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Offering Solutions to Student Disengagement

This week I was asked to engage with Human-Centered design thinking. I collaborated with Kallista, a peer of mine, to develop ideas to improve the first year Professional Communication experience at RMIT. This article is a recap of the process I went through developing the ideas and some of my thoughts after letting them digest for a few days.

Human-Centered Design

Human-Centered design is a process whereby design starts from understanding the problems of people before other considerations. Theoretically it helps develop more empathetic solutions to problems that people actually need, instead of just adding more noise and junk to the world. However, Human-Centered design also has its critics, and definitely can’t solve everything by itself.

Discovery

The first step was to ask Kallista questions about her experiences as a first year Professional Communications (Prof Comm) student, and the first discovery was that while that’s the case, she was actually a Media & Communications (Media) student for three semesters prior to this. I learned about her flexibility when moving credits and why she decided to move, which helped with informing the rest of the process. I also shared my own experiences in my first year. I talked about my positive experience in General News Reporting last semester, and how the tutor made me feel engaged in the process.

Some early insights included:
– Classes and Courses were more engaging when there was a sense of connection to teachers and industry.
– Prospects of future employability weighed on both Kallista and myself.
– Media’s learning structure felt diffuse and Kallista preferred Prof Comm’s relatively linear approach.
– A lot of material in Media were concepts learned in Kallista’s final year of high school which made it even less engaging.
– Lectures, while very interesting, were low in the priority list of things to attend and value because there was a sense that all of the value could be obtained elsewhere.

There are some things that are a certain way to benefit a broad number of students. First year study will always be designed in a way that covers material already explored by eager students so that it can get everyone up to speed.

Insights

While exploring both of our radically different first years, Kallista and I came up with a few key insights about what we value and what we wish we had as first year Prof Comm students.

Feeling a connection to future industry matters: working with tools of industry, or being given the sense that what we’re creating matters beyond the classroom was something we both valued.
Following from that, Opportunities matter: it’s hard to measure because no one knows where we’ll be in three years, but the feeling that our studies will leader to opportunities in employment or elsewhere eases some anxiety that comes with committing to higher education.
Lectures need to be irreplaceable: simply put, in some cases lectures can feel optional for some students. There is a sense that the material is covered again in tutorials/workshops, or that the students can learn it more efficiently at home by themselves.
Flexibility is appreciated: flexibility between streams (Media → Prof Comm, etc.) and credit transferring is great. Flexibility in what we topics we cover in assessment work is also greatly appreciated as we’re more fired up to work on things we can attach passions to.

The Problem Statement

As a first year Professional Communications student at RMIT, Kallista needs to feel that the skills she develops are relevant to future industry work. She often felt that lectures in previous pathways were superfluous. Since lectures make up at least ⅓ (sometimes more) contact hours at RMIT, more could be done to convey the value of lectures.

Radical Ideas

Many of these ideas were developed as a process of throwing everything at the wall. I can’t imagine most would work, but for the sake of transparency and to understand the process of just having ideas I want to include all of them as they were, in order that we noted them down.

Idea 1: Move away from a lecture format entirely.
Rather than in-person lectures, structure contact hours around practical activities. Tutor-led tutorials would remain unchanged but all courses would also have Student-led workshops with tutor supervision. The number of contact hours would go up.

Idea 2: Year 1 internships.
Introducing students to industry connections early on. When workshopping this idea there was a big emphasis on having a breadth of organisations available so that students would feel they could connect to some industry related to their studies.

Idea 3: Smaller classrooms.
Simply have fewer students to enable more one-on-one contact between students and teachers. A stronger personal connection would make students feel more engaged with course.

Idea 4: Monetary Incentives.
(Look I said we were throwing ideas at the wall!) $5 gift card for showing up to a lecture, and another $10 if you make it to the end and feel your time was wasted.

Idea 5: Shorter Everything.
Shorter lectures and shorter tutorials. Fewer contact hours and more independence expected from students.

Idea 6: Lecture and Tutorials Interlinked.
Always timetable tutorials to be right after lectures. Engage in the material as soon as it’s been taught and guarantee that no student has a lecture timetabled on a day they otherwise have no obligations.

What do you think? Anything good in there? Well, we then took these ideas and spoke with another pair of students to see what they thought.

Feedback

The process of going through all the ideas was a bit rushed so we weren’t able to get feedback on everything, however there were thumbs up on the lecture-less format (idea 1) and quite a lot of enthusiasm about industry connections (idea 2). There was a good laugh out of cash-on-entry (idea 4).

Rumination

After receiving feedback we decided to look at our three best performers and decide which would be the most feasible and meet the needs of the problem statement the most. In the end we felt Idea 2 could be developed further.

As a pair, Kallista and I looked at how to expand our idea. Simply replacing lectures with guest speakers was out of the question since earlier this week our lecturer, Dr. Ella Chorazy, informed the lecture theatre that the last time they did it, only a handful of students attended. Still wanting to meet the condition of having a breadth of connections, we looked at a hybrid approach.

The Result of 45 Minutes: 12-12-12

12 weeks. 12 lectures. 12 guest slots.
In a three hour lecture like Professional Communication Foundations, one hour would be dedicated to a guest lecturer who would be selected to discuss how they use the week’s main topic to engage their own work. Each lecture would end with an opportunity for students to approach and converse with the guest to make potential industry connections.

It’s not foolproof. Guests are costly, students may see less value in a lecture split into parts, and in a class of over 100 students, 12 organisation representatives is still likely to leave some people disengaged. Later weeks also offer fewer opportunities for meaningful connections within the semester.

The Value

I don’t think the 12-12-12 solution needs to be implemented. I’m not even sure it would improve my class experience if it was. But the process of working with Kallista was valuable for its own sake. I never expected that the end process of this exercise would be to invite corporate interests into the bright, untouched souls of first-year students, and yet that’s where I ended up.

Jose Miguel Sokoloff, a man I wrote about earlier this year, produced another interesting video during the height of covid. He wrote about the value of “thinking inside the box“. I think I tend to agree with him. Thinking outside the box is overrated. Working within limitations and recognising that solutions can’t just sidestep them, and still trying to find a way to the goal anyway… it’s far more interesting and achievable than ignoring the current factors of the world and working as if they don’t exist.