Abstract
<p>This paper reports the development and initial testing of the Online Student Engagement Questionnaire (OSEQ), a multidimensional instrument designed to evaluate student engagement in online learning environments and to serve as a complementary lens for understanding Students’ Approaches to Learning (SAL) online. Adapted from the Student Course Engagement Questionnaire (SCEQ) (Handelsman et al., 2005), the OSEQ preserves the SCEQ’s Skills, Emotional, Participation/Interaction, and Performance Engagement factors while modifying wording, scope, response options, and administration to support reflection on online learning and inclusion in an online questionnaire, and to enhance clarity and ease of use. It was tested with university students engaged in online or blended learning (N = 93) and evaluated using reliability analyses and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). CFA and reliability estimates provide preliminary support for the intended four-factor structure and indicate that the adaptations made have broadly preserved the engagement factors established by the original SCEQ. The resulting factor-level findings reveal meaningful distinctions among forms of online engagement, including comparatively lower Participation/Interaction Engagement, which would have been less evident from an overall score alone. Overall, findings suggest that the OSEQ shows promise for identifying multidimensional patterns of online engagement and complementing measures of students’ approaches to learning online. Further refinement and validation in larger and more diverse samples are recommended.</p>