Abstract: While this paper set out to discover what activities and/or interaction
channels might be expected to lead to more highly engaged students, what it
found was a bit different. After first creating a scale to measure online student
engagement, and then surveying 186 students from six campuses in the Midwest,
the results indicate that there is no particular activity that will automatically help
students to be more engaged in online classes. However, the results also suggest
that multiple communication channels may be related to higher engagement and
that student-student and instructor-student communication are clearly strongly
correlated with higher student engagement with the course, in general. Thus,
advice for online instructors is still to use active learning but to be sure to
incorporate meaningful and multiple ways of interacting with students and
encouraging/requiring students to interact with each other.