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For presenters for abstracts, bios and presentation videos for the July 2022 Learning and Teaching Symposium, see below.
COVID-19 triggered a rapid international shift toward online assessment, which has been accompanied by concerns about student cheating. If we aren’t physically with students, how can we be sure they are completing tasks in the circumstances we require – and how can we verify their identity? Add into the mix the range of new technology tools that are being used to cheat and unprecedented resource constraints, and it seems that assessment has become much more challenging over the pandemic period.
This presentation explores cheating as a type of disengagement, and what educators are doing to address it. The argument is made that addressing cheating will require an uneasy balance between positive ‘academic integrity’ and adversarial ‘assessment security’ approaches. Examples are provided from a range of disciplines, connected to research into their effectiveness at addressing cheating.
Professor Phillip (Phill) Dawson
Historical BI and unit evaluation data has shown that online Initial Teacher Education (ITE) student engagement and satisfaction in Health and Physical Education (HPE) units has been inconsistent in recent years, particularly for core undergraduate curriculum units. To overcome this, EDPE units were re-designed to adopt a Digital-first approach that prioritises cognitive and affective measures. This has resulted in improvements in mature-age, online student motivation and engagement in the learning process. This presentation explores key features of the unit redesign process and their impact on student motivation and engagement.
Dr Kristy O’Neill
Getting students to engage with the weekly tutorial readings often seems a never-ending struggle. As the tutor, you spend hours reading the weekly tutorial material, then you plan the tutorial. You think about which activities will work best to enable the students to ‘engage’ with the week’s material, only to turn up to the tutorial to discover that the students haven’t done the readings or if they have, they’ve only skimmed them. This presentation stems from an experience as a history tutor and details a tutorial activity – student-led tutorial – that elicited strong student engagement. It started as a fun tutorial exercise but then revealed itself to as a way to get students to engage with the weekly readings. The results were astounding, not only did the new ‘tutors’ devise ambitious and interactive activities but the rest of the class actively participated. Curiously, there seems little literature on this activity, but I would argue that student-led activities should be employed more. For humanities students especially, not only do they offer the opportunity for that generic skill – group work – but more importantly they encourage a meaningful engagement with academic writing, arguments, and primary source evidence.
Kathryn Smithies
Auditing all over the world is documented as being the most difficult and boring of any course in an accounting degree. Being a heavily theoretical based subject with hardly any calculations, students often struggle to see the relevance of this unit. Conventional techniques do not usually work when students cannot engage with what they interpret as dry and dull content. Since 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic introduced additional challenges with a shift to fully online teaching. I have employed a number of evidence-based engagement strategies including the integration of story-telling, incorporation of real-life examples with visual aids, stimulating online questions and interactive live-streamed lectures in both my undergraduate and postgraduate auditing units. I have experienced a sustained 47-fold increase in undergraduate engagement and a 32-fold increase in postgraduate student engagement since the introduction of these techniques. Further to these statistics, qualitative student feedback has been overwhelmingly positive with numerous students noting their initial reluctance to engage with the unit because their preconceived notion was that auditing would be dry and dull, only to find it very engaging and as a result are now pursing auditing as a career path. This teaching method demonstrates that it is possible to engage students in traditionally difficult units throughout lockdowns and into the new normal.
Dr Supawadee (Bee) Moss
UNE student cohorts have been affected in various ways by COVID-19, bushfires, and floods, and economic uncertainty. We are teaching in a VUCA world marked by Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. Recognising that there are ‘many solutions’ to the problem of engagement, a team have been funded through the Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program to develop an Inclusive Pedagogy for Student Well-being’ and a Student Wellbeing Toolkit. This signature pedagogy aims to support inclusion, cultural responsiveness, and well-being, and draws on Universal Design for Learning, Culturally Responsive Pedagogy, and Trauma Informed Pedagogy. Scaling up the signature pedagogy in 2022 across all faculties and schools at UNE, the team target engagement through incorporating a Pedagogy of Care. A Pedagogy of Care fosters learning focused relationships. There is an awareness that care practices can support sharing and reciprocity, just as they can be ‘paternalistic and infantilising. In this presentation a UNE approach to a Pedagogy of Care will be illustrated. There will be an outline of practices that foster relationships premised on care, and acknowledge that care can be problematic of not enacted purposefully and deliberately. Consideration will be given to the promotion of connectedness and the maintenance of healthy boundaries in online teaching contexts.
