Empowering Online Education with Behavioural Science Principles

Brianna Le Busque, PhD., Lecturer STEM (Environmental Sciences), University of South Australia.

Brianna holds a PhD in Psychology and has been teaching in the higher education sector for seven years. Across these years Brianna has taught psychology, health, and science courses, both online and face-to-face. She has also developed course content for a number of universities. She now works full time in STEM, where she continues to teach undergraduate courses, and supervise honours and postgraduate students, while also conducting and publishing research. Having worked in industry roles in market research and behavioural science, Brianna brings a deep understanding of human behaviour to her teaching.

Learning and behaviour are the two interdependent components in the education sector. As this industry embraces different digital transformations, inculcating behavioural science principals in students turns necessary. Brianna Le Busque highlights the initiatives and strives to impact learning models with technology-driven behavioural reforms.   

Behavioural science principles in learning environments

It is no secret that the demand for online education at the tertiary level is growing and becoming more accessible to a diverse cohort of students. Along with this, comes challenges to engage and empower students to successfully complete courses in an 100% digital landscape. I have an undergraduate and PhD in Psychology, and before returning to teach in higher education, I worked in behavioural science. Here, I witnessed psychological behaviour change principles come to life and change human behaviour.  Used successfully in many consulting and marketing applications, it was evident that behavioural science principles can also be implemented by educators- after all, our students are people, and learning is a behaviour. Since returning to the education sector full-time, I have had the privilege of coordinating numerous courses with upwards of 300 students. Through this experience, I have experimented with incorporating different, simple, behavioral science principles into my courses.

Personalisation

Being a scientist and academic, I do not miss an opportunity to analyse data that are particularly insightful in the education space for student evaluations during courses and teaching. The first few times I taught a course with a large cohort of students, a predominant theme within the student feedback was a lack of personalisation, or students feeling like they were just a ‘number’. From a behavioral science perspective, we know that when people hear their name, a spike in attention is produced- it's why we are more likely to open a marketing letter addressed to us, rather than to “occupants of the residence”. Therefore, using students’ names is very important, and while it seems obvious, in large cohorts, this simple personalisation can be overlooked. Where possible, I use student’s names in emails, responses to activities and written assessment feedback.

Respect the limits of working memory

People are only able to hold a limited amount of information in their short-term memory, often overloaded by lengthy paragraphs. Clearly, it is easier to ignore emails that entail scrolling through prolonged text. As educators, we often need to provide students with heavy learning content that we can choose how to structure. Information should be chunked and presented as short paragraphs under appropriate headings, or as easy-to-follow dot points. In an educational context, a summary of information could be presented in points, and then a longer form (a journal article) could be provided as a link for students that are interested in reading more about the topic. Assessment instructions should also be grouped into short paragraphs and the key information in bold.  

“Used successfully in many consulting and marketing applications, it was evident that behavioural science principles can also be implemented by educators- after all, our students are people, and learning is a behaviour,” 

Set the agenda A

Looking again at my student evaluations, another common theme was unawareness among students on weekly expectations, especially given that online education is often more self-driven than face-to-face studying. Like respecting the limits of working memory, it is useful to provide a clear overview of what the students should expect in the weekly content in the classroom. This should be in the format of either dot points or numbered list, that provides an overview of the activities, learnings and outcomes the students are subscribed to. Essentially this removes any element of surprise and alleviates confusion.  

Commitment

A simple and effective behavioral science principle is commitment, which is a key tool in the renowned community-based social marketing framing and has been used in countless behavior change projects. People are more likely to portray a behaviour if they have committed to it- either verbally or through writing. This is why you are more likely to get up and go to the gym if you tell your partner that and go there in the morning. Finding a way to make students commit to studying, revising and completing an assessment increases the chance that they will do it.

There are forums, where I ask students to write down their academic schedule for the exam set to start in an upcoming week. As myself and their peers can see their commitments on these forums, they are more likely to do it and more likely to be prepared for the exam or assessment.

By including these simple behavioural change strategies in my online courses, I have seen students engage in content more successfully, and report feeling more empowered during their studies. Moving ahead, I am always thinking about other simple behavioural science strategies that I can implement in future courses.

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