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How online learning is enhancing personal needs

In an age of search engines, it is no longer the lecturer’s job to be a simple repository of facts. If a student wants to know something, they look it up.

Associate Professor Jaclyn Broadbent, Senior Lecturer and Associate Head of Deakin’s School of Psychology (Teaching and Learning), says it’s now the lecturer’s role to provide meaning and context for available information. Understanding how students learn – and want to learn – is essential to this process.

Assoc. Prof. Broadbent’s students benefit from constant technical refinements to Deakin’s Cloud Campus, which offers 24/7 connectivity from any device. And they also benefit from her unending efforts to understand their needs. She’s committed to providing innovative ways for them to interact with each other and develop both personally and professionally.

Achieving personalised experiences

When you’re studying online, personalisation is important.

Assoc. Prof. Broadbent’s strong commitment to supporting her online students stems partly from her own experience of learning via technology, which was was one of alienation. ‘I felt completely isolated and alone. None of my siblings had finished high school, and neither of my parents had gone to university. I didn’t know who to ask for help.’

She aims to be as approachable as possible for each of the 1500 students she manages over multiple locations. Her style is to use her own passion for the topic to inspire students to want to learn, ‘Helping them find ways that could be tied back to their own life and learning and experience,’ she says.

‘I wanted students to feel like they belonged to something, a little community or family that were all here to help them. A lot of what I do is trying to break down preconceptions that students have about who lecturers and academic staff are.’

Tackling a unique challenge

Australia’s university culture is unique, Assoc. Prof. Broadbent says, because of our large class sizes. ‘If you go to America, nobody deals with the number of students that we deal with in one unit.’

This means scaling cutting-edge pedagogy to work for 1500 people requires daring experimentation. ‘All my processes adapt and grow over the semester as I learn what’s working for them, and what’s working for me,’ Assoc. Prof. Broadbent explains.

‘I have a real passion for teaching so I go to a lot of seminars and workshops where people are presenting really innovative teaching practices, but when it comes down to it, those relate to having 30 students or 100 students in the room.’

She believes Deakin’s encouraging approach to innovation and flexibility in teaching is integral to keeping the Cloud Campus ‘human-friendly’.

‘You can’t spend all this time implementing new teaching practices without the support of your school and the university. Because it does take time; it does take thinking. Deakin always puts the student first, so as an employee you want to do that as well.’

'I wanted students to feel like they belonged to something, a little community or family that were all here to help them.'

Assoc. Prof. Jaclyn Broadbent,
School of Psychology, Deakin University

Making learning meaningful

Receiving feedback from lecturers is a key part of learning, and when studying online you’ll have access to a wealth of thorough and personalised feedback from your lecturers.

Assoc. Prof. Broadbent uses Deakin’s online learning environment to provide student feedback in ways that make a meaningful and positive impact on their work. She uses an iterative and collaborative process called ‘Feed Forward Feed Back’ that guides students through assignments. ‘It relates current work directly to upcoming work and how it needs to be approached,’ she explains.

As part of this process, Assoc. Prof. Broadbent completes the assignments herself, shows her working and applies the marking rubrics, while always asking, ‘What could be improved?’ She ensures students stay in constant communication with her throughout, allowing them to hone their knowledge and improve their work over the long term.

Embracing constant evolution and putting students in charge of how they learn are just some of the many ways that Assoc. Prof. Broadbent demonstrates that student experience is a top priority when you study online.

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Assoc. Prof. Jaclyn Broadbent
Assoc. Prof. Jaclyn Broadbent

Senior Lecturer and Associate Head of School (Teaching and Learning), School of Psychology, Deakin University

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