In this case study Flora Corfee and Adam Burston discuss creating sustainable blended content in this inter-professional unit.

Highlights:

• Using LEO lesson to support understanding and application
• Strategies for creating sustainable content
• Mixing traditional and blended formats to cater for the needs of large enrolments

Hear about Flora and Adam's experience.

ACU Case study:  Planning for sustainability in blended units
Many thanks to the Faculty of Law and Business for the use of their Pop-up Studio equipment to record this interview.
Length: 10 mins.

Unit design

It is important to communicate the design of a unit to students - why a unit is structured as it is and making students aware of your expectations. Adam and Flora communicated to students the blended structure of the course through the unit outline, orientation modules and face-to-face "resource" sessions.

Structure

Assessment

The above assessments may have been designed before the latest update to the ACU Assessment Policy. See Assessment Policy for up-to-date advice on designing your assessments.

This sample of the student's schedule shows clearly what is expected each week both online and face-to-face:

Technology

This is a list of some of the major tools used in this unit.

Each video is paired with a related activity, this can help turn watching a video from a passive activity to an active learning activity that promotes higher level thinking and engagement. Here is an example of reflection questions following a video:

Support

These are examples of the kinds of support Flora and Adam drew on in building this unit.

• Colleagues with experience in using LEO lesson
• Faculty eLearning specialist

Lessons learned

• Talk to people who have created something similar when scoping the project
• Get the whole team on board with the technology at the beginning, familarisation with technology takes time
• Unit development team met weekly (via Adobe Connect) - this was seen as an ingredient for success.
• Seek support in using new tools
• Seek funding support/developmental hours for unit development where possible
• Some students (being first years) took time to adapt to the contemporary unit structure as some of their other units followed a more traditional structure e.g. lecture/tute/lab.
• Think about the sustainability of the resources before you create them (see How do I plan for sustainability of my content?).
• Have the unit developers teaching the unit for the initial two years post-development, this helps refine and tweak the design to iron out any issues that became apparent upon implementation.

Student feedback

• “Flipped Learning is very helpful and is working well."
• "I love how there is the online learning aspect rather than lectures as I found it easier to learn and retain the knowledge by researching myself rather than having the information spoke at me. It is also very easy to use and can be done anywhere."
• "It was very well organised and gave us a clear objective each week. The online forum was a lifesaver at times and Adam and Flora were very prompt to respond. The layout of the unit in LEO was easy to navigate. It was by far my favourite unit this Semester."
• "The online lessons were very long and the teachers pretty much told us everything anyway. Maybe next time the online lessons could just be an overview of the week".
• "Found the online activities instead of lectures to be quite repetitive and in too much depth".

Next time

In a recent iteration adjustments were made to the content in weekly online lessons to better reflect a more reasonable workload expectation and to balance workload across the entire semester.