An investigation into the impact of Self Organised Learning Environment (SOLE) on student engagement in Higher Education

Student engagement has become a cause for concern within higher education, and research has begun to identify specific areas within educational practices that are effective surrounding student engagement (Kahn, 2014). Earlier work conducted by Sugata Mitra referred to as ‘the hole in the wall’ experiments, have shown that groups of children can learn without the assistance of adult intervention. The aim of this paper was to investigate student engagement levels utilising the Self-Organised Learning Environment (SOLE) with adults, in a first year university seminar. The experiment was conducted utilising the SOLEs procedure applicable to a higher education setting. Results, which are discussed in the paper, show that there was a non-significant increase (+11.6%) in student engagement levels utilising SOLEs, compared to traditional seminars students previously participated within.