
Jill LawrenceUniversity of Southern Queensland · School of Arts and Communication
Jill Lawrence
BA, Dip ED, Grad Dip Ed Admin, PhD
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52
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Education
April 1998 - April 2005
February 1984 - November 1984
February 1980 - November 1983
Publications
Publications (52)
The Australian Universities Accord’s (Department of Education, 2024) focus on expanding underrepresented groups’ access to higher education underscores an on-campus-online paradigm shift, or post-pandemic digital transformation, to address students’ flexibility and accessibility needs. The shift identifies that online student engagement, and studen...
This paper reports on research that extends knowledge about higher education students’ perceptions of online engagement. In particular, the study aimed to identify what students thought engagement was and how they experienced it. Understanding students’ views about online engagement will provide a more comprehensive understanding of the topic and s...
Student engagement is recognised as being a critical factor linked to student success and learning outcomes. The same holds true for online learning and engagement in higher education, where the appetite for this mode of learning has escalated worldwide over several decades, and as a result of COVID 19. At the same time teachers in higher education...
Driven by the increased availability of Learning Management System data, this study explored its value and sought understanding of student behaviour through the information contained in activity level log data. Specifically, this study examined analytics data to understand students’ engagement with online videos. Learning analytics data from the Mo...
Combining nudge theory with learning analytics, ‘nudge analytics’, is a relatively recent phenomenon in the educational context. Used, for example, to address such issues as concerns with student (dis)engagement, nudging students to take certain action or to change a behaviour towards active learning, can make a difference. However, knowing who to...
Student engagement is consistently identified as a key predictor of learner outcomes within the online learning environment. However, there is limited guidance about using proactive strategies to improve engagement for low and non-engaged students: for example by specifically employing course learning analytics (CLA) and nudging strategies in cours...
This article explores the concept of an agile ecology for learning and its potential in leveraging creativity to engage students. Creativity is both seen as something that students bring with them from different part of their lives, across different formal and informal learning environments, but it is also seen as something that can be encouraged a...
Universities increasingly implement online delivery to strengthen students’ access and flexibility. However, they often do so with limited understanding of the impact of online pedagogy on student engagement. To explore these issues, a research project was conducted investigating the use of course-specific learning analytics to ‘nudge’ students int...
Stakeholder ownership and implementation are crucial when applying the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) to the development of curriculum. Threshold Learning Outcomes (TLOs) are a case in point. While they might seem to be triumphs of managerialism over pedagogy, we argue that they can be used to build lecturers’ deep engagement with the...
This emerging initiative stemmed from an Office for Learning and Teaching Project (OLT) project, Transforming Practice Programme 2016: Student Engagement: Students as Partners in Teaching and Learning. The initiative, trialed in semester two, 2016, involved the selection and training of two experienced students to be leaders of a Closed Facebook ‘s...
Many countries are now specifying standards for graduates in different disciplines, including sociology. In Australia, the Australian Sociological Association (TASA) has developed Threshold Learning Outcomes (TLOs) for sociology to provide the learning outcomes that students graduating with a bachelor’s degree in sociology should achieve. These TLO...
The intersections between disciplinary knowledge, Threshold Learning Outcomes (TLOs) and first year pedagogy principles remain largely unexplored in the Australian context. This paper reviews how these perspectives developed, their implications for quality assurance and the ways they can be integrated to facilitate students' learning. The paper int...
Two interrelated myths arise from the way practitioners in higher education respond to an increased emphasis on technological delivery. One myth stems from the view that tertiary education students are digital natives who have universal and uniform digital experiences. This myth presumes that the technological experiences of these students are homo...
This chapter examines empirical data to address the rhetoric of the digital native as a competent and
digitally literate learner. The chapter also questions the reality of the notion that a digital delivery
platform is easy to navigate and facilitates positive learning experiences. Data from surveys of students
studying both on-campus and via di...
The context for this project was the Threshold Learning Outcomes (TLOs) that were developed for the Humanities and Social Science disciplines initially through an Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) project. We wanted to identify, understand, refine and be able to advocate for teaching and assessment strategies that would set first year...
Higher education globally is operating in a highly volatile context, a consequence of the rapid globalisation and intense technological change characteristic of the early 21st century. These forces challenge assumptions about work, productivity, and international demand for knowledge, skills and resources, igniting needs for highly competent and ed...
This chapter will explain the SALT fellowship project. It will outline how the project was conducted, including how the SALT platform was developed and piloted. The chapter will augment understandings already developed about the efficacy of two of the five pedagogical principles: Engagement and Scholarship.
In 2005, the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) announced its vision to be Australia's leading transnational university. With the term 'transnational' open to interpretation, the incumbent Pro Vice-Chancellor (Regional Engagement and Social Justice) initiated a project team to define a transnational pedagogy for USQ. The transnational project...
Chapter Four documents the qualitative results obtained from the student survey. The qualitative component of the survey included 15 questions asking students to specifically identify courses that had contributed to their understanding of each of the five principles–Sustainability, Engagement, Scholarship, Flexibility, and Contextual Learning–and t...
This chapter is the third of three chapters analysing student perceptions collected in the Best Practice Learning and Teaching Survey (see Chapters Three and Four). It specifically investigates the Contextual Learning principle. Contextual Learning, according to the transnational project (TP) team, refers to the importance of recognising and valuin...
