Play like a team in teams: A typology of online cognitive-social learning engagement

Abstract

Within higher education, students and institutions are increasingly moving towards blended components and fully online learning coursework. Best practice online pedagogy is understood to be student-centred with a strong emphasis on social learning through collaboration. The social aspect supports frequency of engagement while collaborative activity supports cognitive engagement. Research that guides online pedagogy draws substantially from studies identifying type and frequency of students’ cognitive engagement, usually along a continuum but without the nuance of social learning. To build on that and to identify profiles of cognitive-social engagement, this study examined the content of 3,855 student posts from one course within a chat-based platform. The findings suggested six student engagement types: lurk, superficial, task, respond, expand, create. These types were then further examined along two continuums of complexity and intensity of engagement. The results present a new typology of cognitive-social learning engagement defined by four profiles: bench sitter, hustler, striker, champion. The typology was purposely fashioned using team-play acronyms to build a useable language for educators to recognise student engagement profiles and to guide learning design in social spaces online.