Engaged with what, whom, when, how and why? Longitudinal and relational engagement in online postgraduate education in Scotland

We often talk about engagement without asking: engaged with what or whom, when, how and why? In this chapter, I reflect on a programme of research into an online Masters in Clinical Education at the University of Edinburgh. Here, engagement spans across and beyond a student’s formal curriculum, and can change from moment to moment without being a triumph or crisis of learning. An apparent lack of engagement should be disentangled from a lack of motivation. Online, postgraduate students’ external commitments and conditions are particularly influential, which makes enduring, rather than continuous or expected, engagement, more important. Engagement, therefore, is something to cultivate longitudinally, through relational agency and community, rather than something to generate within each session. Recognising engagement as relational, and distributed across students, teachers and institutions, can illuminate forms of groundwork that educators and institutions can do to support engagement beyond momentary attentiveness to lasting involvement.