Shining a Light on the Online Student Experience

SESSION OVERVIEW

This interactive session is designed to illuminate the path for educators, academic leaders, and student support professionals, equipping them with the knowledge and strategies needed to create engaging and supportive online learning experiences for adult learners. By shedding light on data and evidence—such as co-design, surveys of over 2,000 prospective students,
benchmarking, and relevant literature—the session will show how Melbourne Online has developed and implemented effective online student experience principles, standards, and capabilities.

Session Outcomes

Through this session, participants will:

1. Explore the unique needs of adult online learners using data and evidence.
2. Analyze how the principles of self-regulated learning and self-determination theory can inform a versatile online student experience strategy adaptable to any discipline.
3. Feel more confident developing practical approaches to enhance online student engagement, retention, and success in an online environment at their
institution.

PRESENTER

Dr Dawn Gilmore, Associate Professor, Academic Product and Student Experience – Dawn’s passion for online learning is widely recognised by her peers and colleagues, as President of the Open Distance Learning Association of Australia (ODLAA), through her keynote addresses on topics including online learning, artificial intelligence, and future educational trends at events held in Australia and internationally, and through her benchmarking exercises in online student retention, learning design, and teaching, and academic quality standards for multiple Australian institutions. In the last 18 months, Dawn led a global community of practice made up of scholars working with Online Program Managers to co-edit a book on the topic.

Dawn’s experience extends beyond her research into practice, most recently starting and scaling online learning and academic quality at RMIT, with previous roles at UoM, ANU, Monash and Swinburne. Her extensive experience and leadership in this space positions her to bring the best of online learning to Melbourne Online’s student experience strategy and how this is enabled through course and experience design. Dawn leads on academic product development with faculties, leveraging learning analytics for decision making and innovation, and ensuring academic quality across the end-to-end student experience .