intro body

Case Study

Australia

Deakin University

Prepared by: Jocelyn Calvert

Brief description of the programme

Located in the State of Victoria, Australia, Deakin University is a multi-campus institution with a major commitment to flexible learning delivered through the use of educational and communications technologies. Headquartered in Geelong, the university operates three campuses in Melbourne, two in Geelong, and one in Warrnambool.

Deakin enrolled 30,191 students in its regular programmes in 1996. A further 30,000 students were enrolled through its commercial arm, Deakin Australia, for a total in excess of 60,000 students. Of the regular students, 13,088 or 43 percent were enrolled off-campus. All Deakin Australia students were off-campus students, making Deakin, with a total of more than 43,000 off-campus students, the largest university off-campus provider in Australia.

Problems encountered

Planning and managing distance education

The major planning and management issue facing the university

over the past six years has been how to integrate the academic programmes and

approaches to teaching and learning of the three formerly independent degree

granting institutions that merged in the period 1990 to 1992 to form

the present Deakin University.

Two of these institutions had major pre-merger distance education programmes.

Implementing quality assurance

The university is committed to the principles of quality management and

continuous improvement. Implementing these principles involves both the regular

evaluation of teaching materials and the assessment of teaching of academic staff,

both of which involve seeking student reactions to their course experience.

It has proved difficult to distinguish between student reactions to learning materials

and to the performance of teaching staff.

The distinction is important because the corrective actions

that are needed are very different in each case.

Using and integrating media in distance learning

The development of the World Wide Web allows Deakin to,

deliver off-campus programmes in new ways.

Used well, the Web provides an easy-to-use, cost-effective, flexible, and

powerful medium for the delivery of higher education.

Its ease of use, however, presents the university with a serious issue.

Academic staff can quickly learn to ‘mount’ Web courses.

hey are not always, however, well equipped to take best educational advantage

of what the Web offers.

The issue facing the university is how, on the one hand, to ensure that all

Deakin-based Web offerings reflect university standards and policies, while, on the

other hand, allowing academic staff to creatively explore,

the Web for educational purposes.

Similarly, a broader issue facing the university is how to develop

the skills of teaching staff so that they are able to make the best educational use

of new educational media.

The increasing reliance of the university on resource-based learning methods has

fundamentally changed the nature of academic work in the university with

considerable implications for the nature of professional development activities.

Instructional design and production for distance learning

A major issue facing the university is how to cost-effectively maintain an up-to-date archive of all its course materials. Over the last two years, staff have been involved in the development of an ‘electronic warehouse’ of materials.

The concept is that all materials will be stored digitally, allowing for both easy revision and reproduction in whichever medium is required.

Another important issue is how to allocate scarce educational development resources for maximum benefit. Should the university allocate significant resources to ‘lighthouse’ projects designed to illuminate and illustrate the art of the possible?

Or would it be better to allocate resources more widely to projects that make use of mainstream approaches? This issue is unresolved.

Learner support systems

An important challenge is how to foster the effective use of electronic media for teaching and learning. Many staff and students are new to the educational use of e-mail, bulletin boards, and computer conferencing. Their effective use requires the development of new skills and a willingness, in the case of students, to participate.

Part of the process of higher education is the integration of students into a broader, often discipline-based, academic community of students and scholars. The development of such a community is problematic in distance education programmes such as those at Deakin University, which often do not require students to engage in on-campus or face-to-face activities. Deakin’s response has been to use communication technologies to create electronic communities.

The members of this community; academic staff, students, academic support staff, and administrative staff are linked through an integrated, interactive, electronic communication environment known as the Deakin Interchange.

The Interchange provides users with access to e-mail, computer conferencing, library and administrative databases and services, and Web services through the use of a consistent, menu-driven, ‘point and click’ user interface. Creating a reliable system that is easy to install, use, and upgrade has been a difficult task.

The Interchange, however, as its technological manifestations evolve, will increasingly become the mechanism for the creation of virtual communities of the sort that develop spontaneously in campus settings.

