Being a small campus, we are used to having a high level of connectedness with our students - we don't need to make a specific effort to learn their names, we get to know them well in meeting them at the local cafe, the local pool or the beach. Our student-centered educational philosophy is underpinned by this social connectedness which I think is as important to the success of our students as our teaching and learning strategies. Consistent with this teaching philosophy, we adopted self-determination theory as our theoretical framework for this intervention. We believe that as educators we create the curriculum environment and that this environment shapes human behaviour, including students’ engagement with learning.  In normal circumstances, we can easily create a learning environment in which we design and deliver curricula that support the three basic psychological needs posited by Self-determination Theory, namely relatedness, competence and autonomy by Enhancing Student Wellbeing in our cohort..

For example, right from the start of year 1, we create an environment where students feel supported and happy to talk to staff and peers alike. in 2020 The year began with our usual socialising, we had a student/staff river cruise, the students began to make their friendship groups, our resident nutritionist Amanda did some fun cooking lessons in the colleges.  But then, as we all know, COVID struck and we were all immediately locked down and teaching, learning and socialising moved online. Creating our connected environment, and ensuring students three basic psychological needs were met,  suddenly became more challenging. We polled students during Term 2 to find out how they were managing in the online environment, and if they were keeping on top of their tasks. We found that a lot of students were feeling overwhelmed and falling behind, but also that many were struggling with the lack of social connection . We also had some really nice comments about how much the students appreciated our support.

We therefore constructed four strategies that we theorised would increase students’ need satisfaction, which would then result in increased wellbeing. The first strategy we introduced was the inclusion of icebreaker activities in our scenario group teaching sessions. We envisioned these as fun activities, not connected to curriculum, but to bring a bit of light relief to a difficult situation, and we did it in consultation with our students. One SG group decided to bring in Wacky Hat Wednesday which helped enhance connectedness in our first set of online small group sessions on Blackboard Collaborate. It also encouraged students to turn on their cameras, which they were reluctant to do, a factor that was not helping connectedness.  Next we had a lot of fun with guess the baby – using Microsoft forms we created an MCQ for students to guess who was who. This was a lot of fun, and also got students and staff talking about our families and our life stories. On an educational level it also introduced us to using Microsoft forms, and we brought that into some of our teaching. Other guessing games we introduced included asking students what they were eating for breakfast! We had some interesting images submitted, including a number of gourmet brekkies alongside the truly alarming, 7 weetbix in a bowl which is apparently ‘just a snack’. This led us to discussions about healthy eating, and also connected into our next activity which was to encourage students to think about sedentary behaviour…We introduced some health and wellness sessions to try to have fun, and get our students and staff moving! Our brilliant professional staff team put on sally up sessions, literally 5 minutes of moving. These were so much fun, and students seemed to get a lot out of them.

We tried to create an environment where students felt supported and comfortable to approach us to seek individualised assistance, building the feeling of belonging to a UNSW community, and building a feeling of wellbeing. To reinforce this, we introduced sunrise walks for those students who remained in Port Macquarie. We saw some beautiful sunrises; we met pets and had dogs in bags, we even had a couple of students drop in on their way home from nightshift.  We came to have a regular small group of students who turned up every week to these walks, and forged strong friendships with each other, and great relationships with staff. For those unwilling (or unable) to get out of bed that early we introduced sunset walks, which were equally popular. Other activities we organised were yoga sessions; I negotiated with a local yoga instructor to run weekly classes for staff and students on campus, and we all benefited from bot the movement and the mindfulness.

A further strategy that we introduced while online were virtual coffee catchups and other informal activities. Again, we felt that this would help students to feel part of a connected learning community, and help them to build relationships with both staff and peers.  As part of these sessions we asked each of our 4 small groups to take over trivia once a fortnight. We’ve played online Pictionary, we’ve had online trivial pursuits, and we had a hilarious quiz which featured questions about staff and students, including things like ‘who is Karan’s favourite student’.  We also had show and tell in our virtual coffee catch ups which let us learn a lot about each other.