Students ‘overwhelmed’ by onslaught of course content

Academics’ rush to cater for different learning preferences with plethora of readings, videos and slides leaves course participants fatigued

May 8, 2023
A woman falling asleep at her desk. Is the requirement for academics to constantly learn new skills going to burn them out?
Source: iStock

The internet’s boundless capacity is becoming a millstone for students, as they struggle for buoyancy in a rising tide of course content.

An Australian study has found that academics are largely oblivious to the “online engagement fatigue” engulfing students. Spurred by the need to cater to different learning preferences, educators dish up a banquet of recommended readings, videos, online forums, course announcements and weekly lecture recordings.

But do they “overdo” it? “Are students [becoming] fatigued from those very engagement strategies designed to support [their] learning?” researchers from the universities of Southern Queensland and Newcastle asked in the journal Computers and Education Open.

They interviewed students and educators to find out. While academics had “mixed views” as to whether online engagement fatigue was a “real phenomenon”, students “almost unanimously” acknowledged it as a regular affliction.

Yet although online engagement and how to enhance it were subjects of a “large and growing body of research”, the consequences of overkill had been all but ignored. “Further research is needed to explore possibilities for more easily recognising online engagement fatigue, the relationship between its antecedents and consequences, and taking action to reduce its impact on student motivation, involvement and success,” the authors write.

Lead author Suzanne Maloney said some students were selective about the material they consumed. “But now it seems harder for a student to discern what to leave alone,” said the associate professor of accounting at the University of Southern Queensland.

“There is a push to have lots of bells and whistles in every course. There’s so much information coming at them…through websites, links, papers, online lectures and Zoom meetings. It is getting more difficult for a student to put a boundary around that. People [say], ‘we’ll put this up just in case it’s helpful’ – not thinking [that] maybe putting it up is really unhelpful.”

Students interviewed for the study spoke of being “overwhelmed” by “way too much knowledge” and “a million messages from the university”. Hours spent “looking at a very small screen” left them drained and tempted to quit.

An academic interviewee described this as “a standard fight or flight response…where some people just [say] it’s too much trouble, and they turn off”.

The study found that self-directed students were often misunderstood, as universities harnessed digital analytics to measure their engagement and interpreted a lack of “clicks” as apathy. “You can’t make the universal assertion that a non-clicking student is a poor student,” an educator told the researchers.

“They [may be] a high-performing student who’s got their act together...and to heck with having to interact with anyone. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

Dr Maloney said clicks were taken as “some sort of proxy for engagement” when in reality, students could “download everything and not read anything”. She said extensive material was not appropriate for every course. “There are some modules [where] you just want them to practise, practise, practise.

“We’ve got to educate educators not to put everything in. We probably even have to educate management of universities to trust educators to decide what’s essential [for] their discipline.”

She said teachers needed to focus on their educational objectives. “We’ve got all these fancy course specs and it’s all mapped, but at the end of the day, what’s my goal here? What can I do for these students to help them understand?”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com

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Reader's comments (1)

Oh, it is definitely a real thing. And it is a thing of both their and our own making. Because academics and universities as a whole are now practically petrified at the idea of telling the fee paying customers "No" to anything, because we now have students making more claims than ever that they need and must have learning resource support of a million different kinds and formats, and because we genuinely want to support them on their journey we have begun to cater for that by putting up every version of every format of the learning material we can conceive of. We have begun putting up links to papers and websites and videos related to everything that we taught them to answer their call for guidance and examples to aid their understanding of what we have just taught them. And all in the name of helping them to read around what they've been taught without them having to actually go and look at what might best help them read around what they've been taught because they are now "customers" and should not have to do these things themselves. But in doing this in an effort to meet their requirements and requests and to be as supportive as possible, we have now created an almost bottomless folder of information both directly related and tangentially related to what was actually taught. And in a world where grades are (in a general sense) sought after more than the learning experience itself, the impression given to students and their own interpretation of this support is that if they don't use at all then they can't possibly get a good grade. This then inevitably makes them feel that they have to read it all and watch it all and download it all to keep their heads above water, which ironically any speeds up their scholastic submergence beneath the waves of content. And if we tell them directly that it is only support material and it is not compulsory, the fear that those who do use it will do better is more than enough to hasten along the rest to download it as well. You add in the communications coming at them from all directions, from support services to academic staff to institutional levels, and we're not actually creating a culture of support to reduce their stress and concerns, but one of as you say "content fatigue" where we are actually stripping away or otherwise not nurturing their ability to judge necessity for themselves or to look for the writing information for them as individuals to help their understanding or to support their journey through the university experience. Just because someone is responsible for you and wants to keep you happy, it doesn't mean that you should get what you want or that getting what you want is good for you. My kids might want pudding before dinner, but it doesn't mean that they're going to get it because I'm better placed to make that judgment than them, and it certainly doesn't mean that it's good for them even if I were to cave to keep them happy.

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