Contribute now – how are YOU travelling?
Click on the faces below to have your own say. Then return to this page to see the updated graph!
The results so far – how are WE travelling?
The Journey
Since its original design in 2017 the emoji ‘How Are You Travelling?’ block has been utilised across 285 Moodle units, allowing learners a visual prompt to check in with their unit coordinator about their studies. Over this time its been used over 2,963 times. To celebrate this and share this learner engagement strategy with the wider community, we’ve designed a conference poster for the December 2022 Ascilite conference in Sydney showcasing the journey so far.
Contact Us
For UNE staff, if you’re interested in trying out this tool in your own teaching units just send us a quick email with which unit code you’d like the How Are You Travelling block added to.
For others visiting from the conference, we’re always happy to share our findings! If you’re interested, send an email and I can share the html used to set up your own within your LMS.
Explore the abstract
How Are You Travelling? Facing Retention Head On
Carmen Schultz, Stephen Grono & Mike Franklin
Learner engagement and cultivating a sense of belonging is the primary challenge of providing distance, hybrid, and online modes of higher education (Parkes et al., 2015). In response to this need, we designed and embedded the ‘How are You Travelling?’ (HYT) block into 285 teaching sites over 6 years to enable students to reach out. It provides a short side-by-side sequence of expressive emoji – from happy to tearful – in a high-visibility area of the course page within the LMS platform. When a learner opens the course, alongside the course content, they are greeted with a simple query: ‘How are you travelling?’.
The block is part of a holistic approach to engagement (Boulton et al., 2019), allowing for integration with broader university support services as appropriate to student needs. For students who are anxious or intimidated by directly contacting teachers via email, or publicly posting to discussion forums, the HYT block provides an approachable space for instigating open dialogue, increasing a sense of engagement (Hammill et al., 2020; Muzammil et al., 2020), and breaking cycles of distance, isolation and disconnect, with the overall goal to improve learner retention (Muljana & Luo, 2019).
In the HYT block, learners select an emoji indicating positive or negative affect and are taken to a form to optionally respond further. The HYT block draws on innovative uses of available functionality within the platform, without the need for custom plugins, including automatic alerts for teachers. The simplicity in design allows learners to reach out when in need or share when they are going well.
From a learning design perspective, the block is developed to:
- Provide a real-time and responsive support
- Act as a visual prompt to access support
- Indicate that students are valued within the online learning community
- Encourage and facilitate learner to instructor interaction (Hirumi, 2013)
Positive reactions allow the learner to communicate with the teacher about their positive learning journey, while the negative-coded emotions provide options to allow the teacher to reach out to them directly. There were 2,963 student interactions with the block (averaging 10.4 student interactions per site), of which 62.2% were positive-coded and 37.7% were negative-coded. Emoji was selected over written text as a more universal emotive language, allowing the learner to interpret the faces in a way that aligns to their own subjective experience (McCulloch, 2019). The intentional use of open-ended questions and emotion-based iconography can provide insight into the more “subjective aspect of the student experience” (Boulton et al., 2019, p. 1).
The HYT block and any follow-up conversations are not restricted by mode of study, so both on- and off-campus students can benefit. Being located directly in the course throughout the teaching duration, the HYT block allows for early intervention and timely feedback on issues, course content, and student affect, that are not readily available through traditional university feedback mechanisms, such as post-teaching surveys. Feedback from students on their progress allows teachers to engage with the learner and address issues on a personalised one-to-one basis, improving student engagement and anxiety (see Table 1).
Table 1.
Survey Results of Teacher Feedback for HYT Block
| Variables | n | % |
| Contacted students as a result of student interaction with block | 30 | 63.3 |
| Initiated follow up action as result of contact with student | 19 | 47.4 |
| Perceived impact on student anxiety | 27 | |
| Positive | 44.4 | |
| Neutral | 55.6 | |
| Negative | 0.0 | |
| Perceived impact on student engagement with teacher | 27 | |
| Positive | 48.1 | |
| Neutral | 51.9 | |
| Negative | 0.0 | |
| Ease of Use | 17 | |
| Positive | 41.2 | |
| Neutral | 58.8 | |
| Negative | 0.0 | |
| Would recommend tool | 27 | 77.8 |
Keywords: Online learning, student engagement, student satisfaction, retention, wellbeing
References
Boulton, C., Hughes, E., Kent, C., Smith, J., & Williams, H. (2019). Student engagement and wellbeing over time at a higher education institution. PLOS ONE, 14(11), 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0225770
Hammill, J., Nguyen, T., & Henderson, F. (2020). Student engagement: The impact of positive psychology interventions on students. Active Learning In Higher Education, 23(2), 129-142. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469787420950589
Hirumi, A. (2022). Three levels of planned elearning interactions: a framework for grounding research and the design of elearning programs. Quarterly Review Of Distance Education, 14(1), 1-17.
McCulloch, G. (2019). Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language. Penguin Publishing Group.
Muljana, P., & Luo, T. (2019). Factors Contributing to Student Retention in Online Learning and Recommended Strategies for Improvement: A Systematic Literature Review. Journal Of Information Technology Education: Research, 18, 19-57. https://doi.org/10.28945/4182
Muzammil, M., Sutawijaya, A., & Harsasi, M. (2020). Investigating student satisfaction in online learning: the role of student interaction and engagement in distance learning university. Turkish Online Journal Of Distance Education, 21, 88-96. https://doi.org/10.17718/tojde.770928
Parkes, M., Gregory, S., Fletcher, P., Adlington, R., & Gromik, N. (2015). Bringing people together while learning apart: Creating online learning environments to support the needs of rural and remote students. Australian And International Journal Of Rural Education, 25(1), 66-78. Retrieved from https://journal.spera.asn.au/index.php/AIJRE/article/view/96