School-Aged Students’ Sustainable Online Learning Engagement during COVID-19: Community of Inquiry in a Chinese Secondary Education Context

Abstract

As the COVID-19 pandemic began to spread all over the world, many educational institutions have shifted to a full-time online teaching mode. Although online teaching has been widely explored, the unprecedented initiatives of mass-scale full-time online education at the secondary school level are yet to be unravelled. By using a qualitative approach and drawing on the conceptualisation of learning engagement and Community of Inquire model as conceptual frameworks, this study explored how secondary school students in China engaged with online education during the COVID-19 pandemic and what factors influenced their sustainable online learning engagement. This research examined the perspectives of twenty-four students and five teachers through semi-structured interviews and observations of online classes. Findings indicate that the students’ online learning engagement involved three inter-related categories: emotional, cognitive and behavioural engagement. Contextual factors influencing the sustainability of students’ online learning engagement were identified by the participants, including teacher presence, parental involvement, and a supportive learning environment/community. The findings in this paper have implications for teacher development, family support and establishment of e-teaching platforms in emergency remote teaching for young students. Finally, the study puts forward best practices for the sustainable development of the emergency remote teaching in the future public crises.

Teaching presence predicts cognitive presence in blended learning during COVID-19: The chain mediating role of social presence and sense of community

“…The literature showed that students in blended learning were more prone to establish a higher level of SoC (Rovai and Jordan, 2004 ). In addition, Chinese technological support and parental involvement may contribute to students' higher level of SoC during the COVID-19 period (Li et al, 2021 ).…”

“…The reason might be that video feedback in blended learning offsets the influence of the instructor SP. Yet, the central position of TP in the educational community of inquiry was strengthened by many studies (Hilliard and Stewart, 2019 ; Wang and Liu, 2020 ; Li et al, 2021 ), and so did the association between TP and SP.…”

“…TP has been reported to play a significant role in predicting CP (Joo et al, 2011 ; Hilliard and Stewart, 2019 ) as it could promote critical thinking (Garrison and Akyol, 2013 ) and enhance online learning via social networking sites (Lin et al, 2015 ). In short, TP is closely related to both learning experiences and actual learning outcomes (Li et al, 2021 ), serving as a bridge between SP and CP (Miller et al, 2014 ; Rockinson-Szapkiw et al, 2016 ). To help students undergo a natural transition from SP to CP, the TP of a facilitator is a necessity (Joksimović et al, 2015 ).…”

The Sustainability of a Community of Inquiry in Online Course Satisfaction in Virtual Learning Environments in Higher Education

“…Gain meaning from the ideas developed during the exploration phase (connecting idea). In general, CoI is tailored for the development of theories of engagement, and can model how learners interact and learn online [10,26]. Many researchers have adopted Garrison's research to identify factual evidence on the relationships that exist between teaching presence, social presence, and cognitive presence [14,[26][27][28].…”

“…These issues demand solutions that take the adult learners' needs into consideration. In other words, teachers, peers, and the content need to be effectively incorporated in the virtual learning environment with more engagement and flexibility [9,10]. One popular model that measures these concepts is known as the Community of Inquiry (CoI) model, where engagement and interaction, also known as presence, are adapted.…”