Drawing on students’ experiences of cinema is a key means for developing understanding of film debates. Our students come from diverse backgrounds and have different experiences of and investments in cinema and popular culture. Creating spaces in which these different investments, experiences and interests in cinema can be shared can play a dynamic role in student learning. The challenge was to teach 2nd-year film studies students a digital literacy skill that would enrich peer learning, support their understanding of film studies concepts and be a valuable employment skill. To this end, the DU team researched different techniques of GIF-making. This animation file format allows for hands-on exploration of film study concepts and is also very popular and widespread in online journalism and media production. Together with the course authority, the DU team scaffolded the GIF-making process into three sets of instructions with increasing levels of complexity as students come to the course with various levels of skill in media production. This way, students could ease into the process and refine their skills at their own pace. At the end of the course the students had produced GIFs as a means for applying and testing key debates and had created their own Moodle media galleries to share work in progress. These learning activities can be readily applied to diverse courses.

PVCE Educational Developer Partner: Dr Emily Chandler

Project Planning and Control (CVEN9702) is a large postgraduate course in which students learn how to ensure that projects occur on time and under budget using various tools and methods. The course is taught face-to-face, but it also includes a sizable distance-education cohort. The challenges identified at the start of the Digital Uplift of this course included how to design effective online resources and activities that would enable the lecturer to spend more time during face-to-face classes conducting more personalised discussions and which would allow online students to effectively engage with the course content. To that end, we developed a series of comprehensive online pre-lecture formative activities in H5P to introduce students to key concepts and test their understanding, thus ensuring they came to class well-prepared. We also developed a number of online post-lecture problem-solving resources in the form of Lightboard videos to reinforce these same concepts. While teaching the uplifted version of the course for the first time in the second term of 2019, the lecturer observed an increase in student engagement and satisfaction.

PVCE Educational Developer Partner: Dr James Vassie and Dr Qingyang Lei

Two years ago, UNSW launched its first fully online undergraduate degree, the Bachelor of International Public Health (BIPH). The 3-year program, delivered in partnership with Arizona State University, has had many wins but also raised unique teaching challenges, including how we - as academics and designers familiar to face-to-face modes of delivery – engage our audiences, create authentic ‘communities of learning’ and ensure teaching quality and outcomes are maintained. This presentation will discuss key teaching and learning experiences arising from the BIPH experience, and relate these to online education more broadly.

PVCE Educational Developer Partner: Dr Amanda Yeung

‘Living Architecture: Green Roofs and Green Walls’ is a summer course offered to students form a number of faculties that provides an introduction to the use of greenery to increase the environmental performance of buildings and their surrounds. In previous years, this course was taught face-to-face in an intensive mode, but following a Digital Uplift it was taught for the first time as a mostly online course over the 2018/2019 summer period. This presentation will discuss how the Digital Uplift was used to tackle the educational challenges of moving course content online, and of providing students with access to spaces and voices in the living architecture field that would otherwise be difficult for them to access.

PVCE Educational Developer Partner: Mr Shaun Lehmann

Entrepreneurial Ecosystems (COMM1040) aims to expose students to the fundamentals of global entrepreneurship ecosystems and the practical aspects of identifying, evaluating, and developing business opportunities. The inherent industry focus in the course presented a unique educational challenge. To address this issue in 2019, we developed a significant task to guide students on a journey into Sydney’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. Called the “Great Sydney Treasure Hunt”, groups of students visited the actual locations of business start-ups and financial centres. At each location, they could view interviews from entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. We wanted the students to see, hear and even smell what it was like to be part of the Sydney ecosystem. The course ran for the first time in term 3 2019 and the results reveal a significant degree of positive engagement amongst the student cohort.

PVCE Educational Developer Partner: Mr Martin Parisio

It is expected that the future employment of all our students will include management of risks to the safety of workers, customers, passengers, and clients, as well as other stakeholders and the systems with which they interact. These responsibilities are not always well-recognised or seen as important and dynamic aspects of work across the community. Part of our challenge in AVIA3013/GENS5013: Workplace Safety was to encourage students to consider the wider implications of the content in order to promote interest and participation in course materials. We chose to respond to this challenge by developing podcasts related to the course content, which delivered material relevant to a range of course topics. Podcasts were chosen due to the popularity of the medium and the potential advantages in being able to engage with course materials as part of everyday life.

PVCE Educational Developer Partner: Dr Vanessa Huron

‘Contemporary Issues in Indigenous Politics’ examines contemporary debates in Australian Indigenous affairs, placing an emphasis on the political contexts within which these debates take place. In the past, students have primarily learned about the political system and how issues of interest move through this system from the outside looking in, through reading commentaries and studying publicly available debates and speeches. As a part of the Digital Uplift of this course, we decided to reverse this pattern through obtaining student-oriented interviews from important figures in Indigenous politics, including three federal politicians. These first-hand accounts of how matters of importance to Indigenous Australians move through the political system will provide students with a new and more personal level of insight into what can be a very complex subject matter.

PVCE Educational Developer Partner: Mr Shaun Lehmann