Reaching the Wider Learning Community: Exploring the Support and Design of Media Enhanced Teaching

As higher education courses are increasingly expected to have an online presence, academic staff are faced not only with workload challenges but also with changes to the type of work in which they are involved and consequently the skills, dispositions and support that is required. Within the Faculty of Education at Queensland University of Technology, several mini-cases relating to microinnovations in the design of video in online teaching were examined for the purpose of understanding these challenges. The investigation is significant in that it takes a broader view of the learning communities involved in design to include academic peers, technical support staff and facility managers. In considering this broader learning community, it is clear that a proactive approach is needed at the faculty level to ensure that the work of innovators and early adopters is recognised and shared in a way that contributes to wide scale and sustainable implementation of new ideas. Project background, purpose and activities Over the past eighteen months, the Faculty of Education at Queensland University of Technology has funded an ongoing study of the design and support of media enhanced teaching. The project, known by the acronym DOMET (Design of Media Enhanced Teaching), acknowledges that the challenge of getting new media to work both technically and pedagogically attracts the innovators and early adopters within the faculty, while the complexities of working with unstable technologies often means that the work of these pioneers is unsupported by technical staff, unrecognised by academic peers and unsustainable on a wider scale. The purpose of the DOMET project is to help remedy this situation by accompanying ‘technopedagogical’ pioneers, from a faculty level, as they begin to blaze trails in the application of new media to teaching and learning. Joining these pioneers on their journey involves a type of fourth level evaluation [3], where the purpose of observation and participation is to support the needs of all stakeholders, in this instance pioneers, less adventurous academic staff and technical staff. To this end, DOMET personnel play the role of supportive friends whose tasks include erecting signposts for future explorers, sending back news from the frontier and eventually creating maps for both academic and technical staff to follow. These ‘travelogues’ encourage other academics to become explorers while at the same time assisting technical support officers and facility managers to predict future demands and plan for scalable and sustainable support mechanisms. Sharing this journey represents a proactive approach to providing support through peer networking and developing communities of practice [4, 1, 2]. The methodology applied in DOMET is aligned with an action research philosophy. In particular, the preplanning stage where stakeholders are identified and effective working relationships are established is a key focus of DOMET. Significant events in the enactment of the project include identifying staff engaged in or about to engage in media explorations; contributing academic and technical expertise where necessary; documenting pedagogical and technical features of media explorations; publication of exemplars and pathways on an internet support site; promoting exchange of ideas between academic and technical staff and developing a meta-view of design issues by comparing and contrasting these various media mini-cases.