LEARNING DESIGN UNIT | DIVISION OF STUDENT LEARNING | ISSUE 4 AUTUMN 2017

Learning Design

Another academic year is well underway and we here in the Learning Design Unit of DSL are busy supporting your academic endeavours.

Our strategy this year, as in the coming years, is to provide focussed support for subjects

and courses that address the issues outlined in the University Strategy 2017-2022. The Division of Student Learning has a new Initiatives & Improvements Plan that sets out how we will continue to provide support to achieve the goals in the Faculty and School I&I plans, linking our work directly to the goals in the University Strategy 2017-2022 of transforming learning and teaching at CSU.

Since the last newsletter, in which we reported on the results of last year’s SRS and service quality survey, we have made some changes to our processes. We have revised the SRS interface to make it more intuitive, and also changed some of our allocation processes and work tracking to ensure better support. We are also working on being more approachable with weekly online drop in sessions for academics. We have also added to the SRS the capacity to request subject consultation.

Across DSL, all units are working to coordinate a professional learning strategy to ensure that CSU staff have the skills and knowledge needed to design and deliver courses and subjects that give our students the experiences they both need and want. As with all we are doing, this Professional Learning is supporting the transformative approaches set out in

the Strategy document.

Associate Professor Elizabeth Thomson Director, Learning Design

The Learning Design Unit is currently working in partnership with the three faculties to provide high quality educational design and development assistance to the subjects, courses and initiatives specified within the Initiatives and Improvements (I&I) plans. Our staff are working collaboratively with other support services and initiatives across the University to endorse a unified and integrated approach to the strategic work arising from the Faculties’ I&I plans.

Across approximately 30 priority courses and 60 subjects, Educational Designers are doing a needs analysis and report outlining recommended improvements. Sub Deans (Learning and Teaching) then make the final decision on which recommendations, for which subjects, will be taken up. LDU staff will then be assigned to undertake the work. Work is planned in a sequential ‘just in time’ strategy, with work on Session 60 subjects occurring now and Session 90 subjects to follow.

Many of these subjects are also undergoing Online Learning Model enhancement, directly supported by the LDU.

Another high priority for the LDU team is supporting courses in Smart Learning. We are currently providing design support for nine Wave 3 courses and nineteen Wave 4 courses, with about a dozen EDs working closely with Course Directors on these course designs.

Strategic Support for Transformation

Service Request System UpdateProfessional Learning support

During 2017, Educational Designers are

undertaking a Building capacity in

Learning and Teaching Strategies

Professional Learning program. During

this, they will each acquire specialist

skills in two pedagogies and create

resources in a range of learning and

teaching strategies. These resources

will be available for use by academic

staff in course and subject design and

development.

All units in Division of Student Learning work collaboratively to plan and deliver professional learning for academic staff in areas such as subject design, assessment, use of learning technologies and workplace learning design. This capacity building is linked to the University Strategy 2017-2022 transformations and this coordinated effort is aimed directly at supporting the Initiatives and Improvements Plans in Faculties and Schools.

Linda Ward has been appointed Professional Learning Manager for the Division. She will work with the DSL units and Sub Deans in each faculty to plan Professional Learning Programs for each faculty.

Professional Learning sessions offered by DSL are compiled on a new calendar on the DSL website. This calendar lists date, time and session details, and allows you to save the event to your Outlook calendar.

The calendar includes faculty-specific PL sessions offered by various units in DSL, one-off workshops and recurring ‘drop-in’ sessions for both full-time and sessional staff. The calendar is at http://www.csu.edu.au/division/student-learning/home/staff-learning.

To supplement the live sessions, there is a searchable index of resources at http://uimagine.edu.au/csupd/ that provides access to a wealth of information about learning and teaching at CSU, ranging from help sheets to video recordings of PD sessions.

Would you like to learn about new ways of teaching? Engage your students using active learning strategies? Heard of a jigsaw activity but not sure what that is? Use a scenario based role play to provide students with an authentic learning experience?

A series of professional development programs are now available for staff. The programs cover a range of

pedagogies and include active lecture, cooperative learning, portfolios, problem based learning, reflection and

scenario based role plays. You will be guided through a series of activities that will take you roughly 7 hours to

complete along with an assessment item. The programs are

all standalone so you can complete one or all of the programs.

It is entirely up to you and your needs. Completion of the

assessment items is entirely optional. If you do complete

them you will gain recognition of your achievements via the

new Graduate Certificate of Learning and Teaching in Higher

Education (which in currently under review).

