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For presenters for abstracts, bios and presentation videos for the July 2023 Learning and Teaching Symposium, see below.
Join us at this opening session to hear from Wayne Ross (Open LMS), Martina Linnemann (Manager, Digital Landscapes), Greg Dorrian (Manager, Learning Media) and Stephanie Toole (Manager, Learning Design) as they provide insights into UNE’s next generation learning management system – myLearn. They will provide a variety of perspectives including technical, user experience, Project Uplift, media and design.
Before the teaching semester begins, educators play an important role in establishing conditions for effective learning that will occur the course of the unit. Leveraging Mind Brain and Education (Tokuhama-Espinosa, 2021) principles of emotion and cognition can help to establish these conditions. Emotions are strongly connected to learning (Cavanagh, 2016), as emotional stimuli activate circuits in the brain that in turn affect how well we learn. Our brains prioritise memories or information as more important when they are “tagged” with emotions as meaningful, and we will then want to learn more about this information (Playsted & Kelly, 2021). Visual ‘tags’ can help students to ‘see’ something as important and provide an opportunity for them to make positive emotional connections to the unit’s content and teacher, even before they begin the course. In this presentation, I will share how I have worked with visual tools to create an initial ‘welcome video’ that includes visually and aurally engaging components. Anecdotal feedback from colleagues and students suggest it is worthwhile investing time in creating these welcome videos. My hope is that ‘seeing’ this welcome might foster students’ positive, emotional engagement with the content they will be learning.
Welcome Video
The hype of clicking on videos, reels, stories, and live feeds has quickly become a fascinating new trend, where we are becoming more and more familiar with the new craze of creating and watching short, snappy, and visually appealing videos that have music, voiceovers, digital stickers, photographs, and the list goes on. Thus, it is no surprise that one of the core elements of Project Uplift is focused on ‘quality media’, where the use of accessible digital media is paramount to UNE’s goal of Future Fit. In the School of Education, there have been discussions about how we can improve lectures, and present snippets of our tutorials, to increase student engagement, as many students ‘switch off’ from watching either of these within the first few weeks. To deal with disengagement and missed learning opportunities, TikTok style videos have been used to capture and present important and relevant material to students to prioritise the learning outcomes of units. In this presentation, I will share examples of videos prepared for pre-service primary and secondary History and Geography teachers to demonstrate the possibilities of what ‘quality media’ might look like in our units, with further consideration of the limitations that may ensue when using these short videos.
Quality Media
Historically student based academic achievement was contingent on significant work, but what happens with technology at least partially ameliorates this requirement? Widespread availability of Generative AI packages (such as ChatGPT), Contract Assignment Platforms and Substitute Students, each decouple the notion of an individual’s hard work with their scholastic achievement. This presentation explores five, scaffolding assessment designs that are currently being piloted within UNE units. Strategies covering their broader implementation across a range of quantitative and qualitative units are discussed. Lessons learnt and ‘next steps’ are presented. Crucially each is predicated on the readily achievable – if scary – notion that humans and Gen AI can be frenemies.
Engaging Assessments
Within the Graduate Certificate of Digital Learning, all units allow students to engage in team-chat environments using Discord, which provides near real time emotive chat capabilities. Feedback from students has indicated they enjoy this type of interaction as it feels more fluid, faster and allows easier access to their instructors when have questions. This presentation will cover the set up that has been in use for the last two years, as well as case studies of how it is used, along with how to address privacy concerns.
Engagement Opportunities
Systematic analysis of undergraduate curriculum design and assessment is required to ensure real world experiences are embedded in a degree structure for a high level of information literacy (IL) attainment. IL competencies and skills are critical for successful graduate outcomes. In this presentation, we describe a framework we developed using a constructive alignment approach to develop the Student Attributes for Information Literacy (SAIL) and accompanying rubric with outcomes that categorize depth of application over degree progression. The rubric was used to audit IL in core units of a multidisciplinary Bachelor of Environmental Science degree before and after a cycle of curriculum design. SAIL’s rubric provides educators with a practical and repeatable approach to identifying IL development in units of learning. The SAIL rubric found that IL, for most core units, was taught, practiced, and assessed at the foundational level. At the advanced level, however, students had limited opportunities for literacy training, practice, and assessment in a digital context. The rubric approach to mapping IL attribute achievement highlighted where the critical student competency in information literacy is lacking at the advanced levels of the program since curriculum change. In this presentation discuss how this can be addressed in current iterations of the course, and applications of the rubric beyond the exemplified discipline.
