Abstract:

This article explores student engagement with online tuition and recordings at The Open University.

Key to this is analysis of:
1) student access of asynchronous recorded learning event summaries (LES), and
2) student attendance at ‘live’ synchronous learning events, drilling down into the demographics of students (disabled students, black minority ethnic (BME) students, and students of low socio-economic status (low SES)) in one Faculty.

The aim is the identification of ways current practice can be improved in order to better enable student engagement with online tuition, particularly that of disabled students for whom learning event recording policy is a driver (barriers to participation).

The results show that across the student population the majority of all students do not access the LES and there is no significant impact on BME or Low SES students overall; there is a slight impact on disabled students in that the percentage of disabled students listening is slightly higher than the percentage registered. It is also clear that most students who access the LES have already attended the synchronous event. This has implications operationally (i.e. what kind of recording policy suits the needs of students) as well as at an institutional level (OU and elsewhere), particularly in the face of the shift to online teaching caused by the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic.

Keywords:

Online tuition, recording, engagement, barriers, disability, widening participation.