Setting students up for success

For many students, starting a university degree can be a daunting experience. In the process of adjusting to a new lifestyle and a new way of learning, some struggle to find a rhythm, leaving them disengaged from the many opportunities university has to offer. 

With this problem in mind, a group of academics from ACU’s Centre for Education and Innovation (CEI) set themselves a goal of understanding the experiences of commencing students. Using insights gained from more than 10,000 participants in the university’s Student Evaluation of Learning and Teaching (SELT) surveys, and research on the most up-to-date teaching methods, the academics developed ACU Thrive, a first-year success model designed to aid students in the early stages of their degree.  

The Centre’s Director, Professor Anthony Whitty, and ACU Thrive project lead, Dr John Mahoney, led more than 80 academic staff, learning designers and academic skills advisors to bring the model to life, employing a student-centred and evidence-based approach to develop high-quality learning experiences.

“We wanted to be a university that listens to its students,” says Dr Mahoney, a psychologist who also serves as the academic lead for INSPIRE, the open-source knowledge-translation project that informs the ACU Thrive model.  

“If we think about the most vulnerable group in our university, it’s our first-year students. They’re the ones most likely to succumb to academic stress, which can lead to a whole bounty of emotional and physical upheavals. As academics, we want to think really deeply about how we can be of service to that group, doing all we can to support them and set them up for success.”

In reviewing student feedback from the SELT surveys, CEI researchers discovered a common theme: Despite its uniqueness, ACU did not have a well-defined ‘promise’ that clearly told new and prospective students what to expect at the beginning of their higher education journey. 

“Students know that the academic staff at our university are passionate about producing high-quality learning experiences, but that only tends to happen after they’ve been studying at ACU for some time,” says Dr Mahoney, who also teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses with ACU’s School of Behavioural and Health Sciences. 

“We wanted to put that promise upfront so that it’s there at the very beginning of the student journey, and in designing that promise, we wanted to be sure we could articulate something that was rigorous, practical and concrete.” 

Moving the dial

While the primary focus of ACU Thrive is to ensure that new students experience a smooth transition into university, it also has an eye fixed firmly on their long-term success. It does this by offering a mix of independent and collaborative learning opportunities, with a focus on course content delivered in an engaging way, and extra support from teaching staff.

The model is based on a flipped classroom design where the traditional learning environment is reversed, giving students access to learning content online to prepare for class in advance. This allows students to become familiar with new content at their own pace and in their own time, leaving classes for interactive learning activities and collaborative discussions with peers. 

“What students have been telling us for a while now, especially post-COVID, is that they want high-quality learning content that is flexible, so they can access it anytime and in a number of different environments, and the content can be adapted and improved as their learning needs change,” says Professor Whitty, who along with his directorship at CEI has also held leadership positions in ACU’s Faculty of Health Sciences.

“A flipped classroom is not new – it’s a method that has been around for decades. The thing that is novel about ACU Thrive is that we are doing this at an institutional level, so that academic staff are actually growing and developing new teaching skills that improve the learning experience for our students, so we are purposefully and explicitly moving the dial together. I think that’s incredibly exciting.”

In the first semester of 2023, the model was piloted in more than a dozen first-year units across a suite of courses. Early findings show it is already having a positive effect on the student experience, with student retention in ACU Thrive courses more than three per cent above the expected rate, bucking the downward trend of the pandemic years. 

Just as importantly, the feedback from students has been resoundingly positive. 

“Students have talked about the quality of the online learning being really high, and they’ve talked about the feeling of being held accountable in an empowering way in the online space,” Dr Mahoney says. “Then when they come onto campus for the other side of the flip, they’re having much deeper conversations and engaging with the content in a much more meaningful way.”  

He adds that increased diversity amongst first-year cohorts has highlighted the importance of providing comprehensive support to students.

“We’ve got mature-age students, single parents, elite athletes, neurodiverse students, students with mental health difficulties, and students who are unwell or are in hospital, and that means we need our learning environment to be flexible and adaptable, allowing students the space to catch up if they fall behind, while also providing them all with the support they need.”

Tailored learning

ACU Thrive couldn’t have come at a better time for Charlotte Evans, a third-year student at the North Sydney Campus. 

After making the decision to change from the nursing and paramedicine double-degree to focus solely on nursing, she was concerned about the transition and the challenges that could arise.

As an individual with ADHD, Charlotte faces unique difficulties with absorbing information from lengthy lectures. 

“The traditional format of hour-long lectures often leaves me feeling overwhelmed and unable to fully grasp the content,” says Charlotte, who currently serves as President of ACU’s National Student Association.

Thankfully, she found the material in her ACU Thrive units easy to navigate, due in part to the model’s recognition of the need to accommodate different learning styles. 

“ACU Thrive has been a game-changer in my academic journey, [and] a transformative and enriching experience for me as a third-year nursing student,” she says. 

“It made the catch-up first-year units I have had to complete a lot easier than how it was in my first year. Its user-friendly interface, tailored learning activities and consideration for diverse learning styles have made it a standout unit for me.”

By moving beyond traditional lectures and incorporating interactive components, Charlotte says the Thrive model provides students with hands-on opportunities to apply the knowledge gained, fostering a deeper understanding of the subject matter. 

“This creates an inclusive learning environment,” she says, “where students can actively engage with the material in ways that resonate with them personally.”

As for the chief architects of ACU Thrive, they hope to see the model go from strength to strength in the coming year, as it is rolled out in a range of courses and first-year units.

“The model is really about bringing the perspectives of students and academics together, tapping into their individual and group thoughts, their mentalities, self-identity and all those different things, and moving together in a space that allows for human flourishing,” says Professor Anthony Whitty. 

“It’s about bringing back to life an on-campus university experience where students see the value of being part of a community where their learning is supported, and where teaching staff have the skills and the confidence to work in this new era of higher education and feel as though they own the model itself. That would be brilliant.”

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