Mario Barosevcic has written an interesting article Technology enabled teaching & learning in higher education where he points out the gaps he sees in the Education industry, from the perspective of the Tech Industry.

The CSU/Study Group Study Centre Library & Study support teams got together to have a discussion about this.

Key points that we pulled out of the article to discuss:

• When it comes to the education itself, most universities are the same. Professors create curricula and teach through large lecturers. Teaching assistants help distill and clarify lectures and materials. Students attend lectures, use textbooks and complete homework, assignments and exams required to graduate.

• The student learning experience is often more like a series of disconnected and fragmented experiences. The best students are those that can most effectively navigate all learning roadblocks thrown at them, with limited personalised and tailored academic support.

• Professors often lack formal training and are far behind school teachers, where there are clear qualifications and prerequisites.

• Solutions have required too much behavioral change or have offered too little impact

• Replacing the existing university Learning Management System (LMS) is an almost impossible task given how deeply engrained it is in the system and how long average contracts are. Whilst many have predicted the demise of publishers for years, no one has yet managed to replace them.

• universities have paraded the streets for decades showing off their untouchable, long established academic offers, while building moats around them through investments in flashy campuses.

• 28% of students would prefer their assessments and exams to continue to be delivered in person and 71% of students find one or more aspects of their courses should be delivered online.

On May 21st, the Study Support Team and the Library got together to share different perspectives and points of views they have read in the article provided from the conversation under the title:

(When students fail, many do nothing about it. Here’s how unis can help them get back on track).

Article selection was based on the concept of the roles of study support and library through helping students who fails. The article discusses the research has been done at Swinburne university to understand reasons of failure, roles of academic advisors as well as the roles of students to improve academic progress after failure. The research has been conducted with 230 students who have been notified of their unsatisfactory academic progress.

Here is some of the main points discussed  in this meeting to help our students who are at risk of academic progress:

• Making sure understand their roles in the academic progress process and a suggestion has been raised that raising student awareness of the importance of academic progress in the orientation week would help students understands their academic responsibility to avoid an early failure in the first session.
• All universities have procedures to identify students who fail multiple units in a semester or fail the same unit multiple times. These processes would pick up students who fail half their units, especially in their first year.
• Study Support Team aims at changing behaviour and developing new study habits as well as building a personal support network.
• Most students named multiple and compounding reasons for failing, including financial struggles, disability, and care or work responsibilities. These underlying issues cannot be resolved quickly, by students or universities
• Everyone has a role to do helping students achieve well.

Recording can be accessed here:

https://charlessturt.zoom.us/rec/share/mQIrT8FDZST3na7VrV3BDD8LzSc2is3oKxAm43GbsUIczZBJ8dIJ34rJ5BJPlH4r.SA1Hau2olPaYJ5SM

On May 7th, the Study Support Team and the Library got together to share different Professional Associations they have found and are either a member of or are considering becoming a member of. This was building on the concept of the Communities of Practice discussed a few weeks ago.

A reminder that memberships to these associations can be subsidised by Study Group. The first step would be to write a case explaining how these relate to our roles and how they would benefit the delivery of our services.

Here is a list of different Associations presented in this meeting

VicTESOL  A professional association for those in Victoria focused on Teaching English  to Speakers of Other Languages

Tesol International Association  An international association to educators, researchers, administrators and students in the ELT field

Australian Library and Information Association   The national professional organisation for the Australian library and Information services sector

Council of Australian University Librarians   A leadership organisation for the University Libraries in Australia

International Association of University Libraries

The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions  An international body representing the interests of library, information services and their users

Australian Institute of Training and Development  A professional membership organisation for Learning and Development Professionals across Australia

International Education Association of Australia   An association for individuals and organisations from across all sectors of the International Education Industry

Journal of Peer Learning

ISANA (International Students Advisers Network of Australia Inc) An international education association of Australian and New Zealand international education professionals

Association for Academic and Language Learning    An association which represents and supports academic language and learning educators in Australia

For more information and a discussion on these different Associations and Memberships,

View full recording here

On the 1st of May we discussed Virtual Rotation Stations as per Skolastika (2020)

The recording is linked here.

The article focuses on dividing classes into segments called ‘stations’:

1. Teacher-led station
2. Online Station
3. Offline Station
4. Extension Activity

These stations have been found to increase student engagement and independence.

For the online environment, these rotation stations can be facilitated through break-out rooms in zoom.