Associate Professor Jennifer Charteris, Dr Joanna Anderson, Dr Genevieve Thraves
What is it?
Can I see a pilot video and teaser?
Of course, you can! Please click the OneDrive sharefile
Who developed the pilot?
This concept is the work of:
Why is it needed?
How can it be made sustainable?
Mr Mark Graham, Dr Huifang Li
The 7 Day Auto-Extension Tool is a new approach to student engagement first piloted within the School of Psychology undergraduate units during Trimester 3 2021, and has since been well-received across parts of all three UNE Faculties.
This project success is due to the Learning Design Team structure within which our team is encouraged to share ideas across traditional areas with beneficial outcomes in both academic workload and student learning. From a staff perspective workload is dramatically reduced in this area, freeing up time to focus on teaching and research.
The tool utilises existing Moodle features in innovative ways, coupled with robust extensions policies and guidelines, allowing students to adjust their own due date from date listed to a new due date a week later. This approach provides an immediate and visual resolution for the student, listing this new date clearly in Moodle. The tool incorporates a self-efficacy model of support allowing students to take ownership of their learning with an instantaneous outcome reducing student stress and making failure or withdrawal from the teaching unit less likely. It is already proving an effective way of empowering adult learners and enabled data-informed intervention strategies as part of a wider engagement strategy.
Mr Mike Franklin, Mr Stephen Grono, Ms Melissa Mitchell, Dr Simone Simpson, Mr Johl Sue
New students often enter medical training with narrow concepts of what constitutes ‘medicine’. The wider ideals of public health are commonly viewed as abstract or less relevant than clinical skills and given lower priority than subjects such as anatomy or surgery. Medical school curricula across Australia are struggling to incorporate all recommended knowledge areas, and it can be hard to argue for space for content which is perceived as less ‘clinical’. Within the Joint Medical Program (JMP), which operates between the Universities of New England and Newcastle, the core principles of public health and evidence based medicine (EBM) were taught as a compulsory unit in first year. However, during the recent development of the new MD program, it was decided to deliberate break this ‘silo’ approach and replace it with an interconnected model across all courses in order to better integrate these concepts and emphasise the importance of them within clinical practice. These changes, facilitated through a focus on the spiral teaching of key concepts reinforced over the years, have resulted in better engagement of students, which in turn assists them to gain a greater appreciation and understanding of public health and its role within the wider health system.
Dr Stuart Wark
The term ‘communities of practice’ has become a familiar part of the vocabulary of engagement in global Higher Education. However, the literature on the development and use of communities of practice suggests that evidence for their success in improving academic engagement may be ambiguous at best. This paper analyses the use of communities of practice in Higher Education in juxtaposition to another influential body of work on community engagement, the theorisation of commons and effective arrangements for management of common property resources. The application of Ostrom’s (1990, Governing the Commons) rules for common property resource management to the analysis of communities of practice provides new ways to understand their successes and failures in Higher Education. Following Ostrom, I argue that, ‘Instead of presuming that optimal institutional solutions can be designed easily and imposed at low cost by external authorities’, we should recognise that, ‘“getting the institutions right” is a difficult, time-consuming, conflict-invoking process.’ This paper examines what we must get right institutionally if we are to make effective use of communities of practice for academic engagement.
Professor Mike Wilmore
Student engagement is an important concept that has attracted attention over the past few decades. The level and the extent of student engagement is further heightened more lately in an online educational setting as many higher educational institutes started to complement on-campus delivery modes with an online mode of delivery and also to effectively combat COVID related unprecedented challenges. More and more higher educational institutes grapple with student engagement within the context of online offerings as reflected in high attrition and low retention scores. Therefore, it is vital for higher educational institutes to effectively address issues surrounding student engagement due to the correlated effect on student attrition, retention, progression, success and overall study experience. Educators experiment with teaching resources as an effective intervention to enhance student engagement. However, increasingly students attention span is less and students look forward to quick wins and engage with those resources that facilitate the transferability of knowledge in an easy manner. The unit coordinator experimented with the mini case studies in a postgraduate unit which encouraged problem-solving, critical thinking and logical argumentation abilities of students. The mini case studies presented a hypothetical problem and allowed students to learn a new concept on weekly basis. Student engaged with the content, with the peers and with the instructor and further reflected in increased students study skills and abilities, better comprehensibility of the unit content, integration of theoretical concepts to practice, enhanced grade point average scores and their overall study experience.
