This book equips higher education professionals with a roadmap for the design, development and delivery of a successful online degree.
This book equips higher education professionals with a roadmap for the design, development and delivery of a successful online degree.
Responding to the evolving landscape of higher education, the text offers reflections and practical insights from staff who transformed a campus-based Humanities and Social Sciences degree into a ground-breaking online learning experience at an Australian university, contributing to a dynamic culture of interdisciplinary collaboration and continuing professional development. The chapters follow the development process of an online degree from inception to delivery. Taking an applied focus, they guide readers to anticipate and navigate challenges encountered in implementing curriculum change. The authors explore how to embed student-centred digital pedagogies, approaches taken to develop skills for staff and students, and thoughtful ways to integrate technology into learning and teaching whilst preserving the spirit and integrity of multiple academic disciplines. Alongside relational and strategic aspects of curriculum enhancement, the book offers practical case studies on implementing dynamic online learning to enhance the student experience.
This is an indispensable guide for educators, learning designers, higher education leaders, and professionals in higher education who are involved in supporting and enhancing online higher education programs.
Part 1 Creating an Online Degree
1. Moving your course online: Its translation, not conversion
2. Creating the BA Online: Reinventing the degree through pedagogical
innovation
3. Reflections on the partnership between FutureLearn and a regional
Australian university: An ecological perspective
Part 2 Case Studies in Online Teaching and Assessment
4. FutureLearn as a learning environment: Striving for a community of
inquiry
5. Creating engaging videos for online teaching
6. Teaching Screen and Cultural Studies online
Part 3 Challenges and Opportunities in Adaptation
7. Designing a History course for online and face-to-face delivery: The
Australian Experience
8. Teaching challenging material: Technological affordances of staggered
asynchronous online learning
9. Funking it up: Teaching poetry as creative writing in the digital age
10. Fantasy cricket: From ethnographic film to virtual anthropology
fieldwork
11. Easing eco-anxiety in an online environmental Sociology course
Part 4 Impacts and Evaluation
12. Approaches to academic development to design effective online learning
13. Student evaluation of online teaching and learning: Notes on theory and
practice
14. Being an online educator: Reflections on iterative design of a
transdisciplinary humanities course
15. Australian Underworlds: Online teaching as a pathway to building
scholarly networks
16. Conclusion: Reflecting on the BA Online project
Afterword
Michael Kilmister is an Academic Developer at the University of Reading, UK. He was awarded his PhD in History from the University of Newcastle, Australia where he worked in several teaching and learning roles for more than a decade. He has published widely on academic development and education.
Annika Herb is Education Development Lead at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research explores academic development, teaching and learning, and young adult literature. She is an Associate Editor of IJYAL, and co-editor of Storying Plants in Australian Childrens and Young Adult Literature (Springer, 2023).
Clare Lloyd is the Senior Manager, Education Development at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research focuses on online education, academic development, and technology enhanced learning. She is on the Editorial Board of Advances in Online Education: A Peer-Reviewed Journal.
