Promoting engagement in online learning beyond COVID‐19: Possible strategies and directions for future research

Abstract

In the aftermath of the global pandemic, online learning is now ubiquitous around the world. Yet, although online learning has become a common learning approach across the globe, it is still viewed as a weaker option than on‐campus face‐to‐face learning. Specifically, the lack of student engagement in online learning poses a persistent problem to many educators. In this article, we describe three key challenges of fully online learning: students being more easily distracted, students lacking self‐regulation skills and students feeling isolated. Next, we present three possible strategies to address these challenges: promoting active learning through the online flipped classroom model, promoting self‐regulation skills and reducing the sense of isolation through the use of chatbots. For each of the three strategies, we provide a description with relevant empirical studies based on our own work as well as previous work in the literature and discuss possible directions for further research.