ELEMENTS NEEDED TO ORCHESTRATE CHANGE

A Shift in Mindset

Orchestrating a successful student learning experience

In the world of face-to-face learning, the lecturer was central to the learning process, playing the role of “expert soloist”.

In a digitally-enabled world, the lecturer continues to play a critical role – this time as the conductor of a learning experience orchestra.

ELEMENT 1

Understanding Learners

Learners have a world of choice 

Learners in a digital world have the choice of how much, if at all, to engage in the digital learning.

In a digital world, learner centricity is a key to achieving learner engagement.

What are the different learner personas? What are the preferences and challenges that learners face? How long should a learning bite be? In what format? Do learners have access to devices to engage in the learning? Do they feel comfortable with technology? These are just some of the questions that university educators must ask and answer to understand and enhance the student experience.

Learner centricity requires a mindset of seeking to understand learners at a deep level. This requires that universities adopt ‘human-centric' design to the planning and implementation of digital (including blended) learning.

ELEMENT 2

Confidence with Learning Technologies

Understanding comfort levels of students

The digital world offers a wide array of learning technologies that can enhance the learner experience to achieve better learning outcomes. It is important for the learning design team to be familiar and comfortable with the technology options. 

ELEMENT 3

Design
the Learner Experience

'Fit for Purpose' Learning Design 

Engaging learner experiences are created when academic content is combined with the appropriate learning design as well as enabling technologies. The foundation of all high quality university learning and teaching is the academic content. Well designed university education - whether delivered digitally or via blended learning - must respect the integrity of this academic content – there is no compromise here. The learner experience must fulfill of the same learning outcomes but with an enhanced digitally enabled student learning experience.  

ELEMENt 4

Engaging delivery

Student Engagement is crucial

The skills of engaging delivery in a digital setting can be learned - and the face-to-face approach may not translate. A major factor in the face-to-face learning approach is the presence of direct human-to-human engagement. The mere fact that there are two or more humans in the same physical space permits and enables that natural presence of of human engagement. Thus, in the move to digital and online learning, the loss of this direct human engaging, which naturally leads to student engagement with the academic materials, need to be substituted with a new approach – and a digitally enabled approach – to student engagement. This is one reasons why taking learning design that is used in face-to-face learning mode and ‘putting it online’ will likely result in a poor student experience. The learning design in face-to-face mode is not directly ‘fit for purpose’ in the online learning world. 

ELEMENt 5

Learning Reinforcement

Supporting ongoing understanding 

We can provide you with insights and options to reinforce and assess the student learning outcomes provided in digitally enabled higher education.

These assessments can be 'real-time', that is as the learning journey is underway using data for the learning journey. There are also options to assess learning outcomes post-learning.

These can augment each university's own student and course evaluation surveys, and the Australian Federal government’s QILT (Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching) data on student satisfaction.

Providing a strengthened student learning experience that is enhanced and enabled for online and digitally delivered education will inevitably impact significantly on these scores.