Rubrics and Feedback
In 2019, we refreshed the unit WRIT309/509: Writing Creative Non-fiction. Our refreshment provided students with a balance of theory, individual writing practice, and engagement opportunities for students. In the first assessment, students planned a work of creative nonfiction, and then produced this work for the second assessment. We also created a peer workshop with a grade allocation of 10% to allow students to give and receive feedback on their project drafts between two larger assessments. We faced challenges in how to implement these peer workshops for online students, replicating the positive outcomes of face-to-face workshops in a different learning environment for a different cohort of students. We designed a self-enrolled online workshopping assessment, but many students experienced difficulty using the digital tools. Following completion of the unit, we began a research project on developing and improving online student experience with digital peer workshops. We conducted focus groups and surveys to gauge student reactions in 2019 and 2021. Our findings have added to our disciplinary Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, and in this presentation, we would like to share them with our UNE colleagues.
Engagement Opportunities
UNE’s Master of Professional Psychology (MPP) is an accredited 5th year of training on the 5+1 pathway to General Registration as a psychologist. Previously, the major barrier to sustainability and continued growth in the program was the required 300-hour practicum. In 2020, we developed a landmark simulated psychology placement, based on best practice pedagogical principles and the Accreditation Standards, and this placement has now been adopted and offered since 2021. This innovative simulated placement provides a high quality, standardised training opportunity that enables provisional psychologists to develop practice-based skills in an authentic and structured way that surpasses traditional placement learning by providing a greater depth and breadth of experience. Delivered fully online, the simulated placement also addresses equity concerns for students in rural areas, thereby supporting the development of the mental health workforce outside metropolitan areas. Initial evaluations of outcomes have shown that the simulated placement positively impacts student learning through flexible delivery, competency development across all domains of practice, timely completions, reduced risk to students and the university and positive graduate outcomes. This presentation explores key elements of the simulated placement.
Engaging Assessments
In the past, German language students mainly completed summative assessments (assessment of learning) with little authenticity and personal relevance. To improve the learning experience, language portfolios across all three German levels were implemented over the course of three years. The portfolio design and individual portfolio tasks have received recognition within and beyond UNE. Students’ results and overall satisfaction rates have improved as a result of this redesign. In this presentation, I will describe how the implementation of language portfolios helped ‘humanise’ assessment.
Engaging Assessments
Aligning with the “all-of-ecosystem approach” of Project Uplift, this presentation highlights a values-based approach to the provision of high-quality learning at UNE. Drawing on a Signature Pedagogy for Student Wellbeing developed and refined through a three-year HEPPP project, the cross-university team highlight the value of a respectful and well examined set of principles. These are a broad conception of inclusion, a rejection of deficit discourse, student empowerment for wellbeing, and a pedagogy of care. The team advocate a strengths-based approach that draws on these principles as staff “refresh”, “revamp” and “renew” Uplift units. Inclusion is repositioned from being exclusively about disability to encompassing the delivery of a high-quality education to all. When educators reframe deficit language, new possibilities are opened that challenge stereotypes, and enable positive interactions that affirm identity and a sense of belonging. Encouraging students to act in regard to their own well-being fosters proactive, help-seeking behaviour and mental health literacy. Through a deliberate and responsive approach to care, educators and students can sustain healthy boundaries and develop resilience. When students’ motivations for study, aspirations and unique strengths are realised, relevant supports and services can be offered, empowering them to build resilience, manage challenges and develop a sense of connectedness within UNE.
Engagement Opportunities
A sense of belonging and personal connection can be argued as essential for both staff and students alike regardless of the learning context. In this pandemic era, ‘Relationship-rich education’ philosophies for universities are considered more vital than ever due to increased online learning (Felten & Lambert et al., 2020). To-date, higher education students’ sense of belonging is a concept that has not been adequately conceptualised. The current literature on ‘sense of belonging’ spans a number of disciplines, with no apparent consensus on definition between these, complicated by the fact that sense of belonging is temporal and context-sensitive such as during COVID-19. Whilst there has been recent studies outlining the student experience of belonging in the online space (Peacock et al., 2020), investigation of teacher/educator experiences have been relatively overlooked. This presentation will present interim findings from the SoE CSSP that explored students’ sense of belonging to their education units.
Universal Design for Learning (UDL)
The Social Work pedagogical approach to teaching and learning values transformative reflective practice and teaching through connection with communities of practice. In 2022 UNE developed Social Work in Practice units (SWiP’s). Developed as ‘spine’ units, the SWiP’s have been designed to provide social work students with real and authentic experiences enabling them to identify and link the theoretical to the practical in building knowledge to become competent Social Workers. The experiences and learnings students are afforded aim to ensure they are translating their knowledge of theory into the relating of knowing, being and doing as skilled Social Work practitioners. Student evaluations previously noted that practical learning immersion was typically relegated to clinical placement only. The inclusion of these new 3 credit point units enable immersion into the Social Work profession in placed based environments with Social Work colleagues working in real-time roles sharing their experiences and expertise to support the growing skill base of developing Social Workers. This presentation will demonstrate how the units have been developed and explore activities implemented to enhance enactment in practice of core social work skills relevant to other disciplines.
