Quality Assurance and our responsibilities: a module under development

Julie Fleming and Kogi Nadioo are developing the module on 'Quality Assurance and our responsibilities ­ helping guide your career development’. Our introduction should provide you with enough information to help demonstrate where we are taking the module. We’d be happy for your feedback.

In this module you will gain an understanding of the overarching learning and teaching frameworks that assure the quality of Australia¹s higher education providers, including your institution. We start by examining the overarching regulatory body TEQSA (Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency) https://education.gov.au/final-proposed-higher-education-standards-framework, whose role is to safeguard the interests of students as well as to accredit our courses and units. From January 2017, a new regulatory framework applies to all registered providers of higher education in Australia. The framework is known as the Higher Education Standards Framework and it describes a range of specifically developed threshold standards all institutions must meet.

Our responsibility as educators is to understand these requirements, ensuring compliance. A second important framework governing our institutions is the AQF (Australian Qualifications Framework). This framework is the national policy for determining Australian qualifications in education.

Moving on from these overarching regulatory frameworks, we will then examine your institution¹s related policies and procedures that help assure and enhance the quality of course learning and teaching. This will include understanding your role as an educator and the impact of, for example, policies and guidelines relating to academic integrity and your institution¹s code of conduct.

Another important consideration is collecting and examining different datasets to inform the assurance of those standards. These include internal unit and teaching evaluations and external data including Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching (QILT).

Our aim is that you are continually reflecting on the impact of your academic/professional role through quality enhancement and alignment with internal and external frameworks supporting the quality of learning and teaching. Upon completion of this module, you will develop a personal development plan, based on your choice of a professional development standards framework, that will support you in completing your probation requirements and/or set you up to progress in your higher education career.

Julie and Kogi

Scholarly teaching and scholarship of teaching: continually improving your teaching

Dear All

We are developing the module on scholarly teaching and sotl. This module is expected to provide 2 hours of engagement by the participants. So the module is a practical introduction to the concepts and at the end, we will direct people who want to engage further, to resources/literature.

The ‘table of contents’ for the module is given below. What we want to do in the module is introduce new teaching staff to the difference between being a scholarly teacher and engaging in the scholarship of teaching. We’ll ask staff to: view a video clip of international colleagues discussing their definitions of SoTL; skim a chapter on the benefits of SoTL; and find a teaching and learning journal in their discipline.

Then we plan to introduce the different types of evaluation strategies that can be used to improve teaching and collect evidence to improve student learning and for probation, promotion, teaching awards. This work will be based on the 2009 Light, Cox and Caulkin evaluation chapter in their book “Learning and teaching in higher education”. Strategies include things like peer review, buzz groups, questionnaires, reflective triads, and focus groups. In terms of activities, we will ask participants to try one of the strategies.

As we are in the process of finalising our module, we would appreciate your thoughts on the current approach to the module and our questions below.

1. Can you suggest great resources that we simply must include?
2. Are there particular (short) activities that we might consider?
3. Any other feedback?

Module table of contents

Welcome video (introduction to the module)

Context and definitions

Teaching and learning scholars

Why take a scholarly teaching approach?

Concerns about SoTL (the pros and cons of engaging in L&T research)

Where do I start?

Using evaluation to improve your students’ learning

• Buzz groups
• Peer review of teaching
• Questionnaires
• Etc

Where do I get help from/go from here?

Using SoTL and scholarly teaching to progress your career

Resources

 

Kym Fraser, Swinburne University of Technology

Bernie Fisher, Australian Catholic University

Planning for Learning – a module in development!

One of the first modules that participants in our teaching induction MOOC can choose to work through is the 'Planning for Learning' module. Below Sally and Rosie talk about the approach that they are taking in the module and ask for any thoughts, resources, activities that they might find useful in their module. Each module aims to engage participants for no more than two hours, however the module can provide extension resources for those participants who want to explore the topic further.

There are no surprises in the statement that the process of developing this module mirrors the process of planning for learning per se!   It was tempting to submit the many iterations of the module as a demonstration of the iterative process that often reflects the planning process.  Having gone through the process we have settled on the following key elements around which to focus the module.  We begin with the context as that provides an overall framework for learning. In the context we briefly consider who are the students, where will the learning occur, what the purpose of the learning is and what resources are available. The focus then shifts to the outcomes for the learning - so what are the learning outcomes for the material being taught and how are these outcomes to be assessed?  Our module then asks the question ‘How does learning happen?’ by which we introduce learning strategies by way of learning tasks as the method for the learning to occur.   The emphasis here is to move the participant from telling their student all there is to know about their unit to have their students actively involved in developing the knowledge and skills required of the unit. This section will also incorporate timing and lesson structure. The fourth section centres on utilising checking strategies to gauge the learning progress within their sessions.  The participants will be asked to utilise a graphic organiser to reflect on these aspects of planning as it relates to their institution and the teaching of their discipline. Additional resources will be linked to the module eg lesson plan templates, learning strategies and learning tasks and weblinks for further support and ideas.

