Although recent technologies have revolutionized other fields, however, they are not yet fully integrated into education for Children’s Engagement.

Children’s Engagement has been a hot topic since the origin of teaching and learning and is developing rapidly with time and technology. With the recent advances in Information and Communication Technology (e.g, Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence and 5G), it is a need of the hour to revive its smart use in academia. In underdeveloped countries, parents are offended by financial burdens and educating children is not a priority, as results students are not effectively engaged in learning. Smartphones are mostly used for fun and entertainment, why not for teaching, learning and monitoring to reshape pedagogy.

Traditional education carries many challenges, learner engagement is the burning one. Particularly, the ongoing pandemic situation of COVID-19 has further enhanced this issue. Recent advancements in information and communication technologies (e.g., IoT, AI, 5G, etc.) have provided hugely smart solutions that address different aspects of life; however, smart solutions are not well integrated into the education system. These smart solution needs to be integrated with education to cope with the educational challenges, especially learners’ engagement.

Although recent technologies have revolutionized other fields, however, they are not yet fully integrated into education.

Learners engagement is defined as ”cognitive involvement, active participation and emotional involvement in any learning content”. This definition may be extended as the end result should be productive. In this article, we follow the following definition.

Participation in educationally effective practices, both inside and outside the classroom, which leads to a range of measurable outcomes.

Learner engagement is not the direct goal of the teaching, however, it is an essential reason for learner success. Today, different styles (e.g, Socratic methods, Montessori Method, warmer, collaboration etc) are used in classrooms to make students productively engaged. Along with these methods, information and communication technology is taking baby steps to classrooms for learners’ engagement. Nevertheless, the use of technology, especially the Social Networking Sites (SNS), has been criticized by many researchers since their discovery, however, in this case, the students do not directly interact with SNS, only teachers and parents use SNS to involve learners. The teachers and parents communicate for learners’ development, to boost their outcomes.

Learner engagement is a big issue at each level of learning and it is critically lower, especially in the underdeveloped countries’ schools. It is also the leading reason for students dropping out. About 50 % of learners remain disengaged in classes, resulting in their failure and dropout. Unfortunately, today classrooms (i.e, in the rural and backward areas) are used for knowledge transfer, which needs replacement with highly engaged classrooms. For this purpose teachers, interests and parents’ involvement have a major impact on learners’ engagement likely the employee’s satisfaction is necessary before the customers’ satisfaction. Moreover, the learners’ engagement is not limited to learner only; it directly depends on the teachers, parents and institutional productive engagement. Actually, the learner engagement works in triangles including learners, teachers and parents. This discussion clearly shows that, instead of working on the learners only, there is a need to work on the engagement triangle.

This study investigated the role of social media in learners’ engagement (l=734) by making a productive relationship among the parents (p=400), teachers (t=21) and Principals in underdeveloped countries’ schools. The results of the study are promising. It is worth mentioning here that the school (located in the village), learner average attendance increased to 95% (dropped the truancy to almost zero), which got higher authorities admiration.

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This study is conducted in the underdeveloped country rural school, Government High School Chapri, District Mianwali, Punjab, Pakistan, to analyse the social media impact on parents and teachers to productively engage the learners. The study results are very promising, showing a great increase in all stakeholder involvement.

This research is published in Education and Information Technologies, Springer.

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