The most important issue: Planning and managing a multi-campus, flexible mode university

At the beginning of 1992, Deakin University, with campuses in the regional communities of Geelong and Warrnambool, merged with three campuses of Victoria College in metropolitan Melbourne. Deakin had a strong tradition of distance education while Victoria College was almost exclusively campus-based.

The challenge was to bring together the distinct cultures of the two institutions to create a new Deakin University with a common vision that would be in a position to operate effectively in the new national and international environment of higher education.

From the distance education perspective, it was important that, at Geelong and Warrnambool, distance education and on-campus education were integrated in a dual mode model, with more than half the students and 38 percent of equivalent full-time load studying at a distance.

The new university determined early that distance education was one of its strengths and should be spread across its campuses. Several strategic decisions were critical to developments: structural integration; course rationalisation; resource-based learning and technology integration; and industry-based and professional programmes.

Structural integration

Deakin University did not adopt a federated model in which the regional and metropolitan campuses would operate with some degree of independence and duplicated services; instead, it opted for full structural integration. In academic terms, seventeen faculties were reduced to five, each with from two to five schools (or departments).

While a small number of schools are based predominantly on one campus, the majority of schools and all faculties have staff spread across different campuses. This means that academic decisions pertaining to distance education, at the faculty and school level and in terms of university policy, engage the entire university rather than a traditional interest group. Administrative and academic service divisions of the university are similarly integrated.

In some cases, a particular type of operation is based on one campus; for example, the off-campus library service operates from one of the Geelong campuses but draws on the resources of all campus libraries. In other cases, services of a division or branch are available on a number of campuses; for example, Learning Resources Services, which is responsible for the physical development and production of learning materials, has distributed staff and facilities.

Course rationalisation

Flexible learning options for students required an integrated curriculum with common cross-campus courses (programmes of study) and course units. Academic staff in a particular field or discipline, who may have been based on a number of different campuses, were required to review areas of overlap and develop single course structures; for example, several Bachelor of Business and Bachelor of Commerce degree courses became one Bachelor of Commerce taught on three campuses and off-campus.

In fields that typically have fewer required units and more options (for example, history) academic staff were encouraged to review the units of the predecessor institutions and create a coherent selection that would be offered across the university.

Resource-based learning and technology integration

Flexible learning, including cross-campus delivery as well as distance education, could best be served by the development of learning resources for use by all students. This approach had its origins in the Deakin University of the late 1970s when the open campus, with on-campus students using off-campus materials, was conceived as transforming teaching and learning for all students and academic staff.

Following the mergers, the university’s distance education infrastructure, including educational developers and Learning Resources Services, were deployed in developments and redevelopments across the university. At the same time, the university set a policy of technology integration with particular emphasis on information technology and computer communication. In 1995, Deakin was named Australian University of the Year on the basis of its integration of technology into teaching and learning.

Industry-based and professional programmes

Both predecessor institutions had innovative programmes for students outside the regular government funding structures. Victoria College’s Technology Management Programme saw students in major industries use laptop computers to access technical (Technical And Further Education) and university courses year round in a self-paced system.

Deakin Geelong’s Centre for Management Services provided development and delivery services for professional associations on a contract basis, enabling the associations to offer continuing education at a distance. These activities were merged in Deakin Australia, which continues a successful record of providing distance education services to the professions and industry. Some programmes offered through Deakin Australia are accredited by the university. In one case of co-operation, Deakin University and the Association of Professional Engineers, Scientists, and Managers of Australia offer a joint mba degree in Australia and internationally using Deakin Australia facilities and services.

Summary

The result is a new type of university that is unrecognisable in the terms of its predecessor institutions. The transformation, of course, is not complete, and never will be in this environment of continuous change in higher education.

We believe that Deakin University is in a better position than it would have been without such radical restructuring. In our view, essential ingredients for success in such an endeavour are:

strong leadership, including appropriate rhetoric about the mission of the university;

a programme of change management that allows all parts of the institution to understand and accept their new roles; and

serious commitment to professional development to address the changing nature of academic and administrative work.