Monthly Archives: November 2021

Understanding how anxiety affects participation in online tutorials

Image by Tim Gouw on Unsplash

As an Open University tutor, I am very aware that some students find it hard to join online tutorials and others who do join may not participate. Although many participate by using the chat box or take part in other interactive activities such as answering polls or writing on the whiteboard, few students turn their microphones on to speak. Without visual clues, it is very hard to interpret how students are feeling when they take part in online tutorials, and in larger tutorials it is difficult to know when or why they might disengage from the session. As someone who experiences anxiety myself, particularly in relation to being in an online environment, I thought that it was likely that some students would similarly experience anxiety and I wanted to find out more about what the triggers for anxiety are in relation to the online tutorials that we offer as part of the teaching on an Open University module. I also wanted to explore ideas about what we could do as tutors and as an institution to help alleviate such anxiety which would in turn help students to develop their confidence both in joining and  participating in online tutorials to get the most out of their academic studies. 

My project was in two stages: a questionnaire sent out to students on three Social Science Level 1 modules followed by interviews a few months later with a small cohort of students who had completed the questionnaire. 

The questionnaire was completed by just over 600 students. It asked questions about anxiety in relation to joining and taking part in online tutorials. Students were asked to give their age band. The questionnaire was sent out when students were in their second month of study on their module, so they would have had several opportunities to join an online tutorial. It found that nearly 1 in 6 students had not attended an online tutorial because they did not feel comfortable in doing so and that nearly 3 in 4 students who have taken part in an online tutorial had experienced some level of anxiety in doing so. The aspects of online tutorials that caused the highest anxiety were being asked to speak and being asked to directly answer a question, with more than 3 in 4 students who have some anxiety about participating in online tutorials reporting significant or moderate anxiety about doing so. The percentages were higher amongst younger students, particularly those under 25. 

The interviews were conducted with a small number of students from different age bands registered to a variety of Social Science qualifications. All had taken part in online tutorials. They were asked questions in relation to the anxiety they experience when joining and taking part in these sessions and were invited to consider whether certain strategies would help them to manage their anxiety. During these more in-depth discussions, it became clear that there was a range of different interpretations of the concept of anxiety, with some students happy to talk about the anxiety that they experience whilst others preferred to talk about stress or apprehensiveness, although the triggers for these feelings were the same.  

The interviews found that the anxiety that students felt about joining or taking part in online tutorials at the start of the module fell into three key areas: 

  1. Accessing the room/technical issues
  2. What the tutorial would be like/the ‘abstractness’ of being in a virtual room
  3. Fear of saying something ‘stupid’/not being able to keep up with the other students.

One of the key triggers for anxiety in relation to joining a first online tutorial was not knowing what it would be like, particularly whether students would be required to have cameras on. 

For the most part, interviewees felt that their anxiety diminished over time and with experience of how online tutorials are run and what their options are for taking part. It also helped to be familiar with the tutors running the sessions as well as names of the other students in the session. This was helpful in reducing anxiety related to feeling out of step with the group. 

All interviewees thought that being able to access a short video showing what the online tutorial platform looks like would have been very effective at helping to manage anxiety ahead of the first session. Interactive activities such as polling were popular as they allowed participation whilst remaining anonymous. Although the idea of breakout rooms was a trigger for anxiety amongst the interviewees, most said that they were more likely to speak in smaller groups and that this would help with getting to know other students. 

In summary, the questionnaires and interviews found that there were a number of triggers for anxiety amongst Level 1 students in relation to joining and participating in online tutorials, many of them related to the level of confidence of the student. A first step to helping to alleviate such anxiety will be to make a short video available that shows what an online room looks like as this will help students to know that they do not need to be on camera and can participate as much or as little as they want. In addition, it will be useful to think about how to develop confidence in participating, with well-managed small group activities that promote conversation and discussion, since familiarity in doing this should help alleviate anxiety in the longer term. 

Beyond this, it would be useful to think about what could be done to promote both student identity and a sense of student community since this will make it easier for new students to settle in to making academic study part of their lives and develop confidence in their skills. 

Janet Hunter, Lecturer in Social Sciences & Global Studies, Politics

The Top Five Things You Need to Know about Tutorial Attendance (from folks who have spent far too long wrangling the numbers!)

Image by Jeanne Provost via Shutterstock

Admittedly, the Arts and Humanities are not traditionally known as the spiritual homeland of number crunching, but in 2019, colleagues and I from the departments of Classical Studies, History, English, and Creative Writing at the Open University broke with tradition and embarked on a quantitative analysis of student attendance patterns within our school.  

Three years before, the Open University had introduced a bold new framework for tuition, the Group Tuition Policy, that guaranteed students an online alternative for every face-to-face session on offer. The objective of the policy was to ensure students had a greater range of options (face to face or online/weekday evenings or Saturdays) when it came to choosing a tutorial to suit their schedule and needs.  

