Developing Wellbeing Literacy for Remote Work Integrated Learning
Creators: name: An, Le
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 460908
subject: Information systems organisation and management

description: Wellbeing is critical for Higher Education (HE) students’ learning engagement, academic performance and employability. However, there is increasing evidence that HE students have higher rates of wellbeing-related distress than the general population, and that Work Integrated Learning (WIL) students face even more wellbeing challenges with workplace stressors. Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic (the pandemic), WIL in HE programs has been adjusted toward remote delivery, with remote workplaces increasingly becoming the post-pandemic norm. While the field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) has explored distributed collaboration for more than two decades, the pandemic has provided new opportunities to explore the unprecedented scale of remote working. However, research to date has largely focused on full-time employees, while there is very limited research on the remote work wellbeing impacts on WIL students. With WIL students, there is a greater requirement for supervision and mentoring to support and maintain their wellbeing and productivity, in contrast to the more experienced worker. 

Wellbeing Literacy (WL) equips individual students with capabilities to handle wellbeing challenges independently when working in WIL partner organisations and working remotely during and after the pandemic. Given that WL is also considered an important employability skill, this thesis argues that greater attention is required by HE institutions to ensure their graduates are equipped with these skills.
The objectives of the research are to understand WIL students’ wellbeing challenges with remote WIL, along with the role of WL in the remote WIL context.  This thesis also explores ways to facilitate the development of WIL students’ WL as an employability skill. 

The research is conducted in three stages, each with specific research questions to help develop a greater understanding of issues in this emerging field of research. In all three stages of research, semi-structured interviews are used as method to collect a rich body of qualitative data. 

The first stage of the study is designed to confirm that WL plays a positive role in facilitating WIL students to deal with wellbeing challenges in the workplace. Challenging situations, such as the pandemic, although undesirable, have provided opportunities for students to practice and improve their WL in a remote workplace. In the second stage, Digital WL (DWL), or WL in a digital context, is defined, along with recommended strategies that can be used by WIL students to develop DWL skills. The findings from the first two stages suggest that challenging situations in the workplace provide WIL students with opportunities to practice DWL and WL skills and improve their awareness of WL. Like many employability skills, WL is best developed in practice or through experiential learning. For students about to enter the workplace, it is essential that they are equipped with WL strategies before they commence their WIL engagement. Thus, a Serious Game (SG) that simulates a challenging workplace is used in the third stage to create a WL learning context. SGs provide authentic assessment environments which simulate workplaces and generate iterative tasks for students to apply their knowledge and skills in different ways. The SG enhances individual intentionality towards wellbeing, by placing students in an ethically challenging position. By analysing emotional responses and decision-making processes of students throughout the gameplay, key indicators that impact WL capabilities are identified. A framework is proposed for the use of serious games or digital simulations to facilitate students in the development of WL in the workplace. 

This research contributes to the current WL academic literature with evidence of WIL students’ WL in the remote working context, and initiates DWL as a new direction of WL research for academics, including those interested in CSCW research. The impact of the pandemic on students’ WL and emerging strategies to facilitate students’ development of WL together provide an important impetus and steppingstone for future research. The research also identifies key aspects that educators in universities and WIL industry partners should focus on when using SGs to develop WL as an employability skill. The practical suggestions offered for universities and host organisations will also in turn benefit students’ WL and their employability in the long term.

Future research can explore WIL students’ WL in international remote WIL programs, because cultural and geographic backgrounds have significant impacts on workplace collaboration and may bring different wellbeing challenges. SGs can also be improved to better support WL development, such as integrating conversational components to promote more articulation tasks. It is also promising for educators to be able to evaluate WL using SGs. With the capacity to practice dealing with conflict, SGs’ authentic experiential learning environments also offer the potential to develop students’ soft skills, both inside the virtual environment and later in class discussion and feedback.