This is authored by Dr Muhammad Abid | Lecturer in Marketing, School of Business
Context – Why this mattered
In MKT110, a partner-delivered cohort recorded a 59% failure rate in 202530. The subject was designed, materials were available and assessments were running as intended, yet Brightspace showed low engagement and low assessment submission. The result challenged an assumption I had carried into subject convening: practices that worked with CSU internal cohorts would work equally well in a different learning context. The 59% was not simply a result to explain; it was a signal to redesign how we connected with students.
Human Insight – What changed my thinking
The turning point was recognising that disengagement often appeared before failure in small, observable ways: not accessing Brightspace, not submitting an assessment, or not registering for an oral interaction. Instead of treating these as separate administrative issues, I began treating them as early signals that a student was becoming disconnected. My question changed from “Have we provided students with everything they need?” to “Have we actually reached the students who are drifting away?”
Practice – What I redesigned
Before the 202630 session, I brought together four partner lecturers and two Course Coordinators and mapped where, when and why students were disengaging. We converted that frontline knowledge into a session-long engagement playbook rather than relying on isolated reminders.
Assessment support moved into the learning process. I developed assessment-focused in-class activities for lecturers, created templates that made expectations more visible, recorded detailed assessment sessions for all partner students, assessment conversations routine in classes, and used class time before submission for students to begin working while lecturers could see progress and barriers.
We also built an escalation pathway around early-warning signals: focused Brightspace announcements → targeted follow-up with disengaged students → lecturer and Course Coordinator outreach for each at-risk case → direct phone contact when needed. One critical moment came when many students had not registered for the supervised oral assessment. Rather than sending another reminder, the Course Coordinator, teaching team and I identified and called students individually, explained the process and addressed concerns. Registration subsequently exceeded 90%.
I also held one-to-one conversations with teaching-team members approximately every second week. This created a live cycle of identify → intervene → check response → adapt. Engagement became a shared CSU–partner responsibility rather than something left to individual lecturers.
Impact – What changed and how I know
The failure rate fell from 59% to 19%—a 40-percentage-point improvement. Brightspace engagement, assessment submission and supervised-assessment participation also strengthened, supported by lecturer observations and Course Coordinator feedback. I would not attribute the entire improvement to one intervention; the important evidence is the convergence of these indicators.
The experience changed how I think about student-centred practice. Sometimes the most important redesign is not another resource or another announcement, but a system that notices disconnection early and responds in a personal, timely and context-sensitive way. We stopped waiting for students to seek support and started recognising when support needed to seek the student.
This reflective blog post is part of the Faculty’s Learning and Teaching SLOWposium 2026: Elevate session. Continue the conversation by exploring the reflections of our fellow presenters and discovering new perspectives on learning and teaching. Read the other presenters’ reflections here.
“We stopped waiting for students to seek support and started recognising when support needed to seek the student.”
You can download Muhammad’s presentation slides here