industry & research
campusreview.com.au
Business as usual
How universities are adapting
to new methods of learning
and course delivery.
Michael Sankey interviewed by Wade Zaglas
When the COVID-19 pandemic
took hold in China, grave
fears were held for Australia’s
university sector. This was primarily due to
Australia’s reliance on Chinese students and
the travel bans that are still in place.
But now universities are facing another
challenge. With the banning of large
gatherings and recent social distancing
protocols, on-campus students are now
affected, and a range of technologies are
being relied upon like never before.
But as Michael Sankey, deputy director
for learning transformations at the Learning
Futures Group at Griffith University, explains,
most Australian universities are adapting to
the new “learning ecosystem”, delivering
on-campus students their content and
assessment online.
He stresses, however, that a lot of hard
work has gone into the changes, and that
some universities that aren’t so experienced
in online learning “are playing catch-up”.
Griffith University has also installed some
1500 VPN connections on the computers
of Chinese students who are still unable to
return to Australia.
Sankey says Griffith is relying on its
tried and tested technologies, such as
Blackboard Learn and Microsoft Teams, and
are trying “to keep things simple”.
He also warns that “predatory vendors”
are trying to cash in on the new learning
“ecosystems”.
CR: We’ve heard about universities, such as
UTAS, cutting courses in light of COVID-19.
How is Griffith University going in terms of
academic continuity?
Most of those courses were on the
chopping block anyway for low numbers,
so it wasn’t because of COVID-19 that those
courses were cut. However, Griffith hasn’t
had to do anything like that. We’re pretty
well placed at this point. We have at any
one time 15,000 students studying online,
and so, to a great extent, we have a lot of
the stuff needed to do this in place already.
Originally, we were worried about the
1500 students we had in China, but we
dealt with that a number of weeks ago by
putting in proper VPN connections through
to China, and the focus has changed
considerably to the 50,000 students we
have to deal with now.
In the short term, it's imperative that
our teaching staff who haven’t taught in
the online space are brought up to speed,
so we’re moving rapidly to do things like
run online workshops where we use a
Blackboard Collaborate tool which we’ve
had in our system all along.
We’re running four workshops a day for
an hour and a half for our teaching staff in
relation to using our lecture caption system,
Echo360 – that’s for replacing our face to
face lectures – and, of course, using tools
like Blackboard Collaborate to run the
tutorial groups and smaller groups than
would normally be in a lecture.
We started advertising those workshops
just yesterday. Within an hour, we had 90
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