Abstract
Student engagement is critical to creating a collaborative and involved learning environment. The pandemic brought the class room engagement between the faculty and the students to a halt. We tried to find different avenues for the students to reach out to the faculty and to have an open forum to facilitate discussions among themselves. This approach helped us in increasing engagement and also allowed students who would normally not speak during the class hours to contribute to the overall learning during the course.
Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic affected all walks of life, and the education sector was no exception. As the end of the summer break drew closer, the reality became clear that 2020 would be a watershed year for the education sector: we would be holding classes in the online mode. In-class interaction between the faculty and student was to be a non-feature in a pandemic-ridden world. The first course in which we experienced this was our second-year elective course of investment analysis and portfolio management.
The remaining part of the article is structured as follows; the second section describes the challenges of the online classes. The third section offers the suggestions for enhancing student engagement in online classes and the final section concludes the article.
Challenges of On-line classes
In this section we describe the challenges of online-classes.
Internet Connectivity
For a post-graduate programme in management, student engagement is one of the important learning avenues. Student engagement is defined as ‘students’ involvement with activities and conditions likely to generate high-quality learning’ (Coates, 2008). What the engagement literature describes as transactional engagement, the interaction between the faculty and student, is one of the critical ways to achieve that. With students joining in from their homes, it was impossible to provide them with the in-person faculty-student engagement experience. While we could not have the classical faculty-student interaction, the next best thing was to move to online classes. However, the effectiveness of online classes is as strong as the network strength during the class hours. While the institute provides us with the best possible internet facility for conducting the classes, it is as necessary for the educatees to have a strong network to understand what is being discussed in the class. More often, the students had to switch off their videos to have enough bandwidth to follow the class discussions just on the audio mode.
Reduction in Class Participation
This situation gives rise to another issue with respect to engagement with the students. We witnessed a significant drop in class participation during online classes. Some of it may be due to behavioural reasons of finding the ‘raise hand’ feature in the application compared to asking the faculty directly in the class. The other reason may be that online classes do not offer that level of openness or familiarity with the faculty to ask their queries without inhibitions. In addition to this, the setup of the application allows only a fraction of the class to be visible at a time. As compared to in-person classes where all the students are visible, due to the programming of the application, only a section of the class was visible at a time, as it bifurcates the class into pages. Since the first page has those who have either raised their hands for asking a query or have spoken earlier, most of the people visible to the faculty at a time have already contributed to the discussion. This ‘visibility issue’ resulted in a section of class that could be interacted with in a limited capacity as they were always not visible.
No After-class Interaction
The third level of engagement at B-schools is the after-class discussion with the students. With the students joining in from their homes, they did not have the luxury to approach us with their queries in our offices after class hours.
Reduction in Peer-to-peer Interaction
Another lens of looking at transactional engagement is through the student engagement between themselves. Peer-to-peer learning and active learning in groups help develop an engaging learning environment (Zepke & Leach, 2010). It requires students to engage among themselves and work towards a common goal that simulates working in teams at the workplace. An important component that we use in our assessment is the group project work of portfolio game or preparing an equity research report. Both require students to have extensive discussions to analyze the stocks in-depth and examine all aspects of a single company, respectively. With students joining in from across the country, their experience was that of virtual teams. While the resources would have been the same, we are sure all the members being at the same place would have helped in their learning.
Suggestions for Enhancing Student Engagement
Research states that frequent course-related interactions between the faculty and the students lead to a more active and collaborative learning environment (Umbach & Wawrzynski, 2005). The only way to increase engagement with the students in such constrained times was to increase the avenues of approach. We created a Google classroom for the batch to have interactions and discussions. It also helped in posting class notes. It was also used as a platform for asking questions by the students beyond the class hours. We also used it as the platform to post trivia and any exciting development in the area of investment and portfolio management to evoke discussions. It allowed some of the students who usually did not contribute during class participation to air their views on the posted topics, which led us to an understanding that this can be used as a tool to measure the class participation of the students. This also provided us with a platform that can be used to supplement the in-class ‘academic’ discussions with non-academic tools to evoke students’ interests. We used it as a platform for discussing popular movies in the area of investment to add to students’ understanding of the world of finance and investment.
Conclusion
Education needs a constant interaction between the student and the faculty to facilitate discussion and address their queries. It becomes more important in finance as people with non-finance or non-accounting backgrounds may face difficulty grasping the concepts in one go. The pandemic severely impeded this learning process by forcing us to move to the online mode of teaching.
As educators in finance, we tried to expand the scope of discussion from classroom discussions to avenues where students can approach the faculty at any time. Unlike on mails where queries might be limited to one-on-one, Google classroom helped us in inviting the entire class for their views and ideas on topics being discussed to enrich it. It also highlighted that with a sudden change in delivery, we need to find more avenues of engagement with the students to facilitate discussion and enrich their learnings.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.