Improving student engagement during in-person classes by using functionalities of a digital learning environment

The introduction of digital learning environments in higher education requires teachers to be able to optimize their use to improve student engagement in the learning process during in-person classes. In a quasi-experiment (N = 303), an increasing number of functionalities of a digital learning environment was used to examine the impact on changes in cognitive, affective, and behavioral student engagement between the beginning and the end of a series of lectures. The three conditions were: ‘low number of functionalities’ in which students had only to answer quizzes during the lectures; ‘moderate number of functionalities’ in which, in addition to quizzes, students could ask the teacher written questions at different moments during the lectures; ‘high number of functionalities’ which added a functionality compared to the previous two enabling students to visualize the teacher's slideshow for the course on their own device in real time during the lectures. Results revealed that visualizing the teacher's slideshow on their own device in addition to quizzing and questioning increased affective engagement of students between the beginning and end of the lectures. Furthermore, when only quizzing activities were provided, a greater proportion of students engaged behaviorally to perform additional quizzes administered one week after the end of the last lecture to prepare exams. The discussion evokes both preventing multi-tasking activities, and the need for students to self-evaluate by performing additional quizzes depending on the functionalities used by the teacher during the lectures.