Associate Professor Sujana Adapa
Education… is an intrinsically worthwhile endeavour, in so far as it testifies to a love for the world and brings about the possibility of a transformation in our individual and collective lives, in the here and now.’ (Vlieghe & Zamojski 2019).
In an age of unlimited online and free content offering unsupported solo learning, I argue that students choose university learning because they wish to connect with others. From an existentialist perspective, engagement can be understood as enlarging our Being-in-the-World through our Being-with-Others (Heidegger 1962), in a shared ‘love for the world’ (Vlieghe & Zamojski 2019). An existentialist approach to engagement will (1) recognise each student as a unique Being-in-the-World; (2) recognise that the student is seeking to learn with others (Being-with-Others); and (3) seek to maximise the freedom-responsibility of each student with regard to their own learning journey. In a practical sense, engagement requires finding a point of connection – a ‘spark’ – that renders an excitement and a change in being: it brings the topic of learning into focus and clears space for personalised learning to occur. Such engagement will foster a feeling of ‘I am so glad I am here!’ / ‘I wouldn’t have wanted to miss out on this!’ / ‘I’ll never forget this moment’. In this paper I will discuss ways to foster such connection and forms of evidence we can look out for to prove that such connection has been established.
Heidegger, M., tr. Macquarrie, J., & Robinson, E. (1962). Being and Time. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Vlieghe, J., Zamojski, P. (2019). Towards an Ontology of Teaching . Contemporary Philosophies and Theories in Education, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi-org.ezproxy.une.edu.au/10.1007/978-3-030-16003-6_5
Dr Felicity Joseph
AGFN100 Fundamentals of Agriculture is a foundational unit taken by Undergraduate Certificate, Diploma and Bachelor students, as well as postgraduate students from non-agriculture disciplines. It is designed to be taken in the first trimester of study and aims to prepare students for study of science. This unit is unique to UNE where a need was identified through engagement with students, industry and teaching staff for this foundational unit. This presentation aims to demonstrate the engagement between a junior and senior academic with an iterative and collaborative learning design framework.
The three phases in curriculum development can be divided into design, implementation and improvement. By using an iterative approach the engagement with stakeholders where feedback is incorporated throughout the design and implementation phases, ensures the improvement is ongoing (Guru, 2017). The lecturers built the unit each week and asked for feedback from the students on additional skills and content they wished to learn. Both lecturers attended the weekly practical and tutorial, where they engaged not only with the students but each other. After each class the lecturers debriefed, adjusted the materials and created additional videos to support the students based on the questions asked in class. This inbuilt reflection allowed an iterative approach to be taken for each class leading to a unit that clearly achieved the learning outcomes.
Guru, A. (2017). Iterative Process for Developing and Implementing a Curriculum, University of Nebraska, https://unlcms.unl.edu/ianr/extension/4-h-youth-development/designlab21/iterative-process-developing-and-implementing-curriculum
Associate Professor Janelle Wilkes
Simultaneously, the notion of Student Engagement in Online Learning (SEOL) has continued to receive attention in the post-pandemic era. Although some studies associate SEOL with quality Teaching and Learning in the context of the ubiquitousness of online technologies, the ambiguity surrounding the perceived processes and outcomes of SEOL has not been without criticism. More importantly, studies exploring the viewpoint of academics in charge of fostering SEOL remain scarce. This study responds to this gap and draws on the interaction perspective (Moore, 1989; Hillman et al., 1994) to examine the rhetoric and reality of SEOL in four Australian universities. Following the Human Research Ethics Approval (Curtin University), 33 semi-structured interviews with academics were conducted between December 2021 and January 2022. Thematic analyses revealed three specific issues: a) the way SEOL is described and embedded at different policy tiers remains ambiguous, b) academics have divergent views regarding what constitutes effective SEOL and what is expected of them, and c) there are limited initial and continuing professional development opportunities to improve SEOL capabilities, especially for early-career academics. Based on these findings, the paper makes recommendations to potentially bridge the gap between rhetoric and the realities of SEOL.
Dr Subas Dhakal
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