The programs are available from an Interact2 site called Learning Design.

Earlier this year, changes were made to the DSL Service Request System (SRS) in response to the feedback we received from you in the survey in late 2016.

With regard to the SRS interface, we have changed the order of the buttons to logically group the areas of requests and have added some new buttons such as Subject Consultation for when you want to discuss your subject, Induction and Teaching Dynamics. In the Interact2/Learning Technologies section, there are now buttons for MOOC, Groups and Blogs, Journals & Wikis to help ensure your request goes to the best person to serve you.

Another major change is the ability to do a ‘Follow up’ on resolved jobs rather than request a new one. The My Current Requests button in the upper right corner of the main screen takes you to a page that displays your jobs. On this page, you can toggle between your current jobs or resolved jobs using the Display My Resolved/Current Requests button in the upper left. On the resolved page, you can request a follow up to a closed job. This will then go back into the queue with the original job number and be allocated to the person who had worked on it previously if they are available. If they are not available, such as being on leave, whoever it is allocated to will have access to all the notes in the system.

All Faculties

Business, Justice and Behavioural Sciences

Arts and Education

Science

Job type January February March 2017 to date

General Enquiries 84 81 39 204

Interact Help/Educational Technologies 251 339 205 695

Online Meeting (Adobe Connect) 33 84 52 169

Educational Design Assistance – Online Subject Design

71 114 55 240

SRS Dashboard

With the help of the DSL Adaptive Learning and Teaching team, Learning Design has moved the monthly SRS reporting from a static spreadsheet to a dynamic online dashboard which shows the monthly statistics and overall trends, with easy drop down menus to compare different months or SRS job category. The overall faculty report has been made available to the DSL Executive and Faculty Executive, Deputy Dean, Associate Dean Academic, Sub Dean (L&T) whilst Heads of School can see their school Learning Design SRS statistics here:

https://bi.csu.edu.au/#/site/CSUAnalytics-Prod/views/DSLSRSRequestsforaSchool/JobsOpened

Linda Ward

University of Papua New Guinea Visit

In conjunction with the Division of International Education and Partnerships, the Division of Student Learning hosted a delegation from the University of Papua New Guinea in early March. The Learning Design Unit played a large part in this visit, with Educational Designers talking to the delegation how they work with academic staff.

Presentations by William Adlong, Kath Dalton, Simone Ganter, Lachlan Kalache, Nathan Miles and Kellie Smyth demonstrated the importance of the role of the Educational Designer to the delegation leadership so convincingly, they returned to PNG excited about developing the capacity of their people to work in similar ways.

The PNG delegation were very impressed with how CSU does Distance Education in particular, as online education

is growing in PNG. They were also very interested to see the nexus between the academic and the work of the educational designer. This relationship is new in PNG, and seeing how it works at CSU, where the Educational Designers play a crucial role, provided valuable insight. They came away with a new appreciation of online learning and the importance of team design, development and delivery.

The visitors were also given a tour of the Wagga Wagga campus and were impressed with the facilities that we have that support blended learning, such as the connected learning spaces.

Course Design

What’s new in CourseSpaceHighlights of recent updates to CourseSpace include

Subjects

• Shared subject indicators

• Subject matrix connections to subject outcomes

Assessments

• Exportable Assessment Task criterion matrix that shows showing alignment or connections to the primary standard

• New assessment types and increased visibility of the type and value of the assessment

• Ability to have Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory mark

Products

• Export of Products and Subproducts

Usability

• Prevent loss of work through a confirmation to delete, and reminder to save

Accreditation

• Accreditation content matrix showing alignment to primary standard

• Accreditation matrix export

Details about the recent sprints are available at www.bit.ly/cs-sprints

I have used the integrated standards matrix in preparing for accreditation of the veterinary science course. I am a huge and immediate fan of this part of CourseSpace. Within the veterinary course we have developed a set of graduate attributes based on numerous graduate attribute statements that our graduates must meet (or exceed). In the software, I was able to quickly update and map the School of Animal and Veterinary Sciences vet grad attributes to CSU Graduate Learning Outcomes and to the Threshold Learning Outcomes for Health, Med and Vet - and it worked exactly as I’d hoped. We will now include the Australian Veterinary Boards Council’s attribute statements and the equivalent document from the UK. The integrated standards matrix was great to use – very time efficient and intuitive to navigate SHARANNE RAIDAL, ASSOCIATE HEAD OF SCHOOL, SCHOOL OF ANIMAL AND VETERINARY SCIENCES

