Principles of Teaching, Learning and the Student Experience
Staff
Our courses are designed first and foremost to be relevant to the career and life aspirations of students, equip students to adapt to an ever-changing global environment and be informed by high quality, contemporary research and consultation with industry, employers and government.
Human society, and especially the world of work, is constantly evolving, and, contemporary courses of university study that aim to best prepare students for their chosen discipline, and for operating in the wider world beyond employment, should reflect these developments. Course learning objectives, the curriculum content, the learning activities employed and the assessment methods used should reflect these changes by being responsive to current developments in culture, in the relevant discipline/profession, and, in effective teaching and learning approaches. Courses that seek to benefit students beyond the use-by date of discipline-specific technical knowledge should also aim to equip students with the ability to reflect on their own knowledge, skills and attitudes, and to engage with appropriate forms of on-going personal and professional development.
To ensure that courses are contemporary and forward looking, a range of stakeholders should be consulted in the design of courses and learning outcomes. Naturally, the institutional graduate attributes fundamentally influence the design and conduct of Deakin's courses, implicitly shaping them to respond to Deakin's specific institutional mission. Traditionally, particularly for professional undergraduate courses, the relevant course accrediting body has been a strong influence in specifying required graduate attributes/learning outcomes.
Apart from addressing these internal and external course accreditation requirements, other important stakeholders have a valid claim in contributing to the definition of a relevant, comprehensive and contemporary course of study, including:
To ensure the best outcomes in course design, it is important that the stakeholder consultation be broad, inclusive and, most importantly, representative of the current and real world of activity of course graduates. Relevant courses will provide students with the best employment and other outcomes when they graduate. Future-orientated courses will continue to serve graduates well as their careers and personal lives develop.
From the 2008 Australian Learning and Teaching Council National Teaching Award Guidelines (former Carrick Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education National Teaching Award Guidelines) the key descriptors of activity relating to command of curricula and resources in teaching excellence:
