Engaging Students in Class Discussions with MIRO

For many of our students English is not their first language and for some, it is not even their second language, which made it difficult for them to participate in the discussion. Hence, one of the challenges I faced when teaching these students is that they are not comfortable in voicing their thoughts openly. Some of them may also lack confidence in expressing their ideas in verbally. Another challenge I considered is the documentation of these class discussions. The usual procedures are for students to write on pieces of paper or flipcharts and present their points for the discussions. However, the students may not be able to access the information for revision or reflection after the session. Lastly, active student engagement during group discussions is already a challenge for onsite learning and it can be exacerbated in hybrid environments. Thus, I decided to explore the use of MIRO as a platform to address these issues.

I have conducted a study with 42 students to examine how different features of MIRO affected students’ learning engagement and class discussions. Based on data, 40 students considered MIRO effective in helping them to stay cognitively and behaviourally engaged in class. Students provided examples of their cognitive engagement, “show the ideas clearly and differently and logically”, and “we actually engaged more and we learn more”. Examples of behavioural engagement shared by the students included how they, made changes to their learning behaviours such as, “it is easier to read and it is easier to write down something”, and “different groups of students can write, type their information in the one area”.  Students also identified some common challenges they faced when using MIRO, such as “page is a little bit confuse and little bit mess” and “hard for us to identify what information the group has written”.

Many researchers have found positive effect of technology in teaching and learning on student engagement (e.g., Gosper et al., 2011; Heilporn et al., 2021). Hence, it is no surprise when I have similar findings in my study. What I did not expect was to find students using MIRO as a repository of resources that they are able to access for asynchronous learning. Currently, most module leaders are using the Learning Mall as a platform for students’ interaction and repository of learning materials. However, many of my students found MIRO to be efficient in these aspects. As such, they were more willing to use MIRO for asynchronous learning and were also more selective and purposeful of the comments they post and the resources they shared. This helped to support my belief that an active learning community can be created on MIRO, in which students, not only teachers, are contributors of learning content.

Something that I learned in my study was that when introducing new technology to students, it is important to consider their level of technology acceptance and ability. Some of the students are less technologically inclined and need more support at the initial stage. As such, I need to be more purposeful in my design of the MIRO board to make it easier for students’ engagement. I did it by dividing the board into different zones and labelling each zone clearly. This made it easier for students to access the materials needed, reducing their anxiety in learning a new technology. The use of sections and labels also helped the students when they revisited the materials when working on their assignments or to further explore the learning content.

Bendelier et al. (2020) conducted a systematic review to examine the interaction between technology and the different forms of engagement. Through their study, the researchers found most studies reported behavioural engagement, which focused on students’ participation in classroom activities and their interaction with each other. However, the researchers also identified two additional forms of engagement that needs to be considered, affective engagement and cognitive engagement. Affective engagement refers to the positive interactions experienced by students during the learning process and cognitive engagement refers to students learning from their peers and self-regulation habits. As cognitive engagement and development is an important aspect of education, there is a need to examine how technology can be used to foster it.

MIRO is a simple platform for teachers to navigate and customise for their teaching needs. Also, students in China are able to access the platform easily. MIRO is an effective tool that has many different features that students considered to be supportive for their class discussions and online engagement. Hence, students are more motivated to continue their learning process beyond the classroom.  This helped to develop a culture of collaborative learning in the classroom, which is in line with Rojanarata’s (2020) research on using education technology to promote the development of collaborative skills in students.