D Sadler

Delivering Institutional Priorities in Learning and Teaching Through a Social Learning Model: Embedding a High Impact Community of Practice Initiative at the University of Tasmania

This chapter describes the University of Tasmania’s Communities of Practice Initiative (CoPI), established in 2011 by the Deputy Vice Chancellor (Students and Education). The purpose of the CoPI is to provide collaborative professional learning opportunities for staff around priority and special interest areas in learning and teaching. Importantly, the CoPI is supported with strategic funding, allocated to promote the development of emergent, evolving and broad-reaching Communities of Practice (CoP). Coordinated by the central learning and teaching unit of the University of Tasmania, the CoPI provides on-going professional development for participants to support them to establish, facilitate, disseminate and sustain their work. Since 2011, the CoPI has funded over 30 CoPs in three distinct programs. The initiative has raised the profile of learning and teaching across the institution and increased the number of staff actively participating in learning and teaching scholarship. The CoPI is recognised by staff to provide collegial learning opportunities and space to engage with colleagues from other parts of the University with similar interests. This chapter outlines the background, establishment, and on-going development of the CoPI, including the professional learning opportunities afforded to participants through the initiative. In doing so, this chapter showcases a whole-of-institution program that has delivered professional learning opportunities for individuals and groups leading to institutional change and the enhancement of the learning and teaching culture across the University of Tasmania.

Learning to Share: Adaptation studies and Open Educational resources

This chapter does not discuss a particular approach to teaching adaptation studies. It is about finding more ways to share information about what we do in the classroom, getting feedback on our own teaching innovations and practices, and adding to our own resources though properly cited access to other people’s ideas and practices. It is a utopian ambition in many ways, an idea beset with so many problems that reflects the realities of most academics’ daily lives. In an area such as adaptation studies, opportunities for sharing within institutions may be minimal, with modules/units sometimes scattered across a number of disciplines, produced by individuals who may be isolated in their own departments or schools. Sharing resources is not about cutting corners or abdicating responsibility, autonomy, or curbing creativity; it may allow for faster innovation and change or diversity in the curriculum. In this way students profit from a cross-fertilization of ideas, and lecturers can browse materials produced by others as a way of refreshing as well as reflecting upon their own teaching. Different approaches to teaching may enable another person to pilot a new approach in their own department and perhaps gain professional recognition in the area of learning and teaching, a feature of academic life too often unrewarded.