Engagement

Engaging Students Through Teaching and Learning Practices

Why is it important to integrate engagement principles into your teaching?

Incorporating engagement principles in higher education teaching and learning is crucial for several reasons:

Improved Learning Outcomes: Inviting students to actively participate can promote higher order learning. When students are actively engaged in their learning, they are more likely to retain information, apply it through experience to real-life settings, and develop greater conceptual awareness.
Promote Student Retention: when students are engaged in their learning, they are more likely to remain enrolled their program of study and complete their degree. This learner-centred approach to teaching contributes to a higher likelihood of graduates entering the workforce with the skills and knowledge they need to succeed.
Preparation for the Workforce: engagement principles can help students develop professional capabilities through the integration of knowledge and practice. These skills include critical thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration and are highly valued by employers.
Enhanced Student Satisfaction: active engagement provides students with opportunities to apply their knowledge in a meaningful way. This can increase satisfaction by providing students with a sense of accomplishment and empowerment.

Overall, engagement principles play a critical role in effective university teaching, contributing to enhanced learning experiences and better prepared graduates.

Specialists

Designing a Meaningful Student Experience

What does it mean to design a meaningful student experience?

A meaningful student experience is one that considers the learning objectives of the unit, coupled with the learning objectives of the week in question, and then decide upon the most effective way to support the learning of new materials, and provides resources that reinforce these fundamental understandings, whilst supporting the students to go beyond – building upon these and applying these in ways that are authentic and representative of how the skills or understanding would be used ‘in the real world(tm)’

Fundamentally, it’s about ensuring that everything the students are engaging with (in lectures, tutorials, online) is supporting their learning and has a direct application to both their learning and the work they would be expected to do as graduates in the workforce.

Being critical of the resources and the expected tasks or activities students are being ‘made’ to do is a vital first step in helping eliminate extraneous workloads and meaningless tasks.