Dear Colleagues,

Welcome to the Learning Innovations newsletter. Our bi-monthly newsletter will bring you relevant and curated teaching and learning (T&L) updates, initiatives, good practices and tips, and events within the Deakin Business and Law Schools and across the university.

We have recently revamped our BCEL (bcel.deakin.edu.au) website and Twitter (@DeakinBCEL use #DeakinBCEL) with a fresh new look. We have consulted and listened to you. You wanted easy navigation, simple and practical T&L support, who to contact for help, and to learn and share from others innovating in T&L… please visit the site and follow us on Twitter.

The new trimester is among us, and our Learning Innovations team has been keeping busy providing just-in-time support and building the capacity and capability of our colleagues across our course and unit teams. We have recently welcomed new business and law academic colleagues this trimester with our Getting to Grips with Teaching and Learning as part of Day#3 of the faculty’s orientation program. Last week, the 2019 Deakin Learning and Teaching Conference was a great success with a wide spread of business and law colleagues showcasing their fabulous work. This week on Thursday, 21st Nov, we continue to celebrate excellence in T&L with well-deserved business and law colleagues collecting their 2019 VC Learn awards. Well done.

On the digital frontier, some of our key Digital Learning Environment (DLE) projects we are working with central teams on include: DLE 1– D2L is moving to the cloud and on continuous delivery in mid-June 2020. It is a large piece of work. Our Learning Innovations team is working very closely with other faculties and central teams to ensure our unit and course sites migrate across smoothly, incorporate improved tools and functionalities in T&L practices, and relevant stakeholders are engaged in the process. More information is on the DLE 1 central project site and is accessible by all Deakin staff. DLE 2 – Implementation of stage one Deakin Video class capture (Mediasite) project is complete. Stage two is underway over the next 12 months to review a suitable user-generated video system (i.e., DeakinAir). DLE 3 – Implementation of Collaboration tools (currently evaluating Mentimeter as a university-wide digital polling tool from December 2019 and exploring MS Teams), Self and Peer Assessment (currently piloting FeedbackFruits) and Portfolio tools (currently evaluating Pebblepad and Portfolium). The Online Examinations project – currently evaluating suitable online examination tools, processes, and pilots.

With course design and renewal, we are working with the handover for both MBA and LLB teams post-CloudFirst, applying the Principles of Premium Teaching and Learning with the Financial Planning course, supporting capstone and WIL units. Amongst these learnings, we will be consolidating our approach to scale up sustainably in line with our preparation to the cloud-hosted version of D2L in mid-June 2020.

On the horizon, we will soon be rolling out to a small number of units our in-house digitised assignment extension and penalty tool to manage better and save time for unit teams. Further, Learning Innovations is moving to ServiceNow to improve our process, better capture, manage, report, and service queries from our faculty, course, and unit teams. A soft launch is underway this trimester.

For now, make yourself a cuppa, scroll down and have a read of the rest of the newsletter.

Please feel free to reach out to us at Learning Innovations.