Promoting engagement of nursing students in online learning: Use of the student-generated question in a nursing leadership course

Background: The frequency of online learning has surged in nursing education, and engagement is a critical element in students' success in online learning. An evidence-based learning tool is needed to promote engagement in online nursing education. Objectives: To examine the effectiveness of the student-generated question (SGQ) in promoting engagement in an online nursing leadership course. Design: A quasi-experimental and post-test design. Setting: The online nursing leadership course at a university in Canada. Participants: 179 undergraduate nursing students. Methods: Six learning behaviors related to engagement, including number of visits, time spent, topics visited, posts read, threads created, and replies posted, were retrieved from the institution's learning management system (LMS). The equality of covariance matrices was applied to examine the homogeneity of the six outcome variables among the control and intervention groups, and multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was conducted to compare the statistical differences in all six outcome variables for three planned phases of instruction. Results: The equality of the covariance matrices indicated that the six outcome variables were homogeneous across the control and intervention groups. The multivariate test showed a statistically significant difference between the control and intervention groups in the post-test measurements. In addition, the MANOVA results demonstrated statistically significant differences in the two phases when SGQ was implemented but was statistically insignificant when SGQ was not implemented. The intervention group demonstrated higher means in the two phases in which SGQ was implemented. Conclusions: The findings support SGQ as an effective learning tool for promoting engagement in an online nursing leadership course.