The main takeaways for our session were:

• these techniques can be trialled in online classes, with the explicit introduction of the model to students before hand.
• This model caters for “various types of students to achieve better learning results within a single classroom” (p. 54)
• engaging students can be very difficult when there is no previously established rapport. In the case of embedded support, reaching out to lecturers ahead of class and ascertaining which students might be amenable to facilitating peer engagement can be advantageous.
• The rotation models also hold the potential to be used in a simultaneous online/offline classroom, which can be explored further when the students return to campus.
• Structuring sections of class time around collaboration is encouraged, although it must be scaffolded to afford students the comfort and confidence to participate.
• Ice breakers play a crucial role, and must be based on low risk questions, with binary questions being most favourable, and open-ended questions to be avoided or used with more experienced/confident students

A trial of this station rotation is most likely to work in longer classes, such as a three hour lecture.

Overall it was good food for thought in terms of changing the norm of a classroom and how that might impact the student engagement and shake up some participation.

– Madelle

On April 23rd, the Study Support and the Library Teams read and discussed a chapter on Jarvis’s (2012) book on the topic of Adult Education and Life-Long Learning. The author focuses on 6 20th-century authors in the field of Adult Education, the first and the one most of the discussion revolved around, being Paulo Freire.

Another point of discussion this week was an Interview Freire gave in 1996 on the topics of Tolerance and Critical Thinking (discussing language, ideology and power).

View Full Discussion Video Here 

The article can be quite a challenging read, especially for those without the background in education, or adult education, mainly due to its nature as a Literature Review and the way it has chosen to present information based on authors. However, a few interesting points of discussion were raised and the main ones can be seen below:

Language, Power and Identity (Freire)

• The idea that the dominant “cultivated” language is a social, political construct (rather than an inherently lingustic determination).
• The duty the educator has to provide students access to the dominant (in our case the academic) variant while at the same time recognising that the student’s variant is beautiful and acceptable (in a given context)
• The importance of tolerance when dealing with the other (other nationality, other ethnicity)
• The need to have a conversation with students about language, about meaning, about differences in cultures and how these end up translating in  written expression
• The fact that English is a reader-centered language and the implications that has in terms of what conventions writers need to follow.
• A lack of understanding of this dominant/academic variant may lead students to a)go around in circles, rather than develop an idea and then proceed to another; b)use a thesaurus in an attempt to sound “sophisticated”
• “Education as our practice of Freedom”
• Freire’s Marxist view and its more direct application in scenarios where education is a gate-keeper to success, where the divide between “the have’s” and “the have not’s” is less blurred, or where people do not feel represented in the education they receive (such as Indigenous Peoples historically in Australia)
• How to privilege difference over deficit (acknowledging students’ differences and respecting different variants when introducing the dominant one)

Nine Phases in Instruction (Gagne’s Model)

• A good model to have in mind when designing a lesson

1.  gaining attention;
2. informing the learner of the objectives;
3. stimulating recall of prerequisite learnings;
4. presenting the stimulus material;
5. providing learning guidance;
6. eliciting the performance;
7. providing feedback about performance correctness;
8. assessing the performance;
9. enhancing retention and transfer (as cited in Jarvis, 2012, p.102)

• The differences in what “previous learning”  different students have and the importance of acknowledging their individual previous learning rather than assuming they have none. This is important for adult learners to feel their identity is being respected and a more “tolerant” approach to introducing a different/dominant variant.

Feel free to add any comments on how this discussion has impacted your teaching or how these authors relate to your practice.

A Common Reads Program at CSU Study Centres?

• Could we use personal development/self help/biographies of business people or ex-international students books?
• Could students write about their own journies to share with other students?
• Can we harness ex-Student leaders, who tend to be here “and then they’re gone”?
• Possible use of videos instead of, or in addition to, other texts. Multi-modal. Shared movie experience-film nights etc.
• Use SAF funding to buy many copies of texts for students, or to distribute from library.
• Relies on engagement from students and staff, collaboration across many departments.

Getting Students Involved As Partners in Library Activities

• Involve DSLs?
• Create “Library ambassadors”?
• Approach students and advertise the program
• Library has done similar through STRIVE program in the past
• 4 weeks programs – seemed to struggle to maintain student numbers

Other Ideas From Papers Discussed

• Student Co-Ownership of Learning
• ‘Amazing Library Race’ at Long Island University
• Games, gamification and digital badges for information literacy
• peer-to-peer learning in information literacy teaching
• Partnerships: IT services, writing centres, or student support services
• therapy dogs to be brought into the library in order to engage students
• Big Read in the United Kingdom
• common reader initiatives in general
• Student Voice
• Student employment
• student library representatives
• ‘knowledge ambassadors’ or ‘peer mentors