Dr Filia J. Garivaldis

Since joining BehaviourWorks Australia in 2019, Filia has led the development of the online micro-credential course “Applying Behavioural Science to Create Change”, nominated twice for a Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Industry and Community Education Programs. She has also developed a number of online skill-development short courses for behaviour change, as part of a Toolbox Series, including systems thinking, and using behavioural insights to improve written communications. Filia has also led the development of the Monash Sustainable Development Institute’s Behaviour Change Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), endorsed by the SDG Academy, which has been delivered since August 2022.

Filia has over 20 years of international experience in academia, delivering and leading education in behavioural science and psychology. Her expertise, in particular, is in online education and educational research, and has published widely in this area in leading peer-review journals and books. In 2022 she led the publication of a Special Issue on online education for the Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, with an international team of experts from the United States and the United Kingdom. Filia is also a co-editor on a joint Monash University-King’s College London textbook, titled “Tertiary Online Teaching and Learning: TOTAL Digital Education Perspectives and Resources”, published internationally by Springer–Verlag in 2020.

In 2018, Filia also led an Inter-Faculty Transformation Project funded by the Monash Education Academy, to create Monash’s first university-wide orientation resource for all online students of the university.

One of Filia’s previous most enduring career output was the co-development and co-delivery of Australia’s first fully online accredited 4th year course in psychology, the Graduate Diploma of Psychology Advanced (GDPA), where she has introduced several innovations, such as eWorkbooks that have since been replicated across the School of Psychological Sciences, simulated activities, exclusive special feature content in collaboration with Monash and non-Monash experts.Filia co-lead the delivery of the course to tremendous growth, from a starting total of 87 enrolments in early 2016, to over 900, from regional and metropolitan areas of Australia, in collaboration with Pearson Education Australia – a collaboration which has been nominated twice, in 2018 and 2019, for a Business in Higher Education Round Table (BHERT) award for Outstanding Collaboration in Higher Education and Training, and specifically for Expanding and Improving 4th Year Psychology Education in Australia. Filia was also involved in the development of the Psychology Research Portal – a comprehensive and integrated online research environment that has received a Dean’s Award in 2019 for Technological Innovation in Learning and Teaching, and has been nominated for the Vice-Chancellor’s Award.

Prior to returning to Monash University, Filia was a Senior Lecturer at Regent’s University London, where she developed an MSc in Occupational and Organisational Psychology, accredited by the British Psychological Society.

Finally, Filia’s PhD, obtained at Monash University, focused on self-regulation ability in the pursuit of personal goals, and the moderating effect of implicit emotion.