Associate Professor Lisa Jacka: Welcome everybody. Thank you for listening to us today. I have my good friend and colleague Dr. Lisa Ryan with me. What we’d like to focus on is the idea around students finding time for learning and why that seems to be such an issue for us all, including, I think, as academics, we also seem to be really pressed for time. It seems to be the thing that everybody talks about all the time: we don’t have time for the things that we know are important, but finding time for them can be very difficult. So Lisa, in your experience, what are you hearing from the students and how do you think it’s actually affecting their learning?

Dr. Lisa Ryan: I’m hearing lots of feedback and comments from students about how time-poor they actually are. Many of our students are working sometimes full-time jobs whilst also at the same time managing family and trying to study, you know, sometimes even full-time. So I actually have huge worries about the time intensity and demands on our students. And that is also, I hear also from the learning advisors that time management and using time effectively is the number one workshop that students are requesting when they’re reaching out for support to the learning advisors. So it’s obviously something that many students are struggling with.

Associate Professor Lisa Jacka: That’s really interesting that they’re obviously aware of that for them to be asking for support with that.

Dr. Lisa Ryan: Yeah. Well, a lot of them don’t actually realize that the learning team provides those workshops. So when I mention it to them, they’re like, “Oh, I was wanting something like that.” So, yeah.

Associate Professor Lisa Jacka: With our focus on asynchronous learning and particularly asynchronous learning online, I think one of the reasons we’ve been exploring this is for this very reason, because people are time-poor and it allows people to have more choice about their time when they’re doing things. What are some of the things that you think do work to help in this lack of time that we all have?

Dr. Lisa Ryan: I think probably being very thoughtful and strategic about how much time we expect our students to devote to their courses. And perhaps, you know, sometimes I think as course coordinators and lecturers, we often think that the more information that we provide students, the more that we’re giving them. But in actual fact, I think that it’s the opposite. The more that we provide, the more stressed that they become because they’ve got more things that they need to do. So I think we need to, ourselves as course designers and lecturers, be really thoughtful about the quality of the resources that we do include and being very, very thoughtful about only including the necessary, smallest kind of components available. So I think we ourselves can be much more thoughtful about being pragmatic and how students can actually work their way through the courses in suitable time increments.

Associate Professor Lisa Jacka: And do you have a trick for how you make that decision?

Dr. Lisa Ryan: Perhaps I think that getting your alignment right with your course outcomes and your assessment and making sure that your assessment is absolutely connected to your learning outcomes and that there’s really good cohesion between them and there’s no additional extraneous stuff. And I think that the more refined that we can be, the better. And perhaps that’s something that we just need to do every time we run a course, is go through and kind of look at the learning analytics and look and see what have students engaged with, what have they found useful, and then try and weed out the extraneous bits that students aren’t engaging with. Because if they can pass your course only having accessed a certain amount, then perhaps that’s probably all they might need to access to have that.

And I’m reminded too, in a previous life I was an environmental education interpretive consultant, and we always had this idea of, you know, you will have 70% of people are skaters, 20% of people are studiers. And so you need to provide just enough information for those skaters to get through, but then a little bit extra material for those studiers who actually want a little bit more. But it sits outside of the main part of the course so that it’s an additional extra rather than integrated or embedded in the course, so that you’re kind of providing the bare minimum plus a few little additional extras for people who want to continue down that pathway. So you’re kind of giving, again, a variety of different flexibility options that cater for different learning styles.

Associate Professor Lisa Jacka: And of course, when you’re talking about providing those materials, that kind of course content that’s sitting in an asynchronous space for them to work through at their own pace at any time, isn’t it?

Dr. Lisa Ryan: Yes, absolutely. And I think it’s really important that we understand that just because a student doesn’t contact you or that a student doesn’t write something in a forum doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re not actually reading and engaging with the material. It just might not be in a way that we think they should be, or they just might be a quiet engager, and that’s okay.

Associate Professor Lisa Jacka: Yeah. So our own perceptions of what students are doing is really important in this, isn’t it? It’s made me think, you know, I actually wonder if as lecturers or, you know, the people putting the content out there, that we’re sometimes a bit afraid that if we don’t include enough, we won’t look like we’ve done our job properly or that we won’t seem smart enough. And thinking a bit more about that, I wonder if the asynchronous spaces like the learning management systems that we’re using, whether they actually make us much more visible, you know, visible as content experts to other people who can see what we’ve put up there. In the past, you know, we’d turn up and give a lecture, it wasn’t recorded, only the people in the room would see it. But now, I’m thinking about how this changes our identity as academics in the whole experience.

Dr. Lisa Ryan: And I think too, when you think of the way that AI has developed so quickly that, you know, I kind of wonder, I mean, I know I myself do a lot of my own learning by asking questions of AI and having conversations with AI. I think that potentially students can have that whole additional realm of resource available to them to ask those kinds of questions. And that, you know, perhaps we need to be rethinking the content side of things and focusing more perhaps on the process side of things, because it’s about critically evaluating information and knowing what information is valid and reliable. That is probably more important than actually providing the content itself. So that’s probably something that we as university educators need to be a little bit more cognizant about.

Associate Professor Lisa Jacka: I think what we’re really getting at here is that asynchronous learning gives us this great opportunity to be smarter about how we design our courses. We can have less stuff but better stuff. Stuff that actually works for students, students who have really busy lives. And it’s kind of funny how asynchronous delivery, maybe it’s making us rethink what we’re doing as university lecturers. And maybe the trick is just accepting that our students are going to learn differently than what we expect and that that’s okay. So I guess the bottom line is that asynchronous learning isn’t just about flexibility for students. It’s also pushing us to be way more thoughtful about what we’re actually asking them to do with their limited time.