Charles Sturt University provides learning spaces that stimulate active learning by aligning spaces, pedagogy, technologies, furniture, and strategy. At its core this strategy comes down to marrying digital and physical means to educational ends. The visual materials presented here display award-winning learning spaces on some of CSU’s eight campuses in New South Wales along with reflections on how effective these spaces have proven to be. They explore how people are creatively using blended — physical and digital — spaces, and the optimal design and layout of such spaces.
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Sessional academic staff are employed in a number of academic roles, from lecturing to field trips to course improvement. What distinguishes them from other academic staff is that they are employed on a short-term, contract basis, much like adjunct faculty in the United States. Today they are a dominant feature of the global higher education workforce whose contributions over the past 20 years have been significant.
It is conservatively estimated that sessional academics deliver more than 40% of university teaching in Australia, where the authors live and teach. While the higher education sector’s reliance upon these staff is expected to increase, our knowledge and understanding of these staff is poor. This compromises the development of policies, strategies and programs designed to engage, support and improve the high quality contributions of the sessional academic workforce over a sustained period. A more informed approach to sessional academic engagement, support and quality improvement is an essential component to operating effectively in a modern higher education sector. This paper reviews the challenges associated with the effective and sustainable engagement of the Australian sessional academic workforce.
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The University of New South Wales (UNSW) 2025 strategy supports new designs to facilitate better learning experiences for its students. This includes (re)developing many large first-year courses using more open and blended learning methods. This in turn has led to a re-examination of the University’s physical learning spaces.
This paper explores local and international case studies of different learning spaces and how new digital technologies and more student-centred learning approaches are leading to demands for new learning environments to suit changing needs in learning and teaching. The paper outlines what UNSW is doing to meet the challenges it faces for new physical learning spaces.
Keywords: Learning spaces, online-blended teaching, student learning
A tool for conducting analysis of students’ learning management system (LMS) behavior shows promise for putting powerful learning analytics (LA) capabilities into the hands of front-line teachers. The combination of advanced analyses and visualisations with explanations to aid interpretation and guide action provides teachers with LA capabilities not previously available. Teachers can use the tool as an early warning system, to predict student performance and to analyse discussion posting information. While teachers’ feedback on the tool is positive, this initiative has highlighted remaining challenges, which include ensuring that data is available for analysis and user perceptions of the tool and its usefulness.
Keywords: learning management systems, Excel tool, learning analytics, teacher development
In recent years, some colleges and universities in Japan have put effort into Presentation Training. Such training may concern not only presentations in class, but also competitions, contests, and workshops. At the Osaka Electro-Communication University, we designed a workshop for presentation training and practice that has been offered since 2012. It differs from other universities’ practices in featuring more varied audiences and presenters than customary. We believe that if we can supply presentation training in open situations for students, we can bring their presentation skills to a higher level.
Keywords: presentation training, workshop
This paper examines the potential of blogs to instil professional skills and perspectives that undergraduate accounting students require to become competent professionals in a global economy. Blogs provide a compelling platform for engaging teachers and students in discourse on media articles that examine real world accounting challenges, fallacies, and questionable practices. Blogs are an effective online learning technology that encourages critical thinking, reflection and formative feedback. Making use of CSU Thinkspace as a learning platform in an undergraduate accounting subject, preliminary evidence regarding the effectiveness of blogging for developing professional understandings and higher order thinking skills, is discussed.
Keywords: accounting, blog, professional ethics, distance learning
Many universities seek to deliver an authentic learning experience for students by utilizing a Problem Based Learning (PBL) model. Over three years, we redesigned a paramedic pharmacology subject using PBL concepts and, in doing so, found we had journeyed beyond established PBL models. The new approach uses several different student experiences and learning spaces to implement PBL, including collaborative, research, simulation, online and off-campus spaces. Initial data also suggest high levels of student satisfaction. The “multi-space” approach to PBL subject would be suitable for further rigorous evaluation of the educational design and outcomes.
Keywords: paramedic, problem-based learning (PBL), experiential learning, pharmacology
This paper will discuss the collaborative teaching and learning methods used in our UU204 “Pacific Worlds” Course at the University of the South Pacific (USP)— a generic undergraduate course offered online at the 200 level. The course draws on a discussion forum called talanoa, as well as matai assessment. The latter draws on Pacific arts such as singing, dancing, painting and poetry, which students can utilize to depict a contemporary issue affecting their community, nation or the Pacific region. Under previous modes of learning, through face-to-face and print, the students were still separated by the vast Pacific Ocean. Now, however, this distance has been bridged by the “virtual village” of online learning.
Keywords: discussion, online learning, Pacific culture, talanoa, matai, assessment
This paper will discuss the concept of the classroom as a metaphorical canoe, being a medium for cooperative teaching and learning in different spaces used in the UU204 “Pacific Worlds” Course—a generic undergraduate course at the University of the South Pacific (USP) in the online mode. In “Pacific Worlds” the canoe metaphor places the emphasis on the “journey rather than on the product or destination” and has been used to encourage co-operative learning and enhance a collaborative culture among the teachers and students. The paper will further look at past and present student experiences and comments on the course to ascertain how such a construct immerses, influences, and empower student learning.
Keywords: co-operative learning, Vygotsky, Pacific culture, decolonization, MOODLE
