Man Sleeping at deskWhen we speak of the necessity to secure learner engagement, it’s because we know all too well the negative outcomes that occur through a lack of engagement.

Poor learner engagement is linked with low levels of academic achievement, high levels of learner boredom and disaffection, and high drop-out rates (20-50% according to Carr, 2000). Giving up on training isn’t seen quite as often in corporate training scenarios, since the training is often compulsory, but in Higher Education environments disengaged learners may give up on their courses entirely – and this is a particular problem with online learning.

So what exactly is ‘engagement’?

In 2009, Fredricks, Blumenfeld and Paris highlighted three main definitions of engagement:

Behavioural engagement:

Essentially, this is how learners behave during their training. Are they participating fully in activities? Clearly, the more willing they are to participate, the more engaged they are. When learners immerse themselves in academic, social and extracurricular activities it’s more likely that the training outcomes will be positive.

Cognitive engagement:

How happy are learners to invest time in their development? The happier they are, the more thoughtful their endeavours will be and the more willing they’ll be to put in the effort necessary to really understand complex ideas, master difficult skills and improve their knowledge.

Emotional engagement:

If learners feel an emotional connection to tutors, L&D professionals and fellow learners, they’ll be more willing to do the work required. That’s one of the reasons it’s so important to make sure learners are able to communicate, collaborate and share ideas.

These three definitions of engagement aren’t designed to be distinct, stand-alone explanations. In fact, they can often work together, since a learner with an emotional engagement may be more willing to put in the effort (cognitive engagement), and so on.

However, while we know how important engagement is in learning, it’s not always something that is easy to achieve, particularly when it comes to online learning. There are numerous ways to secure learner engagement – and ‘scaffolding’ and ‘chunking’ are two of them…

reachinghigher

What is scaffolding?

Scaffolding, as described in Baker (2010), is an instructional design strategy that is based within Vygotsky’s Social Development Theory. Scaffolding is designed to make it easier for learners to combine new information and prior knowledge to really help cement learning. Essentially, it involves highlighting gaps in learners’ knowledge and providing them with the means to close them.

What is chunking?

Chunking, which comes from the theory of Working Memory that we can only remember five to nine chunks of information at a time, is the process of taking individual units of information and grouping them into larger units. For instance, say you need to learn all US States in alphabetical order. That’s a lot of information – 50 individual bits! But if we chunk them into groups of States beginning with A-C, D-H, I-L, M, N, O-S and T-Z, that’s only 7 chunks of information to learn and recall. It’s much less daunting!

Get in the zone

Scaffolding and chunking rely on the premise that any instructor, teacher or eLearning designer worth their salt will present information in a way and at a level that will activate the learner’s ‘zone of proximal development’ – that point just above their current skill level which will work to elevate their knowledge. Interactive scaffolding techniques will help learners to use their prior knowledge and experiences to bridge the gap, effectively enabling them to bring their knowledge up a level. Without training, they wouldn’t be able to access this more advanced level, hence why it’s called ‘scaffolding’ – it helps to support learners to climb higher and achieve more.

One of the reasons scaffolding helps to improve knowledge and engage learners is that motivation for learning lands on a continuum of fear, attention, comfort and boredom. If the training is set at too low a level, learners will be bored. But if they perceive it as too difficult and out of reach, they’ll fall into the area of fear and will soon lose all motivation.

Scaffolding and chunking of the information will help to manage this motivation continuum and allow the learner to balance fear, attention, comfort and boredom – leading to engagement.

 

How scaffolding and chunking work in online learning:

There are numerous ways to scaffold and chunk online learning content to best boost learner engagement and achievement:

Prioritise information

Some words on a page are more important than the rest. Bringing the learners’ attention to these particular concepts – especially if they are new – is incredibly useful. This can be done by emphasising certain parts of the text with bold, italics or underlined words, putting information into boxes, or even presenting those titbits in a different format – say, with a video presenter.

Bullets and numbered lists

Presenting information in bullet points or lists helps to organise information and concepts. Often, people don’t read every word on a screen – and in fact, research has shown that reading text online is far more difficult to start with (Ackerman & Goldsmith, 2008). Arranging information into short bullet point sentences makes the information concise and relevant; perfect for skimming, which is what learners tend to do most of the time anyway.

Make it manageable

This applies both to individual eLearning screens and entire modules. No one likes being overwhelmed with text, bombarded with images or forced to sit through 15-minute videos. Similarly, it’s tricky enough to learn concepts which are slightly above our understanding anyway, let alone when we’re asked to do so in gruelling 3-hour long lessons or modules – it’s no wonder our enthusiasm for the training will drop off.

The solution is to break information into smaller sections to draw attention to each part or step, which is particularly useful for learning processes or techniques where learners need to learn each step in a chain. Videos should be short enough to keep the learners’ attention, not send them to sleep. It’s also a good idea to reduce the overall length of eLearning modules – committing to a taxing 20-30 minutes of training is far more likely than agreeing to 3 hours of the same!

Question prompts

“We don’t know what we don’t know,” the old saying goes… It’s only when learners are required to answer questions on what they’ve just been ‘learning’ that they will truly find out if they’ve learnt it. Questions, tests and assessments help learners to think about whether they now know the topic sufficiently to bridge the gap between what they used to know and what they’re being asked.

Further reading

Links to further reading let learners continue their learning after the training is over or can be helpful ways to softly scaffolding and guiding the learner on the correct path during the training. They are also helpful for pointing out areas where the learner probably should have knowledge, but which may not necessarily be the focus of the current training. For instance, in an eLearning unit on closing sales, there might be links to the topics of prospecting, creating proposals or setting prices. Pointing out these available topics can scaffold the learner to realise what they do not yet have knowledge of – and motivate them to get it.

Social learning

We learn a lot from observing others, collaborating and discussing. Enabling learners to review other learners’ comments and questions is a way to validate personal learning – if they understand what the others are saying and can join in, there’s a good chance they’ve learnt the topic!

Videos

Using videos to scaffold a learner to develop new skills and learn new concepts is becoming increasingly popular these days as bandwidth is increasing, videos can be shot for next to nothing on smartphones, and instructional designers are realising the effectiveness of videos in learning. Initially, shorter clips are useful for initial introduction to single concepts, after which information can be chunked into longer videos to combine concepts when the learner becomes more proficient.

CelebrationAs you can see, there are a few scaffolding and chunking techniques that will allow online learners to progress higher than they could have imaged. The main thing to remember when designing eLearning is that by highlighting gaps in knowledge while providing the means to bridge those gaps, learners will be motivated and engaged to learn – which is exactly what we’re aiming for!

You can find out more about engagement by downloading this free white paper PDF: The Secret of Engagement.