Scholarly evidence

So does QUTopia really engage students and prepare them for the real world?  While the anecdotal feedback and awards was confirming this was so, we set out to gain scholarly evidence.  Engagement refers to “the active involvement, commitment and sense of belonging that dictates the time and effort students devote to educationally purposeful activities”. We know that when students are engaged with their learning that they are more likely to attain the learning outcomes (in this case, real world skills) so we set about measuring engagement levels with QUTopia.  Using the U.S. based National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) benchmarks, we compared QUTopia’s role-play simulation with a more traditional subject to see if the simulation could increase engagement levels.

The results of a survey of 157 students revealed that QUTopia increases student engagement on all three subject-related dimensions. QUTopia:

• encourages more active learning and collaboration
• is more academically challenging
• permits more student-faculty interaction than a traditional lecture based course.

For full details of the study go to: