Episode 58: How to Keep Students Engaged During Learning with Shaunak Roy, Founder & CEO of Yellowdig

Shaunak Roy, Founder and CEO at Yellowdig, is doing something really amazing, which is increasing learner engagement in K -12. Yellowdig has experienced a whopping 200% increase in learner engagement across universities and community colleges. Both types of institutions are dealing with a real problem when it comes to student engagement, further exacerbated with this hybrid world we're living in, largely due to Covid. We entered this remote-only learning rather abruptly, and this has caused many problems for students. And now, with campuses slowly re-opening, there's a lot of hybrid learning happening as well. Today, students are connecting from their homes or dorms instead of going to classrooms, or engaging in a combination of both.

What Is Active Learning?

The biggest challenge is creating and maintaining an active learner — a learner who is truly engaged in a particular course or program. Essentially, if you envision a classroom today, it looks like a big space with a professor at the front and a group of students sitting nearby and listening, once or twice a week. Most of the so-called learning happens by basically sitting there and absorbing information. At the end of the class, there may be an assignment or exercise, and that's the end of it. For Yellowdig, however, active learning is when students become engaged in learning by actually contributing to the learning environment.

Think about case study discussions or question and answer peer feedback, where people bring in examples from the real world and talk about them. And they’re not only talking about them, but also taking field trips, getting out there and experiencing how what they're learning applies to the real world. We all have done that at some point, what Shaunak calls active learning. In these instances, learners are emotionally engaged and involved in what they're learning in the subject matter.

A lot of instructors know the benefits and value of engaging students in an active environment, but this becomes exponentially more difficult as you have larger and larger classes. This is one of the reasons Yellowdig has smaller class sizes, because it allows for more interactive classroom environments. Fortunately, the good news is that many other companies are working using technology to drive student engagement, which may or may not be always driven by the instructor. There are various ways of getting students engaged on their own. For example, many kids are engaged in playing games all day long, and there's a palpable difficulty in getting them off a game for them to actually do their homework.

Building Natural Engagement With Gameful Learning

Sometimes, students might be hooked to social media, and the consequences of constant social media usage have been well-documented. Still, the assumption that the instructor is only responsible for driving engagement in the classroom may not be correct. There are ways to engage students naturally because we already know that they do get engaged, depending on what they're doing. Using that engagement not for them to play games, but to actually do studies with one another, is one area where Gameful Learning can be extremely effective. Building technology-nudging strategies to nudge the students at the right time, so that they come back to the learning environment and act in different ways, would be helpful for them. Broadly speaking, for a bigger or maybe hybrid classroom, where students are not together, there are ways to actually get them engaged — ways which are not only instructor-driven but instructor-guided.

There's also another dichotomy that has opened up with Covid, where a more privileged learner (one with a laptop, mobile device, or working broadband internet connection, for example), moves further ahead than a learner without those technologies. As a result, there's a great deal of lost learning in underprivileged communities. 

Kids who have the privilege of being in an environment with a support structure in place are better able to catch up or not fall behind. Yet as we know, there are many kids who are falling behind very rapidly for a variety of reasons. The problem isn't just the pandemic, because it has existed for the last 15-20 years. Educators have all seen study after study, where high schoolers are asked to what extent they feel connected to their teachers, and nearly 80% of them say they are not connected to the classroom. They are only in the classroom because it serves as a prerequisite to college.

If we had the resources available to have the same high-quality schools for every kid in the country or around the world, that would most likely be the best solution. But this is not possible with all the budget constraints in this sector. The alternative solution is creative or innovative projects, often technology-based, that are able to engage students in the right way. The cost of education has become unsustainable for many, especially the most at-risk students. One way of reducing cost is actually innovating around it so that we can clearly look at how people learn, and build products and services that cater directly to that style of learning.

For us to be successful with modern technology in the classroom, there has to be a sharper focus on building technology that drives the right efficacy for learning. This means designing technology sometimes from the ground up, or using the technologies that are already there and redesigning them for the learning environment. Remember: We’re trying to engage learners using the medium they're most interested in and excited to use, and making learning itself more interesting. Take what works for students and try to use that to shape learning instead of creating new habits and behaviors, which is always more difficult to do. Whether we like it or not, technology is here to stay.

Connect with Shaunak Roy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaunak-roy-65231b/

Learn more about Yellowdig at https://www.yellowdig.co/

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