September 2009 — Volume 3, Issue 5

Nine leading educators appointed ALTC Fellows

ALTC Fellowships valued at $1.65 million will support nine outstanding university teachers to work in areas critical to improving student learning and learning outcomes.

Three National Teaching Fellowships were awarded in 2009 along with six Teaching Fellowships. National Teaching Fellows undertake a significant program of activities, develop national and international networks relevant to their work and are expected to establish a collaborative team of internationally recognised scholars.

National Teaching Fellows receive up to $350,000 for their activities which are usually completed within 12 months. Teaching Fellows receive up to $100,000 to undertake discipline-based or inter-disciplinary activities that promote excellence in learning and teaching.

Professor Richard Johnstone, ALTC Executive Director said the fellowships would provide national benefit and he congratulated the recipients who will be working in areas vital to addressing government priorities.

The 2009 National Teaching Fellows are Professor Stephen Billett of Griffith University, Professor Geoffrey Crisp, the University of Adelaide and Professor David Hill from Murdoch University.

Recipients of this year’s Teaching Fellowships are:

• Associate Professor Wendy Beck (University of New England)
• Professor Des Butler (Queensland University of Technology)
• Associate Professor Chris Collet (Queensland University of
  Technology)
• Professor Geoffrey Meyer (University of Western Australia)
• Professor Beverley Oliver (Curtin University of Technology)
• Associate Professor Ieva Stupans (University of South
  Australia)

National Teaching Fellows

Professor Stephen Billett
Work Integrated Learning is at the forefront of research conducted by Professor Stephen Billett whose activities as an ALTC Associate Fellow looked at developing pedagogies for practice-based learning in four disciplines – nursing, physiotherapy, human services and midwifery.

As a National Teaching Fellow, the Griffith University Professor of Adult and Vocational Education will generate, embed and widely distribute a set of evidence-based approaches for effectively designing WIL across 18 disciplinary areas.

Further, Professor Billett’s fellowship involves significant capacity-building across six universities. These are the Intensive Research Universities of James Cook, Griffith, Newcastle, La Trobe, Flinders and Murdoch. This approach offers a unique opportunity to work at the discipline and institutional level across the country.

The fellowship will look at what combination of curriculum and pedagogic practices secures successful WIL experiences and associated learning outcomes. It will explore how these practices are best enacted before, during and after practicebased experiences as well as probing which particular curriculum and pedagogy is likely to secure the conceptual, procedural and dispositional knowledge required.

In focusing on WIL, Professor Billett’s fellowship is responding to growing social and economic imperatives for higher education experiences to secure the effective development of competent professionals.


Professor Geoffrey Crisp
As Director of Online Learning at the University of Adelaide as well as head of the Centre for Learning and
Professional Development, Professor Geoffrey Crisp is ideally placed to investigate rethinking assessment in a participatory digital world, the topic of his ALTC Fellowship.

Over the next 12 months Professor Crisp will investigate various types of learning environments including social networking, syndicated media-sharing services, collaborative editing, virtual worlds and digital portfolios. Beginning with the premise that these participatory environments are already in use, the emphasis will be on the appropriate, effective and productive assessment of activities.

Professor Crisp will draw on the network of international colleagues developed over the last few years as part of his Associate Fellowship at the ALTC and also hopes to expand his contacts in Europe and North America to explore alternative perspectives on assessment issues in a web 2.0 environment.

His fellowship aims to identify issues faced by teachers and institutions in assessing students in a collaborative, distributed, virtual environment and as part of his activities, Professor Crisp will collect case studies of different approaches to assessment in these conditions.

He also intends developing communities of practice both locally and internationally in the assessment of web 2.0 activities. In addition, Professor Crisp’s fellowship will investigate issues related to intellectual property rights, copyright, security, validity and reliability and accessibility in relation to web 2.0.


Professor David Hill
The founder of Australia’s most successful and diverse Indonesian in-country learning collaboration, Professor David Hill will map a national strategic plan for Indonesian language learning as part of his activities as a 2009 ALTC National Teaching Fellow.

Almost 15 years ago Professor Hill established the Australian Consortium of In-Country Indonesian Studies (ACICIS) which soon became a flagship for Australia’s achievements in Indonesian studies internationally.

ACICIS is now a highly successful international education collaboration that includes 19 Australian universities as well as higher education institutions in the UK and the Netherlands and the Asia-New Zealand Foundation.

During his fellowship, Professor Hill will tackle the decline in language learning generally, and Indonesian in particular, with the aim of developing a national strategy to address this crucial issue. He will do this through a series of activities that includes a comprehensive consultation process, collaboration and workshopping
of strategies to promote Indonesian. This work will culminate in a policy paper for the federal government and Australia’s higher education sector.

Professor Hill plans a sector- wide analysis of the state of Indonesian language learning and teaching and will consult with staff at every university in the country where Indonesian is taught. Previous studies of Asian
language teaching have been carried out but this will be the first systematic exploration, evaluation and endorsement of the value of Indonesian language learning.


Teaching Fellows

Associate Professor Wendy Beck
Probing graduate employability from an arts’ perspective is the focus of Associate Professor Wendy Beck’s
ALTC Teaching Fellowship.

A senior academic at the University of New England, Associate Professor Beck is seeking to address a number of issues including the lack of opportunities to develop collaborative teaching programs that improve graduate employability.

