OF POSSUMS, HOGS, AND HORSES: CAPTURING THE DUALITY OF STUDENT ENGAGEMENT IN ELEARNING

摘要

The current preoccupation with activity and interactivity in pedagogical research on eLearning precariously elevates the importance of students' behavioral engagement and insufficiently accounts for other forms of productive involvement in learning. We argue that theoretical developments on the concept of student engagement offer a critical opportunity to revise this stance and problematize online activity. Through the lens of engagement, we depict online engagement as a multidimensional concept that encompasses behavior, emotion, and cognition. We further argue that the focus of online engagement may be dual in nature: Engagement with online pedagogies, and separately, with the substantive knowledge being acquired. Our study draws on qualitative data from postgraduate management research students in an online research methods course. To tease out the complexity of engagement, we use evidence of online activity to categorize learners into three distinct types: hogs, possums, and horses. We juxtapose these behavioral categories against narrative accounts of engagement in eLearning to reveal a rich set of textures as well as misalignment among behavior, emotion, and cognition. The findings seem to question the privileged status of interactivity in online pedagogy and tentatively suggest the possibility that online disengagement may not be detrimental to learning.