Abstract
Online education is becoming widely accepted in tertiary education including by academics, students and employers. Educators have created new and innovative ways of teaching curriculum to online students that produce academically and employable equivalent graduates. In response to this success, we believe that it is time to shift our online attention onto creating a student experience that is equivalent to the entire on-campus experience, and increasing student well-being, success and satisfaction. In this chapter, we introduce a model of an online education hierarchy of student needs—a novel adaptation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Online education is closing the gap between academic equivalence of on-campus and online education, and we contend that the next phase of meeting online student needs includes addressing academic and general well-being, and a strong sense of community, connection and belongingness, which may eventually result in online self-actualization. We describe the importance of student well-being, provide an example of a mindfulness well-being component of a large online course and discuss how a student’s sense of community, connection and belongingness is impacted on by their fully online education world. In this chapter, we explore what should be next on the online education agenda and what needs to be done to really achieve online–on-campus equivalence.
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Chung, J., McKenzie, S. (2020). Is It Time to Create a Hierarchy of Online Student Needs?. In: McKenzie, S., Garivaldis, F., Dyer, K.R. (eds) Tertiary Online Teaching and Learning. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8928-7_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8928-7_19
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