She will also look at the mismatch and lack of communication between graduate outcomes and industry expectations, particularly in archaeology as well as in other arts, humanities and social sciences disciplines. A further interest relates to what Professor Beck believes is the lack of a real process by which discipline-specific standards-building can develop as a discussion between teaching staff.

Associate Professor Beck led the successful ALTC-funded ‘Benchmarking Archaeology Degrees in Australian Universities’ which raised significant future directions for improving graduate employability that will be taken up in her fellowship. One includes encouraging other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences to take up benchmarking because of its demonstrated success in improving learning and teaching.

Outcomes stemming from the fellowship include nationally agreed principles for collaborative teaching in archaeology, general guidance for articulating employability profiles to achieve comparability and developing processes for cross-institutional benchmarking.


Professor Des Butler
Using cost-effective multimedia to create engaging learning experiences in law and other disciplines is the topic of Professor Des Butler’s teaching fellowship.

A Professor of Law at Queensland University of Technology, his fellowship program is designed to address
the needs of two groups of learners – final year law students studying ethics as well as law academics and others interested in using ICT to create engaging environments.

Professor Butler aims to infuse final year law students with an improved appreciation of ethical practice than they might traditionally receive by creating an integrated program of blended learning entitled ‘Entry into Valhalla’. This ethics capstone uses multimedia produced inexpensively to create engaging, contextualised learning experiences.

As part of his fellowship, Professor Butler will support academics to produce cost- effective multimedia by conducting staff development activities that include workshops, conference presentations and an interactive
website that uses ‘Entry to Valhalla’ as a case study exemplar.


Associate Professor Chris Collet
Having forged a reputation as an innovator in curriculum design in techno-entrepreneurship education, it is not surprising that Associate Professor Chris Collet plans to devote his teaching fellowship to entrepreneurship education in non-business schools.

While innovation creates intellectual property it is entrepreneurship that creates new business from IP, however, Associate Professor Collet points out, existing business school approaches do not provide the skill sets required to make the complex transformation into viable commercial products.

The specific aims of the fellowship are to determine skills sets for different innovative contexts, distil international best practice of entrepreneurial education in innovation contexts and develop resources for Australian educators to embed entrepreneurial education in curriculum.

Building on his knowledge and experience in biotechnology commercialism, the fellowship aims to develop skills that address all three levels of an innovation ecology – creativity, development and commercialisation.

Entrepreneurship education programs are common in the US and have been central to European Union activity for almost a decade but while the need for this type of education has been recognised in Australia, the issue has not been addressed to a major degree.


Associate Professor Geoffrey Meyer
The creator of an innovative online program for teaching histology, Associate Professor Geoffrey Meyer will direct his ALTC Teaching Fellowship towards wider take-up of the resource by building a collaborative network of academics.

The web-based, computer-aided resource, which caters for the evolving learning styles of students, has already resulted in improved quality in student learning and learning outcomes with histology teachers in Australia and overseas recognising its attributes and requesting access.

Associate Professor Meyer plans to open access and share his innovation as well as provide leadership to add more content and build further tools through a collaborative network of histology educators.

He has created an image intensive, multimedia learning system designed to support student laboratory learning within histology, often referred to as microscopic anatomy which encompasses the microscopic structure of cells, tissues and organs.


Professor Beverley Oliver
Director of Curtin University of Technology’s Teaching and Learning Office, Professor Beverley Oliver will concentrate her teaching fellowship on facilitating national benchmarking of achievement of graduate attributes at course level.

Professor Oliver points out that while universities review curricula by drawing on a range of data, including feedback gathered through the Course Experience Questionnaire and internal systems, they rarely include graduate and employer perceptions of graduate achievement of learning outcomes.

She proposes to address this gap by disseminating three tools to voluntary partner universities to engage in benchmarking for improved attribute attainment in specific courses. The fellowship seeks to have partner institutions engage voluntarily with selected peers and share limited data so that teaching teams can redesign and improve curricula to enhance perceptions of graduate achievement.

The tools include the following: graduate and employer surveys based on each institution’s graduate attributes; a needs analysis assembling evidence from a range of data sources including the CEQ and Graduate Destination Survey, course demand, student progress and retention; and a curriculum map that shows specific contextualisation and assessment of graduate attributes.


Associate Professor Ieva Stupans
The University of South Australia’s Associate Professor Ieva Stupans will focus her ALTC Teaching Fellowship on developing strategies around the illusive concept of professionalism with her program titled ‘Supporting student transition to a futures orientated professional identity’.

In Australia, allied health and nursing curriculum is intended to address requisite knowledge, skills and attributes defined through professional competencies. However, previous work carried out in pharmacy curriculum by Associate Professor Stupans revealed a lack of all but superficial notions of professionalism and no obvious references to leadership or lifelong learning.

She plans to use her fellowship to develop curriculum initiatives around professionalism, lifelong learning and leadership skills. While this work will be situated within a particular discipline, a framework for staged achievement will be developed that can easily be adapted to other allied health and nursing programs. As part of her activities, Associate Professor Stupans will be seeking the views of industry, academics and
students, holding forums as well as mapping curriculum and collaboratively developing teaching strategies.

Associate Professor Stupans successfully led the ALTC- funded project ‘Pharmacy Quality Indicators for Best Practice Approaches to Experiential Placements in Pharmacy Programs’. Outcomes of this work included development of curriculum planning processes at the pre-placement, during placement and post-placement stages as well as identification of best practices for assessment, reflection activities and scaffolding of placement learning.