Despite these potential problems and the initial apprehension of some students, online support and a couple of personal discussions with a handful of students resolved all problems rapidly. Personal and formal reports evidenced the increased ICT literacy of the students generally and, for some, the conquest of fears.<\/p>\n

The design and presentation of the subject was assessed by informal discussion, focus groups, interview and anonymous questionnaire with subsequent detailed analysis. Because of the short development time, online materials were being produced just in time; perhaps the single benefit of this was the ability to use informal feedback to improve subsequent materials.<\/p>\n

The students\u2019 responses were extraordinarily positive (both verbally and in the formal quality of teaching questionnaires): most students\u2019 quickly grasped the power of the multimodality so that motivation was high, with performance in summative assessments exceeding that of prior years. The staff, too, were motivated by the opportunities to have dialogue in the classroom rather than the one-way transfer of information that typifies the lecture. It was reported that a high-level meeting had hailed the subject as the best in the Faculty’s new courses.<\/p>\n

The success of this subject demonstrated to staff and students the effectiveness of powerfully using ICT, a message that could be taken into other subjects and into more general life.<\/p>\n

Although the development timeline was halved due to administrative delays, the product was delivered on time and under budget.<\/p>\n

Apart from my role in chairing the content development, I created most of the resulting online materials, the study guides and CD-based videos. I also co-ordinated aspects of the project that required a graphic artist and programmer and directed a team of research assistants who handled some major copyright issues. Towards the end of the semester, I oversaw the devising of a questionnaire (separate from the quality of teaching questionnaires) to examine many aspects of the subjects; I analyzed all of the resulting data.<\/p>\n

I delivered this subject at my campus and co-ordinated the multicampus subjects. Prior to and throughout the development and delivery, I coached the other staff. At the same time, I co-ordinated, delivered and assessed five other Higher Education subjects (two by distance education) and one in TAFE, as well as supervising student projects and working on another large project (‘The Burnley Plant Directory’). I also held the role of laboratory manager with its associated organizational, budgetary, safety and personnel responsibilities.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Learning materials – The Biology of Plant Production   A large and complex project developing a semester-long subject for multimodal (blended) delivery to students in the first semester of applied science courses in agriculture, horticulture, natural resource management. Most of the students were on-campus for the semester but some had only a mid-semester residential session. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","czr-hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/learningspark.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/learningspark.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/learningspark.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/learningspark.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/learningspark.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=563"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/learningspark.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":873,"href":"https:\/\/learningspark.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563\/revisions\/873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/learningspark.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/learningspark.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/learningspark.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}