PHCM9391 Health Organisations, Strategy and Change has around 400 working health professionals enrolled each a year, most studying online and many asynchronously. Whether students in a cohort like this engage depends partly on whether they feel they belong, so I treat inclusion as part of course design. I speak directly to students who will watch the recording, voice students' written questions to guest speakers as they present, use Menti quizzes and the meeting chat so less confident students can contribute in writing first, I learn to pronounce students' names, and invite students to share photos of where they are studying from. I run weekly anonymous check-in surveys and discuss the results in every tutorial (more detail).

My teaching in PHCM9615 received 100% satisfaction on myExperience each year from 2019 to 2022. Across the 1,049 students in my courses from 2021 to 2023, my teaching averaged 5.6 out of 6 across all myExperience items, above School, Faculty and University means in every term. In Term 1 2026, 96.7% of 212 respondents in PHCM9391 agreed or strongly agreed that they were satisfied with my teaching, compared with 91.9% for the School and 90.7% for the Faculty. The School of Population Health awarded me the Alan Hodgkinson Award for Teaching Excellence in 2024 and 2026.

The myExperience survey doesn't specifically ask about inclusion, however in Term 1 2026, 14 of 231 substantive free-text comments raised inclusion or belonging unprompted, and 6 raised cultural safety or the Acknowledgement of Country. One student wrote in 2024:

"He does a great job in reducing the power imbalance between himself and us as students and spends a lot of time drawing on the valuable information offered by his students."

Another wrote:

"I always assumed that online communication could only be one-sided, but Dr. Ben proved me wrong, our sessions were always engaging and dynamic."

Belonging is still the most challenging thing to build in a cohort this size, and "I felt part of a learning community" was my lowest item in 2026, though still comparatively high at 5.25 out of 6.

I use technology to fit learning around students' work. The podcasts I produced for PHCM9615 were accessed 350 times in Term 2 2023, when the course had around 60 students, and this innovation received an honourable mention in the 2021 Scientia Education Academy Exemplary Teaching Awards. In PHCM9391, students now use a large language model in their final assessment and appraise its output, because they are moving into planning and policy roles where AI already shapes decisions (more detail on the podcasts and the AI assessment).