Insightful Understanding people

and the world

Inclusive Stronger together

Impactful Outcome driven

Inspiring Leading for the future

Sharanne Raidal

CourseSpace GovernanceAt the Smart Learning Executive meeting on 3 April, a number of recommendations for change were approved related to the Technology stream of the project. Moving forward, releases of CourseSpace will be based on a quarterly release cycle (dates to be confirmed). A roadmap will be established that shows what features will be included in upcoming releases. A collective Advisory Group, comprising the Course Design Working Group (CDWG) and the Technology Working Group

(TWG), will review requirements on a relevance basis and meet quarterly to plan for the upcoming releases and review/showcase what has been developed in the current release. A separate Requirements Review Group will no longer be required. The separate CDWG meetings that have been happening monthly will change and only be held as required in line with release planning to address specific requirements and design matters. Participation will be on a relevance basis. Likewise, the TWG

will not meet monthly, they will meet as required to address technical matters related to IT architecture, systems integration and vendor performance. From a Governance perspective, the Smart Learning Executive meetings will also be aligned to the quarterly release cycles and additional meetings will be held in between as required. DIT and Faculty representation on the committee will also be increased as part of the focus on mainstreaming.

Shared SubjectsWith intentional course design, each subject is included as an authentic part of the course, whether core or elective and provides a way of meeting the Graduate Learning Outcomes, the appropriate Australian Qualification Framework level or industry/accreditation requirements. In a number of instances, it is reasonable to share subjects across a number of courses. These shared subjects, whether inter- or intra-faculty, may be specifically developed to meet the needs of multiple courses or they may be chosen from another course to provide specific content from another course/school or faculty.

The Course Design team has been working on a set of protocols for shared subjects to overcome some of the longstanding issues around their currency and management. This includes both intra-faculty subjects that are developed for use across a number of courses, without a ‘home’ course, and the inclusion of existing subjects that were designed for a specific course and will ensure the integrity of subjects is maintained, while their contribution to the overall design of the course has relevance and value, and that this remains so throughout the course lifecycle.

When selecting a subject that is shared, the course team maps the subject assessment tasks to the course products and, importantly, communicates with the subject developer to inform them of the use of the subject, and to discuss any particular needs they may perceive in terms of student experience. Vital to the ongoing inclusion in any course is a protocol to ensure that if changes are to be made to the subject, the coordinator/convenor/developer is able to inform all CDs who use the subject.

To support these processes, CourseSpace now contains Faculty–based subject banks, one for each of AQF levels 7, 8 and 9, to house shared subjects. When subjects are entered in these spaces, their design detail – such as assessment tasks and outcomes – can be mapped to ensure internal subject alignment and they can then be imported into other course structures to be mapped against products and standards. An imported subject can only be edited in its original CourseSpace. In the space it is imported into, it can be mapped to products and all internal alignments can be seen.

The team has been working to establish a similar SIAS CourseSpace for subjects developed in that school for use across the University (IKC subjects) to help ensure quality Indigenous Australian content is included in each course.

Project Status

Dallas Woolley joined the Smart Learning team as project manager at the end of January, replacing Dawn Calvert who was project manager throughout the Smart Learning Refresh stages.

Dallas brings expertise in information technology projects in corporate education settings, having worked on the development and implementation of Learning Management Systems for organisations ranging from the Queensland Government to Endeavour College of Natural Health. Based in Brisbane, he is currently studying at MBA at CSU.

Dallas’ interest in change management processes will serve him well in the role, as his overarching task with Smart Learning is to manage the transition into mainstream operations. This will be a large scale-up. Currently, 8-10 courses per year are being reviewed in CourseSpace; this will eventually

grow to 30 or more courses per year. This mainstreaming will require a coordinated effort to manage both the technology and workload aspects.From a process and practice perspective, there are a number of areas currently being reviewed. Primarily the focus is on building expertise in the faculties through professional learning ensuring that faculties are self-sufficient and have ownership of the course design process. From an IT perspective, delivering key functionality in CourseSpace, refining the processes for future updates and ensuring scalability of the tool are crucial.

