Increasing Student Engagement in Online Modules

By Georgie Crewdson

Updated Mar 11, 2026

Online modules do not struggle only because the content is digital. They struggle when students feel isolated, lose momentum, or stop believing that anyone notices whether they are keeping up.

This paper examines a 7-week online accounting module and shows how a practical engagement framework can support academic success 1. Although the action research was designed before the COVID-19 pandemic, it ran during the outbreak, which makes the findings especially useful for anyone trying to understand what accounting students think about remote learning in stressful, fully online conditions.

The framework breaks engagement into five connected areas: social, cognitive, behavioural, collaborative, and emotional. The rest of this article turns the study's findings into practical actions that lecturers can apply to their own modules, using student feedback from the accounting course as the main source of evidence.

Social Engagement:

Social engagement is about the relationships students build with one another and with facilitators. In online teaching, these relationships rarely develop by accident. Students need visible spaces where they can ask questions, compare experiences, and feel part of a learning community. Strong social engagement can improve both self-esteem and the wider student experience [2].

Actionable Task: The most successful intervention in this study was a facilitator-created Facebook learning group. Its value was not just the platform itself, but the signal it sent: the module had a social space where student-student and student-facilitator interaction was encouraged. At the same time, some mature students preferred the LMS because they did not use social media. The practical takeaway is to create more than one social hub. Offer an informal space for community building and a formal space inside the LMS, then guide students towards inclusive tools such as WhatsApp where appropriate. This makes it easier for different student groups to participate without feeling excluded.

Cognitive engagement:

Cognitive engagement relates to how students work with the course material itself. It depends on students being able to plan, monitor, and evaluate their learning against clear outcomes. Some students will find this easier than others, so course design needs to do more than provide content. It needs to help students understand how to learn from that content.

Actionable Task The module used a scaffolded structure in which students watched a video, read a textbook section, and completed an activity before moving on. Student feedback suggests this sequence worked well: 94% said the videos were helpful and improved the learning experience, and 94% agreed that facilitator feedback was clear and timely enough to clarify expectations. The takeaway for lecturers is to combine challenge with structure. Use short videos, build in activities that require students to apply what they have just learned, and give prompt individual feedback so students know what is expected and where they need to improve, a theme echoed in research on what makes good feedback.

Behavioural Engagement:

Behavioural engagement is visible in whether students turn up, stay on track, and complete the work. It relies on self-regulation and discipline, but it is also shaped by the way the module is run. Social and cognitive engagement make behavioural engagement easier because students are more likely to stay involved when they feel connected and know what they are doing.

Actionable Task The facilitator modelled the level of involvement expected from students by giving individual feedback and monitoring weekly activity. For example, she emailed students who had not started the weekly tasks by the middle of the week, rather than waiting until the deadline had passed. In response, 94% of students strongly agreed that timely feedback helped them reflect on their learning. Even so, 78% described themselves as self-directed, which may not be true of every cohort. For undergraduate modules in particular, the message is clear: do not assume students will regulate themselves. Use activity logs, notice when students fall quiet, and send individual prompts early enough to help them recover.

Collaborative Engagement:

Collaborative engagement develops through teamwork, both formal and informal, and helps students build skills they will need beyond university. It is harder to sustain online because students have to manage different time zones, schedules, and expectations without the natural coordination that happens in face-to-face settings. Even so, group work remains valuable when it is designed carefully.

Actionable Task: In this module, successful group work depended on clear roles, balanced participation, and limited scope for one person to dominate. Groups were kept small, at five students, which made individual contribution harder to hide in a 7-week module. Many groups also created WhatsApp groups and managed themselves effectively. Another useful choice was to let students select the format of their report, whether written, a narrated PowerPoint, or a video. That flexibility gave students more ownership over the task. For other online modules, the practical lesson is to set group assignments with accountable sections and fair assessment, keep group sizes manageable, and be ready to intervene when coordination or conflict becomes a barrier. Regular facilitator-group check-ins can provide the structure that less self-directed cohorts may need.

Emotional Engagement:

Emotional engagement concerns how students feel about the course, the facilitator, and their overall experience. If those feelings are consistently negative, the other forms of engagement also begin to weaken [3]. That is why personal goals, confidence, anxiety, and belonging matter so much in online learning, even when the course content itself is strong.

Actionable Task: The facilitator supported emotional engagement by asking students to share their goals for the module and degree, monitoring the Facebook group for concerns and interests, and responding quickly to emails that revealed uncertainty or anxiety. These actions mattered because the feedback showed both motivation and strain: 92% of students agreed or strongly agreed that goal setting motivated them, yet 50% still reported anxiety about the course. Open-ended responses suggested that some of this anxiety was linked to pandemic-related pressures, including caring responsibilities. For other modules, the lesson is to treat emotional support as part of teaching. Build spaces where students can raise concerns, respond to questions about personal participation as well as academic content, and use feedback to spot when isolation or anxiety is undermining engagement.

Conclusion

This case study shows that the common thread across all five types of engagement is consistent facilitator presence. Students were more likely to stay involved when the lecturer built community, clarified expectations, monitored participation, supported group work, and responded to concerns quickly.

That is the main takeaway for online teaching. Good digital course design matters, but engagement improves most when students can see that someone is actively guiding the experience at both individual and group level. If institutions want online modules to support academic success, they need to treat engagement as something that is designed, observed, and improved continuously, not assumed.

FAQ

Q: How do the demographics of the student population (e.g., age, cultural background, prior online learning experience) influence the effectiveness of the engagement strategies implemented?

A: Demographics shape how students respond to engagement strategies. In this study, some mature students preferred the LMS over social media, which suggests that a single communication channel will not suit everyone. Prior online learning experience, confidence with technology, caring responsibilities, and cultural expectations can all affect how willing students are to join discussions, collaborate, or ask for help. The best response is flexibility: offer multiple routes into participation and keep checking whether particular groups are being left out.

Q: What are challenges faced by students and facilitators in implementing and adapting to the engagement framework, especially considering the abrupt transition to online learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic?

A: The main challenge was that online learning became more demanding at the same time as many students' lives became less stable. Students were dealing with anxiety, isolation, and in some cases caring responsibilities, while facilitators had to create presence and structure without face-to-face contact. That made communication speed, clarity, and responsiveness much more important. The framework helped because it gave staff a way to think about engagement in several dimensions instead of treating low participation as a single problem.

Q: How was the impact of the engagement strategies on students' academic performance and overall success in the module measured and evaluated?

A: In this case, the author relied heavily on student feedback gathered through a form that included both closed and open-ended questions. The percentages reported in the paper show how students responded to specific parts of the module, such as the usefulness of videos and the value of timely feedback. In practice, institutions can strengthen this approach by combining student voice collected through comments with participation data, activity logs, completion rates, and assessment outcomes to see whether engagement changes are improving both experience and performance.

References

[Source Paper] Malan, M. (2020) Engaging students in a fully online accounting degree: an action research study, Accounting Education, 29:4, 321-339,
DOI:10.1080/09639284.2020.1787855

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