Current Australian Learning and Teaching Council projects
Effective teaching and support of students from low socioeconomic backgrounds: Resources for Australian higher education (2011-2012)
This research project, which is being led by Professor Marcia Devlin, will contribute to enhancing the learning and experiences of students from low socioeconomic status (LSES) in Australian higher education. The research will identify and document successful initiatives and create a new, easy-to-use and adaptable set of resources to assist institutions to effectively implement policies, programs and practices to facilitate the success of students from LSES backgrounds enrolled in higher education institutions in Australia. A key feature of this research project will be the development of a distinctive framework that embodies an Australian conception of inclusive teaching in higher education. The project will focus on effective approaches to teaching and supporting students who come to university with greater diversity in preparedness and in social and cultural capital. The findings will be applicable to a range of higher education contexts and to enhancing the experience of all students, irrespective of background.
Shaping the future of psychology through developing and assessing graduate attributes using collaborative learning (2011-2012)
Recent changes to the accreditation of psychologists in Australia have brought into sharp focus the competencies of psychologists. Now more than ever, psychology graduates need to demonstrate various graduate attributes pertaining to specialist knowledge of the discipline, the application of this knowledge, critical thinking, and research and communication skills. As a result of this recent emphasis on psychology graduate attributes, calls have been made to: (1) assess these attributes in the undergraduate psychology courses offered to students, and (2) design curricula that embed learning activities fostering the development of these attributes. Despite this need, there exists no valid measure of psychology graduate attributes, nor have curricula been designed to assist students in achieving these attributes. This project fills these gaps by refining a self and peer assessment measure of psychology graduate attributes, and developing an innovative problem-based, collaborative learning approach to enhance psychology students’ development of these attributes and improve learning outcomes. The project has significant ramifications for psychology Australia-wide.
This project is being led by HERG member Dr Gery Karantzas. HERG members Susie Macfarlane and Associate Professor Greg Tooley are members of the project team.
Sustainable leadership of teaching and learning initiatives: Lessons from the Promoting Excellence Initiative (2010-2012)
To assist universities with the organisational and operational change required for institutions and their staff to engage in a meaningful way with the Australian Learning and Teaching Council programs, $9,420,000 was committed by the ALTC to 42 institutions under the Promoting Excellence Initiative (PEI). This project, led by Associate Professor Judy Nagy, will examine what was implemented and embedded through the PEI and determine to what extent initiatives have had a positive impact in terms of promoting excellence and engagement in learning and teaching. We contend that successful initiatives are contingent upon the contextual environment, formal leaders, others within the leadership hierarchy and the expectations of staff they are intended to motivate. The contributions of this project will be the transparent reporting of effective institutional leadership, structural arrangements and relationships that contribute to constructive engagement with ALTC objectives. The second contribution of the project will be to make transparent the challenges for leadership that operate across, within and through academic ‘silos’ and the ways in which these might be best managed and overcome.
Building distributed leadership in designing and implementing a quality management framework for Online Learning Environments (2010-2012)
This project, which is being led by HERG member Associate Professor Dale Holt (ITL) with HERG members Dr Stuart Palmer (ITL) and Mr James Quealy (KMD) as team members, will design and implement a framework that uses a distributed leadership approach for the quality management of Online Learning Environments (OLE) in Australian higher education. The distributed leadership approach will enable the development of the framework and in turn contribute to its implementation. The framework will be the vehicle for building leadership capacity. The project will draw upon the combined expertise and strengths of the five partner universities using different learning management systems and approaches to social networking and who are at various stages of deploying their next generation online learning environments. The universities involved represent different groupings of institutions in the sector and each is reliant on disparate leadership groups to successfully implement and sustain their environments. The project will determine the key components of such a quality management framework and the key sources of evidence that need to be collected to ensure that institutional investments generate good student learning experiences.
The project is being undertaken in partnership with Macquarie University, University of Southern Queensland, University of South Australia and RMIT University.
Website: Online learning environments (OLE) project
