La Trobe

Out of sight, but not out of mind: a case study of the collaborative development of a university-wide orientation resource for online students

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posted on 2022-07-04, 05:46 authored by FJ Garivaldis, J Chung, L Braganza, L Arulkadacham, R Sharma, A Reupert, S McKenzie, G Rose, Timsy GuptaTimsy Gupta, Z Aziz, T Mowbray, D Ilic, M Mundy
The global online education sector has been rising rapidly, particularly during and after the events of 2020, and is becoming mainstream much sooner than expected. Despite this, research studies report higher levels of perceived isolation, difficulties with engagement, and higher attrition rates in online compared to equivalent on-campus programs. Reasons include restrictions to the type of institutional support accessible by online students, and the lack of comprehensiveness of orientation resources. This paper describes the collaborative efforts by a cross-faculty academic team, supported by a community of practice, to create a university-wide online orientation resource—the Monash Online Learning Hub (MOLH). The development of the MOLH involved multiple phases, including an analysis of current practice, resource design and content creation, formative evaluation by staff and students, and successful integration into the university’s mainstream student orientation platform for widescale implementation. The methods adopted were varied, and involved generating both qualitative and quantitative data across multiple phases of development from online education experts at the University, that culminated in the gradual building and refinement of the MOLH. Final outcomes, implications and lessons learned are also discussed in this paper.

Funding

Open Access funding enabled and organized by CAUL and its Member Institutions. The project was funded by Monash University. No other funding from other specific grants from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors were received.

History

Publication Date

2022-04-01

Journal

Educational Technology Research and Development

Volume

70

Issue

2

Pagination

(p. 531-558)

Publisher

Springer

ISSN

1042-1629

Rights Statement

© The Author(s) 2022. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Com-mons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativeco mmons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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