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I'm Selena Griffith. I teach in the School of Design Studies at the College of Fine Arts
and I coordinate large courses in design practice and I teach a number of smaller courses around
collaboration, design management, branding and innovation.
The big challenge for me is shifting between postgraduate, undergraduate, large and small
courses. It's quite a shift, because all the students
have varying different needs. Over the years I've implemented new learning
technologies starting with using blended learning to assist students in having access to course
materials. The reason I heavily adopted this was I was
teaching between Sydney and Singapore. The students in Singapore and the student in Sydney
were undertaking the same course and they needed the same resources, but the students
in Singapore didn't have those resources so I found a way around the links in the library
for online learning materials and had all of our course materials put into a digital
format and then was able to put links that the students could click on. I found it was
great for the guys in Singapore because they felt included in the community of learning,
and a link to the Australian students, because they had the same material. And then in the
online platform they would be interacting with each other, so effectively it doubled
the number of people that they were learning with. I started seeing collaborations between
the two. At a postgraduate level that was really exciting,
because often postgraduate students just want to get that qualification and move on, particularly
in Singapore because it's a precursor to promotion. You just can't get past a certain level without
that qualification. To have these students engaging and really
enthusiastically with the students in Sydney was fabulous. And seeing the power that an
online platform had for collaboration in learning and peer led learning between those postgraduates
made me feel that I could probably get the same results in my large classes with my undergraduates
if I redesigned the tools effectively for them.
I looked at the mechanics of what the students were used to in a learning situation, which
was teamwork, and wanted to shift that towards group work. I had to research quite a bit
myself on the difference between the two. And then started to frame the activities that
the undergrad students were doing around shifting them from a mentality of group work to a mentality
of teamwork, which meant they became far more independent and self-actualised in their learning
and their assessments. Now, that's not easy to do. Then I had to
start thinking of methods to make students feel that they weren't taking risk, because
as we all know students tend to be risk averse because they want to maximise their grades.
So I set up a series of very simple learning exercises in tutorials that were formative
rather than summative but they would get good critical feedback on from both their peers
and the educators, the tutors and myself so that they could learn from what they were
doing. So these were things like peer review. We
used a tool called iPeer for a while, which is no longer available at the university but
was really, really useful. Now I use a 360 degree review.
It allows the students to evaluate themselves on their performance as a team member with
respect to their peers, and to get feedback from their peers and give feedback from their
peers. They are learning some really essential skills
for designers, which is how to work in a team, how to provide constructive feedback, how
to take constructive feedback. And then how to synthesize that and change the way that
they're working. So we undertake a second evaluation towards
the end of semester, which has an extra component in it where the students indicate whether
their peers have improved or not on their performance in relation to the criteria that
we've assessed them on at the beginning of the semester.
I have had a lot of students over a couple of years back saying, 'Yep, we've got this
great project that we're sort of at launch stage in this course'. Because they sort of
identify a business opportunity that's related to design, they build a business plan around
it. Often the students come with an actual registration of a business certificate or
an ABN number and they're ready to go, ready to roll with this project.
I thought it would be great to give these students the space and time to then explore
that collaboration further. So we have a course code at COFA which is a special project course.
We have an undergraduate and a postgraduate level. I decided to experiment with new course
with that a few years back that was called Nexis.
And it's about students from design or creative background finding points of common interest
with people from other disciplines and pursuing a collaboration.
A lot of these students had got to the stage with their projects that they needed to bring
in a programming professional for an iPad app or a mathematician to work on some particular
aspect of their project or a materials scientist. So this course allowed them to bring this
project in and then collaborate around that. What I found in this course, the students
had so many very diverse projects but lots of very similar issues, and all of them had
different skill sets. I thought as a meta collaboration the whole
class should learn how to collaborate with each other on something. We asked them, for
a few weeks, I put them in pairs from related disciplines and they need to present to the
whole class what their specialty is and find a number of case studies of other creative
professionals that have that expertise that have collaborated successfully with someone
else. And they give an hour-long presentation to
the class out of the three-hour slot, which means that they are teaching the rest of the
class. So, this is a peer-led learning activity. I've now found that that makes students much
more effective communicators. It's not actually an assessment task. Again, it's one of those
formative tasks that gives them confidence to communicate about their collaboration.
What I found as a result of this is that their final presentations are much more strategic
and much better communicated because they've learnt how to communicate about collaborations
effectively in this formative task that's also a peer-led learning activity.