Tag: belonging

Award! CIC and faculties co-design personalised feedback with OnTask to build student belonging

UTS awards CIC’s multi-year, multidisciplinary faculty collaboration, using the OnTask tool to scale personalised feedback and build student belonging.

Since 2017, CIC has been supporting academics to embed OnTask messaging in learning design, offering workshops and consultations. When Lisa-Angelique Lim joined CIC in 2021, she brought deep expertise from her PhD at UniSA, and took this work to a new level, leading a learning community to implement OnTask across a wider range of subjects, thereby enabling personalised feedback and support for students in multiple faculties. 

So it’s a true mark of recognition to see that CIC, in partnership with UTS academics from multiple faculties, received an award in recognition for our sustained efforts in the Student Experience category, for fostering students’ belonging in multiple disciplines through personalised feedback. This accolade was part of the Vice-Chancellor’s 2024 Learning and Teaching Awards and Citations, and was celebrated at the 2025 Learning and Teaching Awards Ceremony at UTS on 4 April 2025.

Our large, multidisciplinary team was led by Dr Lisa-Angelique Lim (CIC), with Associate Professor Amanda White (Business), Dr Amara Atif (FEIT), Chris Croese (Law), Associate Professor James Wakefield (Business), Dr Keith Heggart (FASS), Associate Professor Nicole Sutton (Business), Ram Ramanathan (CIC PhD student), Dr Rina Dhillon (Business), Dr Simone Faulkner (Business), and Professor Simon Buckingham Shum (CIC).

Addressing the challenges of student belonging with personalised feedback using OnTask

Belonging is a cornerstone of the student experience, critically impacting engagement, retention, and overall success. At UTS, the Student Experience Framework places a strong emphasis on belonging. However, the challenge of nurturing a sense of belonging at the classroom level is significant, given the diverse and large student population, particularly in first-year core subjects. Personalised feedback has emerged as a potent tool to address this challenge, serving as a form of ‘relational pedagogy’ that builds self-efficacy and fosters greater engagement and thriving at university.

To tackle the challenge of belonging, our team leveraged OnTask — a tool designed to support students through personalised communication and feedback across multiple disciplines, based on their data. OnTask uses learning analytics to provide tailored messages that help students stay on track with their studies, understand their progress, and feel supported throughout their academic journey. Check out this short animation on how OnTask works.

Quick teaser video of our academics’ perspectives of their implementation of personalised feedback in their context:

 

What this looks like in practice

Here, we highlight a few examples of the work by our team.

  • The UTS Business First and Further Year Experience (FFYE) team, led by A/Prof James Wakefield and Dr Simone Faulkner, used OnTask to personalize orientation communications for both undergraduate and postgraduate commencing students, leading to a significant increase in orientation registrations.
  • A/Prof Amanda White used OnTask in the Accounting for Business Decision A (ABDA) subject to tailor emails based on students’ progress, encouraging higher engagement and leading to improved exam grades.
  • Dr Keith Heggart created personalised video messages tailored to students’ confidence levels in the fully online Graduate Certificate in Learning Design, significantly enhancing student engagement and perceptions of support.
  • The positive impacts of OnTask are well-documented. For instance, in the large first-year subject, 22208 Accounting, Business and Society (ABS), led by Dr Rina Dhillon and A/Prof Nicole Sutton, personalised messages based on weekly quiz results led to improved pass rates and enhanced feelings of being valued among at-risk students.
  • Similarly, personalised feedback messages sent by Chris Croese to his students in large Law subjects kept students on track and motivated, correlating with better final grades. More stories of how academics at UTS have used OnTask, with research papers, can be found on CIC’s OnTask page.

Towards future partnerships to enhance student belonging

With this award, we celebrate the collaborative efforts and innovative approaches taken by our team to foster a sense of belonging among students through personalised feedback. Our journey over these past three years demonstrates the sustainability of this practice and its potential to influence and enhance teaching and learning widely.

We are honoured to receive this recognition, and look forward to continuing strong partnerships, to make a positive impact on the student experience at UTS.

“Belonging Analytics”?

Connecting the fields of student belonging and learning analytics: “Belonging Analytics”

As with every purposeful human endeavour, motivation for learning and becoming a professional within a discipline is enhanced when individuals feel a sense of belonging. In the context of education, belonging refers to students’ subjective feeling of being a valued member of the learning community, that comes from a sense of connection with others as well as to the course of study. This affective dimension of engagement has notable links with many positive learning outcomes, including transition, retention, success and well-being. The importance of belonging has been underscored by the recent COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent increase in online, remote learning, and more students found themselves learning in isolation. The issue is further compounded for students from equity or disadvantaged groups, who already feel a lower sense of belonging.

Notwithstanding the pandemic, students’ experiences of belonging is dynamic and contextual, which presents challenges for tracking and supporting students in a timely manner.  Traditional research methodologies such as surveys and interviews, may be useful sources of data for understanding student belonging, however these are difficult to scale and repeat over multiple episodes.

In response to the urgency of student belonging, CIC researchers Lisa-Angelique Lim and Simon Buckingham Shum are collaborating with belonging experts Peter Felten and Jennifer Uno (Elon University, USA), to conceptualise a scalable approach to this important issue.

In a new paper, we explore the possibility of harnessing learning analytics to monitor and support belonging in timely and personalised ways. Drawing on examples of where learning analytics has been used for personalising feedback to students, we propose a framework for “belonging analytics”, based on the dimensions of agents, data, and feedback mechanisms.

Overall, our framework suggests approaches that leverage a range of quantitative and qualitative data to monitor and support student belonging over time and at scale. Clearly, as with other substantial learning concepts, much care is needed to ensure that any approach drawing on learning data to inform belonging must be firmly grounded in theory, and that analytical approaches do not foster inequity. We conclude the paper with further questions to explore in this new field.

Learn more…

Read: Needed Now: Belonging@Scale blog and a longer read: Lim, L.-A., Buckingham Shum, S., Felten, P. and Uno, J. (2023). “Belonging Analytics”: A Proposal. Learning Letters, Vol. 1, Article 4, 1-12.

Watch: We recently presented these ideas in a webinar at the recent Indiana University Learning Analytics Summit.

Engage: Finally, just as belonging is inherently relational, we invite educators and researchers with a shared interest in this topic, to be part of a new Belonging Analytics community on LinkedIn. We look forward to building this community together with you.