Note: "Unit of study" means "course" in aussie.
some more info:
The project will provide an innovative solution to issues faced by teaching staff during the design and management of units of study. This solution comes in the form of software functionalities not available in any other university systems (student management, content management and course management systems).
The system will offer three sets of functionalities, all centred around the unit of study: 1) Student visualization in the form of dynamic concept maps produced automatically from Unit of Study Outlines, 2) Teaching functionalities to improve collaboration with colleagues and communication with tutors, 3) Management functionalities to improve administrative activities relating to quality assurance processes, professional development and budget reporting. The Faculty of Engineering is already funding the development of the first set of functionalities through a Teaching Improvement Fund. This project will focus on the next two as below.
Teaching functionalities
These will comprise a workflow-based system for Unit of Study (UoS) administration. The workflow could include a number of pre-built triggers that each institution could select based on their internal processes. The whole application would have a single data model centred on the UoS and designed to allow a relational database to use the information input by staff in a number of ways. In this way, instead of filling out many different administration forms at different times with repetitive information, an academic can enter information once, and it can be used automatically to speed up other processes and even be used for new and innovative outcomes not possible before, including:
1) Administration, publication and versioning. Academics will be able to write the UoS outline as they design the unit.
2) Unit ‘requirements’ and ‘recommended electives’ (normally included in a UoS outline) will be used to produce concept maps that help students better understand relationships between units.
3) Tracking of graduate attributes developed in a unit
4) Automatic timelines that prevent schedule overlaps and improve coordination between units
5) Efficient textbook requests. As soon as the academic publishes the list of books to be used, the library and local bookstore are informed.
6) Workflows for budgeting and approval of tutor time.
Additionally, collaboration functionalities will facilitate communities of practice around teaching areas and shared teaching journals.
Management functionalities
Academic management roles (i.e. Head, Dean, Directors of Teaching and Learning or Undergraduate Studies) often face difficulties with 1) managing quality assurance processes, 2) professional development efforts, 3) budgetary planning and 4) communication with academics. This project is aimed at reducing the load of these efforts and improving the quality of outcomes. Specifically:
1) Quality assurance processes
- Managing student workload by making sure that the number of daily/weekly deadlines does not exceed some value.
- Managing graduate attributes by guaranteeing that each course satisfies the minimum required by its professional association (i.e. Engineers Australia) and documenting teaching strategies that prove successful to teach those attributes.
- Students’ evaluations are extremely important to quality and the tool would provide simple analysis, results graphing and record-keeping.
2) Professional development
- Processing of scholarship index and DEST reporting
- Recording of publications and other T&L contributions useful to the teaching community
3) Budgetary
- Tutor allocation and management
- Academic allocation and loading. This feature could allow for the analysis of how a new management strategy affects loadings on “presentation”, “design”, “tutoring”, “marking” and other teaching activities
4) Communication
The .LRN system to be used is already a very mature collaboration tool. Collaboration features would allow a better communication of policies and requirements and more importantly improve conviviality within the institution.
