MOOC pilot underway

Dear Colleagues


The pilot of our Fellowship MOOC 'Contemporary approaches to university teaching' is well and truly underway with just under 200 colleagues enrolled. I had hoped that perhaps we'd enrol 100 colleagues in the MOOC and am therefore overwhelmed by the response.


Participant feedback on the MOOC has been extremely positive and we have gleaned very useful information from the participants which will help us when we revise the MOOC in time for launching early in 2018.


As well as the participants enrolled in the MOOC, approximately 30 colleagues nationally and internationally have requested guest access to review the MOOC. Again, their responses have been overwhelmingly positive with several universities indicating that they want to use the MOOC for their staff teaching professional development when we launch next year.


Teaching induction research
In the next few weeks the blog will host posts from colleagues who have recently had their teaching induction research published - Don Houston and Cassandra Hood from Flinders University Australia, and Schalk Fredericks from North-West University South Africa. Also expect to see a post from Denise Chalmers and Lynne Hunt on their recent publication on evaluating teaching.


If you wish to contribute to the blog about your teaching induction program, please do contact me at kfraser@swin.edu.au


cheers


Kym

To quiz or not to quiz?

Dear All

Colleagues from 19 Australian universities are contributing to the development of the ‘Contemporary Australian Teaching Practices’ MOOC which we will pilot in semester 2, 2017. As the MOOC is designed specifically for university staff who are new to teaching, we have designed it to introduce basic concepts such as how to provide constructive feedback or teach a diversity of students.  Ideally I would like to see our new teaching colleagues spend about two hours a week across a semester, exploring a different topic every week.

However, it is possible that some colleagues who have been teaching previously will access the MOOC. While I want to encourage people to dip into all of the 11 modules, people will of course, pick and choose what is of value to them: just in time, just for me.

I wonder if it would be useful therefore to have say one multiple choice question from each module in a preliminary ‘self assessment’ quiz, which colleagues could use to guide their choices.

What do you think? To quiz or not to quiz???

Cheers

Kym