Researcher’s Chat
Episode 1. When Assessment Drives Everything: The Hidden Force Shaping Online Learning
What happens when students stop exploring and start strategically surviving? In this episode, we uncover a striking shift in how students navigate asynchronous online learning. Where assessment requirements have become the invisible hand guiding nearly every click, download, and question.
Gone are the days when students would dive deep into course content for its own sake. Today’s reality? Students zero in on assessment materials like heat-seeking missiles, often bypassing rich learning resources that don’t directly connect to their grades. Their questions reveal the pattern: they’re not just studying differently, they’re studying selectively.
We dig into the perfect storm behind this transformation: students arrive at university already trained in strategic test-taking, while simultaneously juggling jobs, families, and mounting responsibilities that leave little room for intellectual wandering. It’s not laziness, it’s survival mode in an overstretched world.
But here’s where it gets interesting: asynchronous learning might hold the key to breaking this cycle. We explore innovative approaches that work with, not against, student reality, from transforming dense readings into digestible podcasts to creating flexible engagement pathways that honour both diverse learning styles and packed schedules.
Join us as we challenge conventional wisdom about student engagement and discover how online learning could actually reconnect assessment with genuine curiosity.
Researcher's Chat - Episode 1
Read the Transcript - Episode 1
Associate Professor Lisa Jacka: Hello and welcome everybody. I have my good friend and colleague Dr. Lisa Ryan with me, and we’re talking about what we might call assessment-driven learning. So Lisa, tell us what you’ve been seeing in your courses and just a little bit about why you think it has been happening.
Dr. Lisa Ryan: I’m seeing in my courses the evidence for students focusing on assessment. When I look at the forums and you get questions about the assessment, and it’s quite evident that students have not engaged with the relevant modules. So they’ll ask a question that has very clearly been, you know, articulated or discussed or elaborated on in, you know, a particular module, and everything is there that they need to refer to, directions, etc. And then they’ll still ask a question, and it’s very clear that they haven’t actually engaged with the material at all. And so you’re getting these questions that just show that students aren’t engaging with the material. And of course, I suppose when you respond to that, I just keep referring people back and saying, “Well, that’s covered in module three. If you have a look at da da da da da.”
The other time that I have seen this, or evidence for this as well, is actually on a research project that I’m currently looking at. We’ve been asking students about the ways that they are studying and how they’re doing their internship. And probably, oh, I think it was like 70% of the students that we surveyed indicated that the only type of engagement that they had with their courses was just doing the assignment. That was actually the way that they were doing their work.
And I know that, you know, all of our students are busy. I think in particular, our particular university has, you know, many students who come who are first in family, they come from low socioeconomic backgrounds. For many of them, they’re all having to work and study, and they’re often managing families all at the same time. So I think that the combination of that pressure and time constraint really compounds to affect our students perhaps a little bit more so than some, you know, some of the other students from the bigger universities.
Associate Professor Lisa Jacka: Thanks, Lisa. I have one question. What do you think we can do? Like how can async, if we come back to the asynchronous, how can asynchronous help us with this problem that we’re seeing of students focusing on assessment and potentially not actually even dipping into that lovely content that we’ve created and put there on our study desks?
Dr. Lisa Ryan: I think that async opportunities provide students with flexibility to be able to engage with course content at a time that suits them and in a way that suits them and that best matches their learning styles. So I think that perhaps paying attention to providing a range of different opportunities and a range of different ways to engage with learning materials. So for example, in one of my courses, I provide the readings, you know, I use a podcast technique to sort of convert the readings to a podcast, and students are telling me they’re really enjoying that because they can listen to the podcast while they’re driving or doing the washing up or whatever else that they can be doing. So I think providing that flexibility is really important for students.
Associate Professor Lisa Jacka: I agree, Lisa. You know, the reality is that our students are busy. They’ve got work, families, study, everything happening at once. So of course, they’re going to be strategic about where they spend their time. So instead of fighting this assessment-driven approach, maybe we need to work with it. So the key is designing our asynchronous courses so that students can’t actually succeed on the assessments without engaging with the important stuff that we want them to learn. And by offering flexible formats like podcasts, as you’ve talked about, and making our content genuinely useful for their assignments, we can meet students where they are while still achieving our educational goals. It is possible.
