Rate My Professor Paula De Barba

Dr. Paula Galvão de Barba is a Senior Lecturer in the Monash Education Academy within the Education discipline at Monash University. She holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences and completed her postdoctoral studies at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education. With over 12 years of experience in educational psychology research, she leads quality assurance for postgraduate online courses at Monash Online. Her academic career includes prior roles at the University of Melbourne's Melbourne Centre for the Study of Higher Education, where she contributed to projects on learning analytics and student feedback systems.

De Barba's research focuses on self-regulated learning, achievement motivation, learning analytics, online learning, and the integration of educational technology in higher education and lifelong learning contexts. She examines how student motivation, participation, and self-regulation strategies predict performance in digital environments, including MOOCs, and explores the role of generative AI in co-regulated learning processes. Key publications include 'The role of students' motivation and participation in predicting performance in a MOOC' (2016, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 603 citations), 'Visualizing patterns of student engagement and performance in MOOCs' (2014, 344 citations), 'A tale of two MOOCs: How student motivation and participation predict learning outcomes in different MOOCs' (2018, 142 citations), 'Learning with generative artificial intelligence within a network of co-regulation' (2023, Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice, 103 citations), and 'Development and validation of a learning analytics rubric for self-regulated learning' (2025, Educational Technology Research and Development). With 33 research outputs and over 2,738 citations on Google Scholar, her work has significantly influenced practices in data-informed teaching and student empowerment through analytics-driven insights. She has co-authored book chapters such as 'Self-regulated learning and the student experience in online higher education' (2023) and contributed to proceedings on adaptive learning systems and feedback interpretation.