Chapter Six provides both the quantitative and qualitative results staff results from the Best Practice in Learning and Teaching (BPLT) research project for academic staff. In the quantitative section of the survey, academics were asked to provide their ratings on all five teaching principles in terms of importance in teaching, frequency of use, an...
This chapter considers key theoretical perspectives underpinning the journey: Transnational education, best practice learning and teaching, and institutional pedagogy. USQ initially prioritised transnational education as its institutional vision in 2005, but by 2007, notions of flexibility and sustainability had taken its place. Transnational educa...
In this chapter, we specifically interpret academics’ understandings of two key principles, Sustainability and Flexibility. Academics’ responses to the staff survey (Chapter Four) and focus group data from a sample of on-campus international academics (see Chapter Seven) were used to inform the current analysis of these two principles. The chapter...
This chapter provides a theoretical review of the concepts embedded in each of the five principles. The review examines the understandings that the TP team had attributed to the principles. The chapter also explores how these theoretical perspectives informed the research team in developing an online survey to measure student and staff perceptions...
This paper describes the processes of development of an online educational tool to facilitate equity and access for the diversity of students entering the largely digital context that is higher education today. The Associate Deans (Learning and Teaching) across the five faculties at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) responded to the issue...
Associate deans (Learning and Teaching) face a number of challenges in successfully retaining and progressing students in their faculties. The first challenge involves identifying strategies to assist students to actively engage with their studies. This challenge escalates if the primary mode of delivery involves distance learning. The second chall...
This paper aims to explore the factors that impact on rural and remote students’ participation in higher education at university. The findings indicated that the students were familiar only with university scholarships, tertiary preparation program, and head start. Before admission, most students required information on pathways to university, admi...
Discussions at monthly meetings of the Learning Technology Mentors CoP enabled informal evaluation across the life of the project.
In mid-2010 simple open ended questionnaires were circulated to mentors and selected staff members with whom mentors had been working to evaluate progress to that point. Responses indicated that the mentor positions had...
For international teachers the experience of ‘crossing over’ and moving from one higher education context to another for employment can be confronting. Not only does this transition often involve a physical location change but as part of a growing borderless workforce many international academic staff still need to cross borders in terms of having...
Numeracy is a key attribute in nursing. At USQ, a large regional university in Australia, numeracy has been embedded in a course in the first semester nursing program. This chapter identifies the numeracy needs of these nursing students and outlines the model of learning improvement, based on that of Keimig, chosen to target the students" learning...
This paper will describe the characteristics of an academic numeracy component of two new courses designed to build the academic attributes student nurses need to succeed at university and in the nursing profession. It will also report on a project designed to evaluate and improve these courses. This project had a collective case-study design, incl...
Internationalisation of higher education embodies a pedagogy that is expected to have a grounding in scholarship, in both domestic and overseas environments. The pedagogy has to incorporate a scholarship that includes knowledge about teaching and learning underpinned by the subject discipline and interdisciplinary awareness and relevance to the sub...
There is considerable interest in how students study and what skills best facilitate their academic performance. This paper reports on some of the key outcomes of a large individual differences study of student learning profiles at a regional Australian university. It examines how students’ conceptions of knowledge, approaches to learning, and pers...
This paper documents the relationships between pedagogy and e‐assessment in two nursing courses offered at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. The courses are designed to build the academic, numeracy and technological attributes student nurses need if they are to succeed at the university and in the nursing profession. The paper first...
In 2005, the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) declared its vision to be
Australia’s leading transnational educator. To define and develop USQ’s
‘transnational pedagogy’, the then Pro Vice-Chancellor (Regional Engagement and
Social Justice) initiated a consultative project team from across the university
community, consisting of Excellence in...
Each year universities deal with large numbers of students who have unsatisfactory academic performance or who are asked to “Show Cause” why they should not be forcibly excluded. Although student and learning support sections of universities can assist students on an individual or group basis, most students are usually left to their own devices as...
Higher education is becoming increasingly pre-occupied by issues relating to student attrition and retention. There are active debates about the reasons for attrition and the effectiveness of retention models and strategies. These debates are largely expressed through political and empirical perspectives but lack theoretical perspectives capable of...
Th is paper introduces new ways of thinking about diversity in higher education. Th e Abstract: Th is paper introduces new ways of thinking about diversity in higher education. Th e Abstract 'defi cit-discourse shift' challenges the defi cit approaches that perceive the increasing diversity of the student body as a problem, or defi cit. Th e shift...
From the moment they participate in higher education nursing students undergo a number of transitions which are critical in terms of their capabilities to persevere at university. Their first year experience includes the processes of becoming familiar with, mastering and demonstrating mainstream university literacies. These include academic literac...
Higher education is increasingly pre-occupied with issues relating to student engagement. While a growing body of literature links student engagement with university transition and retention, other strands reveal students' growing disengagement with university culture. The issues are largely expressed through political and empirical debates but lac...
Power is framed within systems of influence and, in higher education, one field of influence potentially lies in the discourses cultivated and disseminated within a Community of Practice (CoP). Communities of practice provide contexts for sustained professional conversations around identified domain and practice issues. These are particularly perti...
This paper reports on a two year pilot project facilitating the professional development of teachers of first year courses through a community of practice. Community members reflect and co-construct initiatives to enhance the learning experiences of their students. They also develop strategies to meet individual, institutional and societal demands...