Subject Integrity ProcessUnder a directive from the Smart Learning Executive, the Course Design Leads are proposing a Subject Integrity process as an additional waypoint in the Course Design. This is a discussion between stakeholders such as the Course Director, Head of School, Subject Convenor, Educational Designer and GLO Advisors during which they evaluate a subject’s outcomes and assessments against course aims, objectives, pedagogical aspirations and delivery. The goal is to ensure that subjects, when delivered, maintain the integrity of course design to ensure that the goals are met. This process will take place before the delivery of any subject in a course that has just undergone review, following the subject development stage.

A pilot of the Subject Integrity Discussion was conducted using the Bachelor of Social Sciences (Welfare) to develop a procedure that is responsive to the demands of stakeholders involved in subject development and delivery. Further testing and refinement was conducted with the Bachelor of Occupational Therapy.

The Subject Integrity Discussion is a collegial process of exchanging ideas rather than being focused exclusively on University policy compliance. Focused on constructive alignment, pedagogy and reflective teaching practice, it uses self-organising principles to build connections between the academics and stakeholders and the design and development of subjects.

The team is now seeking feedback from Schools and Faculties over the next couple of months.

Dallas Woolley

For more information about the

Learning Design Unit contact:

P: 02 6933 2056

E: dsladmin@csu.edu.au

W: csu.edu.au/division/student-learning/home/csu-curriculum/what-is-learning-design

Design and P

rint: CS

U P

rint | print@csu.edu.au

Course Design PresentationThe Division of Student Learning hosted Professor Geoff Crisp of University of New South Wales in April. Professor Crisp presented a seminar on learning design. The slides are available at http://bit.ly/crisp-design

Geoff Crisp

For more information about the

Learning Design Unit contact:

P: 02 6933 2056

E: dsladmin@csu.edu.au

W: csu.edu.au/division/student-learning/home/csu-curriculum/what-is-learning-design

Design and P

rint: CS

U P

rint | print@csu.edu.au

Course Design PresentationThe Division of Student Learning hosted Professor Geoff Crisp of University of New South Wales in April. Professor Crisp presented a seminar on learning design. The slides are available at http://bit.ly/crisp-design

Geoff Crisp

Scenario-Based and Role Play Learning Workshop for School of Policing

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Scenario-BasedandRolePlayLearningWorkshopforSchoolofPolicing

TheLearningDesignUnithostedaworkshopconsistingof2halfdaysessionsformorethan60teachingstaffoftheSchoolofPolicing.AspartofthedesignofthesessionEDsconsultedwiththeparticipantswithinthesessiontomakethisamodelledactivelearningexperienceandalsoapersonalisedprofessionaldevelopmentsession.

Theworkshopprovidedteachingstafftheopportunitytodevelopconfidenceinfacilitatingwell-structuredlearningexperiencesusingscenarioandroleplaylearningpedagogiesintheADPPclassroom.Theyalsohadtheopportunitytoactivelyevaluate,analyseandreflectonfacilitatingscenarioandrole-playbasedlearningexperiencesthatenablestudentstodeveloptherequiredknowledgeandskillsinauthenticcontextsthattheywillencounterintheclassroom.

The Learning Design Unit hosted a workshop consisting of 2 half day sessions for more than 60 teaching staff of the School of Policing. As part of the design of the session EDs consulted with the participants within the session to make this a modelled active learning experience and also a personalised professional development session.

The workshop provided teaching staff the opportunity to develop confidence in facilitating well-structured learning experiences using scenario and role play learning pedagogies in the ADPP classroom. They also had the opportunity to actively evaluate, analyse and reflect on facilitating scenario and role-play based learning experiences that enable students to develop the required knowledge and skills in authentic contexts that they will encounter in the classroom.

1

Scenario-BasedandRolePlayLearningWorkshopforSchoolofPolicing

TheLearningDesignUnithostedaworkshopconsistingof2halfdaysessionsformorethan60teachingstaffoftheSchoolofPolicing.AspartofthedesignofthesessionEDsconsultedwiththeparticipantswithinthesessiontomakethisamodelledactivelearningexperienceandalsoapersonalisedprofessionaldevelopmentsession.

Theworkshopprovidedteachingstafftheopportunitytodevelopconfidenceinfacilitatingwell-structuredlearningexperiencesusingscenarioandroleplaylearningpedagogiesintheADPPclassroom.Theyalsohadtheopportunitytoactivelyevaluate,analyseandreflectonfacilitatingscenarioandrole-playbasedlearningexperiencesthatenablestudentstodeveloptherequiredknowledgeandskillsinauthenticcontextsthattheywillencounterintheclassroom.

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