Deliberations about digital learning: finding a way forward

We know that learning is a complex business, and various theories emphasise different facets of learning (Illeris, 2009) which leaves problems about how we study learning and the technologies used to facilitate learning (Laurillard, 2002). Learning can become even more difficult when the delivery medium changes and students are charting new waters as during the pandemic when teaching and learning was delivered completely online. The OpenVoices on COVID-19 special issue of Open Learning (Whitelock et al., 2021) reflected upon the shift to online learning, prompting changes to teaching, learning and assessment, emphasising approaches that have been tested and shown to be effective in enabling students’ growth and development. This issue continues to highlight further deliberations around digital learning and how it supports student success. One of the major questions for both students and teachers alike, when moving into an emergency digital ecosystem, is how will learners cope in order to succeed? The first paper in this edition, by Alqurashi (2022), throws some light on this question. Alqurashi used publicly available data from a United States National Survey of Student Engagement analysing over 16,500 responses from undergraduates designated as high or low performers, who took all their courses on line. The purpose of the study was to investigate whether there was a difference between high and low achieving students’ engagement compared to their subsequent course achievement. Alqurashi selected seven engagement indicators that focussed on teaching and learning practices: higher-order learning, reflective and integrative learning, learning strategies, quantitative reasoning, collaborative learning, student–faculty interaction and effective teaching practices. The statistical analysis revealed that high achieving students were significantly higher than low achieving students in higher-order learning, effective learning strategies, effective teaching practices, and reflective and integrative learning. The interesting finding for course design and resourcing was that low achieving students were significantly higher than high achieving students in student–faculty interaction, suggesting more help is sought from tutors by the lower achieving students. The study can only speculate on the type of help sought by these students from staff. However, using lack of engagement as reported by Herodotou et al. (2020) can act as a pre indicator of drop out which in turn alerts tutors to provide further support. No differences were found in the collaborative learning variable, when it could be postulated that lower achieving students would seek more support from their peers through the use of online discussion forums. The second paper by Griffin and Roy (2022) employed a suite of studies to investigate the efficacy of online discussion forums. This research was conducted with students from the UK’s Open University with 429 responses to questions sent to 5,748 students. Although the overall response rate was only 7.5%, the postgraduate module responses were higher. The questions probed student perspectives on their feelings when participating in ‘tutor group’ forums. They found both negative and positive student OPEN LEARNING: THE JOURNAL OF OPEN, DISTANCE AND E-LEARNING 2022, VOL. 37, NO. 3, 215–218 https://doi.org/10.1080/02680513.2022.2081071