Enhancing undergraduates’ engagement in a learning community by including their voices in the technological and instructional design

Over the past decades, Social Networking Tools (SNT) have been applied in educational settings to support students' engagement in learning communities. Previous studies suggested the positive effects of including students' voices in technological and instructional design. However, educators usually cannot revise the features of SNT as they like, which may limit the possibility of enhancing students' engagement (i.e., cognitive, emotional, and social-behavioral engagement). Therefore, this study explored whether changing SNT technological and instructional design based on students' voices can improve engagement. We developed a photo-sharing web-based SNT and examined whether refining the SNT and instruction design based on students' input would enhance their multifaceted engagement in a learning community. We collected the opinions and feedback from 114 undergraduate students in an environmental psychology course at a private university in the USA using surveys every three weeks. We refined the technological and instructional design accordingly. Students' engagement was measured four times during the semester, and after the semester, nine students were interviewed with regard to how the technological and instructional design changes influenced their engagement. With successive iterations, we found that students' cognitive and emotional engagement significantly improved, while their social-behavioral engagement did not change significantly during the study. Interview results further explained how the design changes influenced students' engagement. The findings suggested soliciting students’ input into SNT technological and instructional design can benefit their engagement in a learning community, while engagement was also influenced by many other factors.