Case Study B: Gauging Student Engagement with an Online Orientation Module

Hibernia College specialises in professional development education, primarily in the education and health science sectors. Delivery is primarily blended, with some wholly online programmes. Online study is divided into a series of weekly tasks that students must complete. These encompass activities such as watching videos or multimedia presentations, reading articles, writing reflections, creating blog posts, participating in forum discussions and attending online tutorials. The vehicle for the delivery of these tasks is a Moodle-based learning management system (LMS). The typical student embarking on these programmes has earned a Bachelor’s degree from a traditional university and has no, or limited, experience of online learning. To help them transition successfully to the online or blended mode of delivery, we developed an online orientation module that focused on the technical, administrative, academic and social skills they would need to manage their studies. I was interested in gauging the extent to which students were engaging with this online orientation module and finding out which elements were most used and which were under used, with a view to making changes for subsequent iterations. I was also interested in exploring whether there was any different in the usage patterns of male and female students and of older students compared to millennials in order to ensure that the orientation was serving the needs of all.