Imagine a world where you could get feedback on that dreaded assessment you’ve been putting off.

It would be pretty amazing yeah?

Well believe it or not, you live in that world.

Alas there are no unicorns or an elixir of life (free coffee), but there are guardian angels: the Academic Learning Support team.

The Academic Learning Support team is made up of learning advisors who work across all schools to help student succeed at university.

Senior Learning Advisor for Academic Learning Support, Alison Hillier, works extensively with mature age students to help them overcome the obstacles they face when starting tertiary study.

“A lot of [students]…have really good time management skills, but adding that extra layer of study on top of it means things get crushed,” explained Ms Hillier. “Sometimes it can impact on family relationships, sometimes it can impact on their studies and paid work. So it’s a little bit of a balancing act in the first couple of months of uni to try and get all of that working.”

“We have learning advisors and Student Liaison Officers allocated to the Enabling Pathways programs…which are fantastic for students doing those programs. They get a lot of intensive and one-on-one personal assistance, so that helps a lot of those students, particularly the ones that are feeling more nervous than others,” she elaborated.

Academic Learning Support are able to help you through all stages of your study program, from Enabling through to your PhD. These include developing your academic writing, improving your study skills, providing course specific maths and statistics support and assisting with English language skills.

What’s the catch? None!

Make the most of self-help resources, online workshops and student consultations to help you ace university – all for free.

You can book a Zoom consultation with a learning advisor from any of our Callaghan, Ourimbah, Sydney and City campuses. If you have a look on the website you can even see their friendly faces and find out what areas of expertise they like to work with students on.

You can even add a friend to your Zoom appointment, which is really handy if you’re both working on the same assignment or doing a group task. Just let the advisor know the student number of all the students coming with you, and they’ll send Zoom links to everyone.

Academic Learning Support can help organise your timetable or optimise your time management so you get the most out of your revision strategies.

“A student who wants some advice on their timetable might send their study load through to us, a list of their commitments, whether they’re a morning or a night person and we can help them construct a timetable,” Ms Hillier said.

The REALLY amazing, almost too good to be true, service offered by Academic Learning Support is providing feedback on your assessments.

You can submit your draft assessment or assessment outline online and a learning advisor will reply within 24 hours (during the week) with a response.  E-consult also operates all year round, so if you’re thinking about winter or summer school you can use it then as well. All you need to do is make an e-Consult appointment via CareerHub to secure a place in the queue and submit a sample of draft material.

“The thing about e-consult is we obviously can’t tell you whether you’ve answered the question, but we can look at the assignment question and see whether you’re hitting the right notes, see whether you’re hitting the target areas of the question, and tell you whether you’re writing paragraphs that match up with the things in the question. So we can tell you whether you might have accidentally missed out an entire part of a question, or gone too far perhaps!” said Ms Hillier.

Academic Learning Support regularly evaluates its services to prove they actually enhance students’ performance.

Data shows that students who use these services outperform those that don’t.

“One program that I was involved in running a few years ago, the students that attended the workshops which were designed alongside the program for the semester got an average of a 7 mark increase in their marks compared to students who didn’t. That’s nearly a full grade point. If they were sitting on a borderline of a credit or a distinction, they would go up into that distinction mark.”

A seven mark difference!?!

Seven marks may not sound like a big deal, but that can be the difference between a pass and a fail.

If you’re struggling at all with your uni work, or just wanting to be the best student you can be, Academic Learning Support has got you covered.

Looking to improve your study skills or time management? Book an appointment with Academic Learning Support.