We close by welcoming further discussion and reflection on institutional practices and performance measures in the digital environment, particularly in terms of whether they allow instructors to embed relational aspects and elicit cognitive and affective trust from their students. Theoretical foundations have been drawn from Indigenous scholarship as well as organisational and socio-psychological literature. Notably, we highlight the importance of further inquiry into methods of rapport-building in higher education. We also investigate the role of trust in influencing student engagement and achievement, in terms of attainment of academic goals. In this article, we highlight and investigate the conceptual construct of trust and its antecedents.Ĭonsidering the nature and purpose of interpersonal trust in student-instructor relationships within online higher education institutions, we explore several factors (in particular, performativity, casualisation of teaching staff, neoliberalism, non-traditional student identities, and the digital divide) which influence the development of trust. Instilling trust can construct sustainable learning environments that are abundant with collaborative inquiry and dialogue. This conceptual article asserts the importance of building and sustaining trust between higher education students and practitioners within the online environment. The program’s innovative pedagogy encourages students to engage via active learning with tailored assessments, interactive communication via discussion boards and facilitated real-time sessions and formative feedback which include audio components. Hence, many students enter the program via non-traditional pathways bringing significant differences in experience and consequent skill bases. The program’s open-access facet is the ‘no entry requirements’ such as prerequisite studies. The case, an open-access, undergraduate information systems program, attracts mature age students studying while balancing employment and family commitments. Inevitably this has led to a growth in diversity within student cohorts.The case study described in this paper illustrates strategies based on informed learning design for educating diverse student cohorts in an online program offered by Swinburne University of Technology. With growth in online education, students gain tertiary qualifications through a mode more suited to their demographics such as work and life balance, learning styles and geographical accessibility.
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