Gayani Samarawickrema

The criteria of effective teaching in a changing higher education context

The criteria of effective teaching in higher education are understood to comprise particular skills and practices applied within particular contexts. Drawing on the literature and using Australia’s understanding of effective teaching, this paper examines the notion of effective teaching. The paper specifically compares dimensions derived from robust research and psychometric processes with the Australian Learning and Teaching Council’s criteria for effective teaching and observes the criteria of effective teaching in higher education to have evolved. While the paper suggests some areas in which future considerations of the notion of effective teaching might usefully focus, it also argues that context is critical and that it is subject to continuous and multiple changes imposed by forces from within and outside universities. The paper maintains that our collective understanding of competent, professional and effective teaching must continually evolve in order that it accurately reflects and continually responds to the contexts in which learning and teaching is undertaken. The paper also calls for an ongoing agenda that continuously investigates and articulates the meaning of effective teaching in a changed, and changing, context.

Adopting Web-Based Learning and Teaching: A Case Study in Higher Education

Most universities worldwide are becoming distance education providers through adopting web‐based learning and teaching via the introduction of learning management systems that enable them to open their courses to both on‐ and off‐campus students. Whether this is an effective introduction depends on factors that enable and impede the adoption of such systems and their related pedagogical strategies. This study examines such factors related to adopting a learning management system in a large multicampus urban Australian university. The research method used case study approaches and purposively selected the sample consisting of innovative teaching academics from across the university, who used web‐based approaches to teach both on‐ and off‐campus learners. The data were analyzed using a combination of Rogers’ theory of diffusion of innovations and actor‐network theory and revealed a series of enabling and impeding factors faced by pioneering technology‐adopter teaching academics, some of which are technology related while others are policy related and common to large multicampus institutions. The study found that safe adoption environments recognizing career priorities of academics are a result of the continuous negotiation between the evolving institution and its innovative and creative staff. The article concludes with a series of conditions that would form a safe, enabling, and encouraging environment for technology‐adopter teaching academics in a large multicampus higher education setting.

Addressing the context of e‐learning: using transactional distance theory to inform design

The rapidly expanding range of options available for innovative e‐learning approaches based on emerging technologies has given renewed importance to teaching and learning issues that have long been familiar to distance educators. These issues arise from the separation between learners, and between teacher and learners, which occurs when learning is undertaken wholly or partly online. There may be important implications that emerge from aspects of separation, depending on whether students are studying primarily on‐campus, off‐campus, trans‐nationally, or in specific contexts such as the home, the workplace, fieldwork locations, or other places made possible by mobile learning technologies. We suggest that the context of learning has significant implications for e‐learning design, and that one way of analysing these implications is to draw on understandings from distance education, particularly the theory of transactional distance. We use cases from two Australian universities to illustrate the practical application of these implications to e‐learning design, including designs that involve Web 2.0 technologies.

Participatory Evaluation: Implications for Improving Electronic Learning and Teaching Approaches

This paper examines the participatory approach used by a group of academic support staff in evaluating an academic professional development resource designed to support e‐learning and teaching. The resource, titled Designing Electronic Learning and Teaching Approaches (DELTA), showcases examples of electronic learning and teaching approaches developed at Monash University, Australia. The evaluation included individual and collective reflection, dialogue and action, drawing on the features of participatory action research. This paper explores the value of this critically reflective, participatory approach for evaluation to improve the use of new learning technologies, demonstrating how it provided a clear decision‐making framework for iterative improvement of the DELTA site by identifying consensus items for action and recording other items for later consideration, while also contributing to team members’ own professional development.