We are not quite finished with our module as yet so are happy to have any questions, thoughts or ideas sent our way for further consideration! 

Rosie Greenfield and Sally Gauci - Victoria University

Online learning and teaching induction program progress report

Dear All

I hope that 2017 has started well for you.

The Fellowship team is making sure and steady progress on the development of the modules (named in the December 14 post). Two colleagues are developing each module and an outline of each proposed module has been reviewed by a topic expert and feedback has been provided. Colleagues are now working to develop their modules fully in order to send to them back to their expert reviewer in March.

Over the next few months we will post information about each of the modules and ask your advice on what we are proposing to cover in them.

The Fellowship team has collected survey and interview data from over 20 colleagues in the Australian higher education sector who are in charge of their institution’s teaching induction program. The results provide an interesting snapshot of current provision in our sector.

Earlier this month I reported to the funders of this fellowship, the Australian Department of Education and Training, on progress at the six month mark of the Fellowship. We are on time and within budget on all outcomes. The research that we have conducted is ‘extra’ to the original application. All in all, I am delighted with the progress we are making in the Fellowship and I am immensely grateful to everyone who is contributing to the Fellowship. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable and fabulous collaborative effort.

Cheers

Kym

Learning and Teaching Induction program development review approach

Dear All

On October 24th and 25th the Teaching induction Fellowship team is coming together to workshop the development of the online Learning and Teaching Induction Program (LTIP). We will:

• discuss implications for LTIP of the teaching induction literature, a survey of current teaching induction programs that we are in the process of completing, and  reports from program directors of three different teaching induction programs from the sector;
• agree the outcomes of LTIP for participants and the principles that underpin LTIP;
• consider issues such as assessment, badging, certification;
• propose different models for LTIP, and agree a model;
• determine the topic areas to be covered in LTIP and begin outlining same;
• trial an approach that will enable consistency across LTIP; and
• discuss what we need from a MOOC platform.

In the original fellowship application, we proposed the following review process for our development of LTIP:

1. Post the workshop we will take the LTIP model that we have chosen, content topics that we have agreed, and other documents developed in the workshop and send those materials to a number of critical friends in the sector who have agreed to make comment on same, including the Fellowship reference group.
2. In light of that feedback, hopefully by the end of November, we will discuss and make changes to our model, content, documentation and begin the development of the LTIP curriculum.
3. As the content is developed, the curriculum will be reviewed by topic experts, members of the reference group, Fellowship team members and other critical friends.
4. When the content is developed in the platform we choose, the fellowship team and fellowship reference group members will review the program and provide feedback before LTIP is piloted in semester 2, 2017.

 I would be grateful for any thoughts fellowship team members and critical friends of the fellowship (i.e. anyone who reads this blog), have on both the workshop elements and the LTIP development review process proposed.
cheers
Kym

Principles to underpin the online learning and teaching induction program

Dear Colleagues

I'd like to have your input into the sorts of principles that you think ideally would underpin the learning and teaching induction program that we develop through this fellowship. While we don't yet know the form that the program will take, we do know that it will be fully online and that it is unlikely that any one person will be moderating the program (so many things to consider in designing the program).

I believe that it will be extremely useful if we could identify some core principles that underpin the work that we do. In this way, when we have decisions to make about the program, we can go back to the principles when needed.

Below are some principles that the Fellowship Reference Group have suggested for our consideration. I would love your opinion on these and also other principles that you would like us to consider.

cheers

Kym

The program is:

1. engaging
2. based in the context of the participant's work environment - relevant, authentic
3. structured so that participants can easily see what pathway through the program best suits them
4. brief, providing layers of information so that the participant has the choice to engage at a surface level of the topic/module or to delve further
5. task oriented such that participants are asked to explore their own organisation and share what they find
6. linked to institutional imperatives.

Key concepts to introduce through our LTIP

In 2008 Peter Kandlbinder and Tai Peseta reported on their work to determine the key higher education L&T concepts developed in Graduate Certificates in HE L&T. Peter and Tai identified the five most frequent concepts from information from 46 programs in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom: reflective practice; constructive alignment; deep and surface approaches to learning; the scholarship of teaching; and assessment driven learning.

Our teaching induction program will be a semester long and will likely require about 20 hours of participant engagement. This is very different from an accredited graduate certificate.

Which if any of these concepts do you believe we need to introduce in our teaching induction program?

Are there other concepts that you believe we need to introduce in the program?

cheers

Kym

Kandlbinder, P. and Peseta T. (2009). Key concepts in postgraduate certificates in higher education teaching and learning in Australasia and the United Kingdom. International Journal for Academic Development. 14:1, 19–31