Blended Learning Enhancement Initiative

At UOW we share a common purpose, which is to empower our students for their future and core to how we seek to achieve that purpose is by harnessing the transformative potential of digital learning and teaching.

Last year, we had to rapidly transition to remote delivery across all of our subjects and courses. This meant that staff and students right across the university, across all of our campuses developed skills and experiences in digital learning and teaching. What we seek to do with the blended learning enhancement initiative is build on that momentum build on those experiences to significantly enhance digital learning and teaching right across the university. So the purpose therefore is not to replace campus-based subjects and classes, but rather to compliment our campus-based education provision.

The Blended Learning Enhancement Initiative seeks to provide staff with the tools and the resources to significantly improve our online learning environments and our digital teaching practices. It's built on consultation with staff and students. It incorporates student-centered pedagogies. It supports and encourages staff reflection. It provides staff with a whole range of resources to enable them to reflect and to better design integration of digital learning and teaching in their courses and subjects.

Crucially, it will build more resilience into how we deliver our teaching at UOW. We've learned a lot from 2020, and now is the time for us to stop, take stock, reflect, and work together to significantly improve our digital online learning environments on our online learning and teaching practices.

The project will kick off with the formation of the Blended Learning Advisory Group. With staff and students representatives from all of the faculties. This advisory group will work with LTC to evolve the Blended Learning Enhancement Initiative as it progresses over the next 18 months to support the enhancement of digital learning across all of our subjects at UOW.

This initiative is not a one size fits all approach that will be imposed upon staff, but rather it's sensitive to the nuanced contextual environments in which learning and teaching takes place across the disciplines. Therefore, our approach is very much one of consultation and collaboration with faculties. We seek to inspire academic staff and empower schools to make strategic choices around the development of blended learning in their courses. And in particular, how to harness the wonderful power of digital learning and teaching.

I'd like to end this message by acknowledging the tremendous work done by so many staff across the university, across all of our campuses to provide an outstanding learning experience to our students. Staff who've worked so hard last year to move all of their subjects online and staff continue to work hard to ensure the students get all the support that they need to progress in their studies.

I'd like to thank you for your interest in this program and for engaging with the Blended Learning Enhancement Initiative, which offers us the potential to continue to provide an outstanding learning experience for our students.