Comment by Professor Shelley Kinash, Executive Principal, Student Experience (Interim)

Retention is a major focus for universities. After students have commenced their degrees (whether UG or PG, on-campus or online or mixed modes), how do we support them to stay through to graduation?

One key way is to strategically manage supports where they are going to make the most difference to students. Each student is metaphorically the pilot of their own airplane and thus journey. They are not flying/studying 24/7. They go home to their families, have to pay bills and manage overall life. Many of our students are working while studying. This limits what they can reasonably attend to on their flight radars.

Within the airline industry, technological advancement has enabled exploration of the concept of Free Flight. This means that instead of having air traffic controllers, pilots use technology to manage their own flight. Today’s students are the metaphoric equivalent of free-flight pilots. There are a lot of factors, people and roles which must come-together to get the airplane in the air and safely to its destination.

However, while in flight, pilots must necessarily keep their senses and cognitive awareness tuned to the open skies ahead and on responding to control panel readings. Likewise, students need to pay attention to those who are directly teaching them and what they need to do for graded assessment. For pilots to do their jobs, the mechanics, booking agents, flight attendants and luggage handlers matter, but are not the key elements on the radar during the flight. Likewise, in universities, the example roles outside the students’ immediate locus of awareness are senior executives, student engagement officers, finance officers and academic developers.

In higher education, design-based research and day-to-day observations of students and their ways of operating (flying) confirm that the primary ways to engage students (and thus support them to remain with their studies) are through the educators in direct contact with the students through their Units and where possible through their graded assessment. See, for example, Kift (2009),  Jorre de St Jorre & Oliver (2018) and Wormald et al. (2009).

Professor Brenda Wolodko, Associate Dean Teaching & Learning (HASSE) explains,

“Our academics are often the face of UNE, especially for our online students. They are consistently the most likely to develop connections and relationships with students and can have a significant impact on retention and on the students’ perspectives on their experiences at UNE. As a result, effective lecturer communication to students is critical.”

HASSE has taken this free-flight pilot perspective on students beyond a principle to an action plan, and the solution is working – including on retention.

Here is a short video explaining what HASSE did to support students as free-flight pilots.

https://vimeo.com/578325471/1f854fc18f

The proposed action from this article is to scale-up HASSE’s intervention.

The challenge to each of us is – to streamline and focus communication so that our students can and do hear us. Let’s follow HASSE’s lead and find ways which are bespoke and effective in our other disciplines and contexts.