We reckoned it was time to take a good hard look at attendance in the wake of these changes.  What was working well? What wasn’t?  So much of our tuition strategy and implementation in the past had been based on gut instincts about what works well for students and tutor—but we wanted to establish a solid evidence-base for tuition moving into the future. With this in mind, we donned our data-wrangling chaps, and headed out into the wild frontiers of attendance statistics. 

Using data from our booking and registration system (LEM), we tracked student attendance from 2017-2018 (eventually adding in 2019-2020 in the second phase of our project) to help us get a broad overview of attendance across a range of Arts & Humanities modules, but also to give us a snapshot of student behaviour at a more granular level.    

We had all sorts of questions about attendance. What percentage of students actually attend learning events? What kind of events do students prefer to attend—online or face to face? Lectures or smaller tutorials? How does attendance relate to academic outcomes for students: do students who attend learning events do better than those who don’t? How has COVID impacted on student attendance? While the answers to these questions were interesting in themselves, what drove us was a desire to get it right for students in the future: how can we plan tuition so that it is attractive to students and helps them achieve their study goals?  How can we make the most of our present tuition resource so that our learning events benefit the maximum number of students? 

What we came up with, after many, many hours of wrangling data into submission, was a fascinating picture of student attendance behaviour within the school of Arts & Humanities.  It may not be the I Ching of attendance, but our report generated a number of valuable insights into the state of student attendance in our school. Here are a few tantalising snippets we thought you might like to know: 

Students want tuition.  There is clearly a strong demand for it. While attendance at face-to-face sessions remained fairly stable between 2017-19, attendance at online sessions seems to be growing, year on year, and we need to plan for that in terms of investment in our teaching platforms, staff development, and tuition offerings.   

Attendance has remained relatively stable, and even risen, under lockdown. Apart from a dip in mid-May 2020 when many end-of-module assessments were cancelled for students, attendance during 2019-2020 was generally higher than it was the previous year, and this trend appears to have continued on modules presenting from October 2020 as well.    

There is a strong link between attendance and attainment: students who got Pass 1 and 2s were more likely to have attended a learning event (and more of them) than those students with Pass 3 and 4 grades. 

Cancellation might be our best friend—when it comes to registering for online learning events at the beginning of a module, many students panic and book more events than they will realistically attend. Unfortunately, they often neglect to cancel bookings they don’t intend to use. Our study found that 1 in every 3 students who register for an event fails to show up! This means that a large number of the students on waitlists could have been accommodated at learning events if appropriate cancellations had been made.  Clearly, we’ve got a job to do creating a booking system that minimizes un-used bookings, but we also need to cultivate a culture amongst students of responsible registration. 

Some students REALLY like to attend. When we sampled student behaviour, it became clear that there was a wide range of engagement within our student cohort: some students didn’t attend at all, while others attended a great deal.  Of those who attended a great deal, we discovered the phenomenon of the ‘super-attender’, that species of student who not only books but also attends a massive amount of learning events on a single presentation. One student in our sample managed to attend a whopping 40+ sessions over the course of one module (and actually booked but did not attend a further 10). It’s not clear that attending this many sessions on a limited number of topics will actually help the student achieve their study objectives—in fact, it may rob them of time better spent on personal study and assignment writing.  While it’s great for students to have choice, booking into this many events means that one student’s choice may sometimes come at the cost of others who didn’t book early enough. Such students are relatively rare, but such a phenomenon does draw attention to some of the risks involved with having a booking system with no limits.  

The project has been challenging but hugely productive, laying the groundwork for a series of conversations with our colleagues in the school of Arts & Humanities who are responsible for designing and implementing tuition strategies on future presentations. Our findings have also been a springboard for broader conversations within the university community, with stakeholders ranging from tutors to university policymakers and system-commissioners.  All of us are keen to make the most of our resources to meet students’ needs in the coming years and we firmly believe that the best way to do that is by sharing our understanding of what is working—and what is not—in our present tuition and systems offering. 

Have you been involved in a project looking at student attendance, in another faculty of the Open University or at another institution? Have you found that these trends in student behaviour really resonate with you as a tutor, teacher, or tuition manager?  Or perhaps you’d like to read a more detailed account of our methodology, conclusions, and recommendations? We’d love to hear from you. Please do add a comment below or drop us a line at jennifer.shepherd@open.ac.uk or astrid.voigt@open.ac.uk. 

Jennifer Shepherd & Astrid Voigt 

on behalf of the ‘Investigating Tuition Attendance in Arts & Humanities’ Project Team (Robin Mackie, Steve Padley, Maddy Sharman, Jen Shepherd, Lee Simmonds, Astrid Voigt)