve this goal, consider the following:

• Many professional fields rely on team collaboration in day-to-day work. Keep this in mind when designing course assessments. When appropriate, ask students to collaborate in a manner that mirrors what they will experience when working in their professional field.
• When asking students to work in a group to complete an assignment, communicate the expectations for student collaboration, including if and how an individual’s contribution to their group will be graded. Consider creating a rubric for group work assignments to ensure expectations are transparent.
• Suggest technologies that students might use to collaborate. Ask students to discuss and document their plan for collaboration as a group. Assigning or suggesting student roles can also help reduce ambiguity and ensure that each student contributes to their group’s deliverables.

Student-student engagement opportunities in an online course provide several benefits, including stimulating higher levels of thinking, increasing student feelings of connectedness, and deepening student learning. Taking the time to carefully build and foster community and collaboration will help ensure that students achieve learning outcomes while building meaningful relationships with their peers.

Martin, F., & Bolliger, D. U. (2018). Engagement matters: Student perceptions on the importance of engagement strategies in the online learning environment. Online Learning, 22(1), 205–222.

Ong, D. L., Shim, K. J., & Gottipati, S. (2021). Profiling student learning from Q&A interactions in online discussion forums. In M. M. T. Rodrigo, S. Iyer, & A. Mitrovic (Eds.). (2021). Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computers in Education. Asia-Pacific Society for Computers in Education.

Williams, E. A., Duray, R., & Reddy, V. (2006). Teamwork orientation, group cohesiveness, and student learning: A study of the use of teams in online distance education. Journal of Management Education, 30(4), 592–616.

Young, S., & Bruce, M. A. (2011). Classroom community and student engagement in online courses. MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 7(2), 219–230.

Yuan, J., & Kim, C. (2014). Guidelines for facilitating the development of learning communities in online courses. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 30(3), 220–232.