Empirical Evidence to Support a Nudge Intervention for Increasing Online Engagement in Higher Education

Abstract

Student engagement is recognised as being a critical factor linked to student success and learning outcomes. The same holds true for online learning and engagement in higher education, where the appetite for this mode of learning has escalated worldwide over several decades, and as a result of COVID-19. At the same time teachers in higher education are increasingly able to access and utilise tools to identify and analyse student online behaviours, such as tracking evidence of engagement and non-engagement. However, even with significant headway being made in fields such as learning analytics, ways in which to make sense of this data, and to utilise data to inform interventions and refine teaching approaches, continue to be areas that would benefit from further insights and exploration. This paper reports on a project that sought to investigate whether low levels of student online engagement could be enhanced through a course specific intervention strategy designed to address student engagement with online materials in a regional university. The intervention used course learning analytics data (CLAD) in combination with the behavioral science concept of nudging as a strategy for increasing student engagement with online content. The study gathered qualitative and quantitative data to explore the impact of nudging on student engagement with 187 students across two disciplines, Education and Regional/Town Planning. The results not only revealed that the use of the nudge intervention was successful in increasing the levels of engagement in online courses but also revealed that the prerequisites for nudging were needed in order to increase success rates. The paper points to the value for the broader awareness, update, and use of learning analytics as well as nudging at a course, program, and institutional level to support student online engagement.