Designing Engaging Online Environments

Engagement in learning is critical to students' achievement of meaningful learning outcomes. Educators often describe engagement as a multi component concept that involves emotional, cognitive, and behavioral domains. In an online environment, student engagement is challenging to achieve. Both synchronous and asynchronous instruction needs to be thoughtfully designed to engage students at a meaningful level. Moreover, within an online environment, some of the differences between the students from diverse backgrounds may be more challenging for the instructors to address and thus require an intentional and systematic approach. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is an instructional design framework that is based on a notion that all students are varied in their learning needs and therefore instruction needs to be flexible to ensure learning of all. This chapter will examine the construct of engagement, focus on learner variability, and offer practical instructional design solutions based in the framework of UDL.