Engaging students can be challenging in any educational setting, however, with flexible online courses being a viable option for employed students, new challenges surrounding time pressures can lead to disengagement. This page discusses potential ways to support engagement with students with time pressures.  

Setting expectations with the class early in the course is important to help students navigate and develop their own study plan to complete the work flexibly. Whilst work can be completed flexibly, having a conversation about the amount of work the course contains and guiding them with an overview of the learning journey can help students plan their own study time effectively, alleviating time constraints. 

Being clear and concise with information is key to ensuring that students remain on task and focused. Unclear or jumbled information often leads to disengagement as students can become confused with what they need to achieve. This clarity is even more important when students have limited time available to complete their tasks. Instructional language can support this by providing clear indications of: 

• What the task is.
• How they complete the task. 
• How long the task will approximately take.
• How the task will be used (i.e. to support your assessment outcome, as a discussion within the class, etc.). 

By setting clear boundaries and expectations in a concise manner, students will be able to navigate and self direct through tasks. Also, by providing approximate lengths for each of the tasks, students will be able to plan their study time more effectively. 

Using summaries of tasks and learning at the beginning and end of the week can be useful to support students with keeping engaged and on task. Such overviews can act as checklists for students to help them keep track of all their tasks, expectations and deadlines. It is recommended that these summaries are short and simple with more instructions being embedded within the task itself to make it easier to read.  

Summaries of live sessions or microlectures can also help time-limited students access materials in a shorter timescale, whilst still providing them with further materials for them to use at their own discretion.

Data can be useful for you as an academic to keep track of students engagement over a period of time. There are many data sets that can be utilised to display engagement metrics which will enable you to support students who have disengaged. These metrics should be used as a prompt to highlight students that need support or advice and can be used to start an open conversation with individuals. There are many challenges that can cause disengagement with students and these conversations will help highlight any potential challenges and solutions to ensure that student is successful on the course. 

Some resources, whilst useful, can be time consuming and can contain an overload of information. To help empower students and engage them with learning, it can be useful to create resources with students, especially during live sessions. By producing the content in groups the work is shared and can be used as a shared resource afterwards to help with revision. Also, since students were involved in the creation of the artefact, this supports an underlying understanding of the topic information.  

Providing content in a diverse range of mediums helps busy students engage with learning in a way that suits their needs. Some students may not have the time to sit and read a full article, but an audio recording that summarises the article, a relevant podcast or chapter of an audiobook may be something that can be listened to while on the go, during a commute, or while completing other daily tasks.

Giving students options about how they engage with content makes their learning more flexible and feel more achievable alongside a busy schedule, particularly for material beyond the core content of a module that helps them to expand and enhance their knowledge.