Professor Kerri-Lee Krause is Chair in Higher Education and Director, Griffith Institute for Higher Education, Griffith University, Queensland, Australia. Her research expertise and experience spans broadly across higher education policy areas. Her particular research focus is the student experience in higher education and implications for policy and practice. She has recently been an advisor to the Scottish Quality Assurance Agency on the first year experience. She also recently led a national ALTC-funded project examining teaching-research links across the disciplines and at the institutional policy level.
Currently, Professor Krause is leading a Queensland government study on strategies for enhancing participation rates of students from low socio-economic backgrounds in higher education. She leads the Australian arm of an international project in collaboration with the US-based IMS Global Learning Consortium investigating best practices for online learning in first year university and she is also a member of an ALTC project examining the implications of emerging technologies for learning and teaching among the first year ‘digital generation’.
A significant part of her work involves providing policy and practical advice to university academics, policy-makers, administrators and support staff to enhance the quality of policy and practice in higher education settings.
Abstract
First Year Engagement: What Role Does Curriculum Play?
Kerri-Lee Krause (PhD)
Professor and Director
Griffith Institute for Higher Education
Griffith University
The notion of ‘student engagement’ has become something of a buzzword in higher education over the last decade. It has emerged as an institutional aspiration in the policy documents of just about every university in Australia, mirroring a similar pattern in the UK, New Zealand and North America. But what does ‘engagement’ really mean when it comes to how, why, when (and even if) students learn in their first year of university study? This presentation will explore some of the implications of the engagement construct for curriculum design in the first year. It will examine some of the key first year curriculum issues in higher education internationally, including consideration of the role of research-teaching links, the influence of disciplinary differences and the role of assessment and feedback in first year curriculum design.