Engagement Opportunities
Two of the central activities of academics – teaching and research – are often in competition with each other. Corridor conversations offering advice such as, ‘Focus on your research if you want to get promoted’, underscore the tension between these two activities. Similarly, if the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) is undervalued in the culture and values systems of universities, academics may place career advancement before the pursuit of SoTL (Franks, 2020). For learning to be at the centre of a university’s mission, its recognition and reward processes should demonstrably value teaching and SoTL (Center of Engaged Learning, n.d.).
Since 2019 (with the exception of 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic), teaching and teaching-related staff at UNE have been asked to complete an online survey capturing their perceptions of how teaching and teaching-related research is recognised and rewarded. Results from this survey have been used to inform the design and delivery of recognition and reward processes and academic development activities at UNE. This presentation, provides some results from this survey and explores how we can all adopt a scholarly approach to learning and teaching.
Opportunities
This presentation is about the alternative assessment for COSC250 Functional and Reactive Programming in Trimester 1 2023. It’s a hybrid between an assignment and an exam, featuring a little programming game, The Murders at York Close, inspired by murder mystery games like Cluedo and Among Us.
As we all know, generative AI had a significant impact on assessment plans in 2022 and 2023. Something that can be particularly awkward is what to do about the “alternative assessment” to a proctored exam. A lower-weighted exam might be proctored so that you can include some understanding-style questions (that generative AI can answer)… but then a third of your students get approved for an unproctored alternative that you need to set. Alternative assessments inherit the weightings, learning outcomes, and role within the unit of the exam. Students face the end-of-trimester time pressure of a short examination and marking period, but in potentially a very different format. And although 30% is small for an exam, it’s as big as the biggest assignment in the unit, so an alternative has to look respectable compared to the other assignments too. This presentation describes an alternative assessment task that combines randomised questions, video questions, upload questions, and a programmable game to try to produce something playful that can serve the constraints mentioned above.
Engaging Assessments
Teaching in a block has become a popular method of teaching and learning in business schools. The approach has been widely applied in industry and is now tailed to meet the needs at the tertiary levels. Contemporary research indicates that block teaching enables collaboration and improves learning opportunities in a short period. However, an ideal approach to block teaching is yet to be established, with many universities adopting differing models. These include teaching for an intensive period (e.g., five full days for one week) or spread over a certain number of weeks. However, it is also argued that block teaching compresses learning objectives. This presentation reviews the prevailing approaches of block teaching, the nested pedagogies, and the outcomes and challenges from the perspective of teaching in business schools. We review the applications of block teaching pedagogy in online and on-campus models of teaching.
Engagement Opportunities
Case Based Learning (CBL) is a form of Problem-Based Learning (PBL) that facilitates reflective learning and helps in the development of clinical reasoning skills which further improves the transition from theory into practice in medical and biomedical subjects. This presentation describes a study that evaluated student feedback received for the use of interactive CBL assessment in pathophysiology unit (PSIO230) and the level of student engagement and achievement of learning outcomes. An assessment was designed in Lt platform by choosing video footages of a patient and 11 questions were created to test their knowledge. UNE Human Research Ethics approval was obtained to conduct this study (HE22-198). A questionnaire was designed in Qualtrics survey with 14 questions. Out of 72 students, 32 completed the survey and 56% found it to be ‘enjoyable’ with 44% found it to be ‘very enjoyable’. In open-ended questions, students mentioned that they ‘preferred it over reading textbooks’, found ‘watching videos of real patients telling their story was a more interesting and a holistic method of learning about different diseases’ and they ‘felt connected to the patient’ and ‘could relate more to the patient’s disease state’. Inclusion of interactive CBL assessment was found to be effective in teaching pathophysiology in the online environment.
Engaging Assessments
Although the University of New England has been providing distance education for over 50 years, there are still some areas of study that benefit from face-to-face content delivery so that students can successfully meet the learning outcomes. For example, undergraduate study (core to Agricultural degrees) that focuses on the adaptation and identification of important agricultural plants (including crops, pastures and weeds). This unit is generally delivered through several face-to-face practical sessions during which students learn the main identifying features of the plants. However, the COVID-19 pandemic changed all this. Lectures and practicals were moved fully online, so there was a need to rapidly change our approach to delivering this content. Online learning tools were developed to help students learn to recognise the important agricultural plants, but this continues to have relevance for students studying primarily online. We tracked student responses to determine their engagement with the learning tools, along with their success over time in identifying the plants. We investigate the success of the learning tools by comparing student engagement and responses with their final grade in the practical exam, in which they were formally examined on the plant species. The positive feedback we received for the learning tools indicates that this forced change in content delivery was beneficial and, accordingly, we plan to continue using and developing the learning tools.
Interactive Content
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