The carrot without the stick: a case study of encouraging post-event student engagement with mobile phone technologies

The difficulty of successfully engaging students to participate in their learning at tertiary institutions has been identified by researchers as a major concern. In particular, post-event learner engagement with lecture material is virtually non-existent. In this sequential study over two semesters, students, who were enrolled into a first-year undergraduate subject, were asked to submit electronically, before the commencement of the next lecture, answers to a question that either related to or extended the content of the previous lecture. In order to encourage their level of post-event engagement, during one of the semesters, at the start of each of their lectures not only were the previously posed questions discussed, but the students were first asked to vote, using their mobile phones, on the correct answer from a choice of alternatives. The effect of this intervention was gauged from participants’ perceptions and triangulated with each cohort’s online submission rates. The results indicated that while their online submission rates did not improve significantly, the students did perceive that participating in the voting process encouraged them to investigate the set questions in their own time.