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“I’m Not a Number, I’m Someone to Them”: Supporting Commencing University Students’ Through Technology-Mediated Personalised Communication

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5204/ssj.1623

Keywords:

commencing students, learning analytics, personalised feedback, online engagement

Abstract

As universities offer more flexible delivery options there are parallel concerns about increasing levels of engagement. Withdrawal and disconnection from study is most common during the first year of university as students experience social, cultural and financial adjustments and attempt to understand the nuances of academic learning. This article reports on the impact of a technology-enabled support system delivering timely, personalised and actionable feedback on online activity and support emails at critical periods in two courses. Learning analytics data was used to identify appropriate engagement metrics for personalising feedback to students with results indicating an improvement in course grades. While the learning analytics approach provides a technology-mediated means for scaling personalised feedback and communicating with large cohorts of learners, the qualitative results indicated that students felt they were noticed as individual learners, were more willing to contact educators for support, and more motivated to engage with the online course learning materials.

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Author Biographies

Sally Lewis, University of South Australia

Dr Sally Lewis is a Senior Lecturer in Communication and Media and Program Director at the University of South Australia. She is a former Director of Communication (Government) and Director of Marketing (Industry). Sally has been nationally recognised for her work in interdisciplinary student learning and has research interests in communication and student engagement. Her current projects include a report, book chapter and paper with colleagues from Curtin University, RMIT and UTS on interdisciplinary, project-based work-integrated learning.

Georgina Heath, University of South Australia

Dr Georgina Heath is a Psychology Lecturer and First Year Coordinator at the University of South Australia. Georgina currently coordinates a number of Psychology courses with a focus on personal and professional development. Georgina’s work as First Year Coordinator has involved implementing a study skills and resilience program for students transitioning into university. Georgina’s background is in shift work and health which was the topic of her PhD.

Lisa Lim, University of South Australia

Lisa-Angelique Lim is a PhD candidate with Education Futures at the University of South Australia. Lisa’s research lies at the intersection of learning analytics and student learning. Of particular interest is the impact of student-facing learning analytics reporting systems on students’ self-regulated learning processes and academic performance. Lisa is especially interested in how students interact with these socio-technical systems, to make decisions about their learning.

Rosie Roberts, University of South Australia

Dr Rosie Roberts is a Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of South Australia. Her research focuses on middling forms of transnational migration into and out of Australia. She has recently published a book titled ‘Ongoing mobility trajectories: lived experiences of global migration’ (Springer 2019), examining the ways migrants enact agency and negotiate risk under the spatial and temporal conditions of multi-stage and ongoing migration pathways. Her current collaborative projects include a co-edited book with Associate Professor Shanthi Robertson, which provides a critical exploration of middling transnationalism (contracted with Routledge, 2021) as well as a project exploring arts-based approaches of working with new arrivals from a refugee background, to support their resettlement in Australia. She has also worked on several government funded education projects, which focused on the transition of students from disadvantaged backgrounds to higher education.

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Published

2020-10-13

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How to Cite

Lewis, S., Heath, G., Lim, L., & Roberts, R. (2020). “I’m Not a Number, I’m Someone to Them”: Supporting Commencing University Students’ Through Technology-Mediated Personalised Communication. Student Success, 12(1), 24–34. https://doi.org/10.5204/ssj.1623

Issue

Vol. 12 No. 1 (2021): Volume 12 Issue 1 2021

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2020 Sally Lewis, Georgina Heath, Lisa Lim, Rosie Roberts

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Authors retain copyright and grant the Journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International Licence (CC BY 4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.