Maximising the transnational education experience

The introduction of fees and additional pressures on both learners and institutions brought about by the global financial downturn suggests that while HE is notoriously slow to change, that we may be coming to a time of “significant transformation of university business models” (Bokor, 2012). Indeed many of our core students are no longer local, let alone domestic and the Business School at the University of Northampton accepts that we need to be attractive to students from international markets. We recognise the need to evolve the way in which those students learn and staff teach and this workshop explores our methods of developing learning and teaching within the school to fit in with an overall university strategy to be an innovative internationally-facing university committed to delivering an outstanding high quality student experience. As the Learning and Teaching Co-ordinator and Learning Technologist, we work closely with module teams to undertake curriculum development aimed at transforming practice – moving from a reliance on face to face teaching to engaged online learning. This transformation has necessitated a radical rethink of online student learning. Key to this has been the creation and development of teaching techniques that will improve online communication and peer interaction in an attempt to replicate the communication and interaction that can more readily be observed in a classroom. Our curriculum development process aims to ensure close alignment of learning objectives with assessment and enable the provision of accessible and relevant teaching materials by taking advantage of technological advancements and developments through our VLE. We found during this process that academic staff sometimes require additional encouragement and support to deliver their materials in an online environment. Accordingly we now encourage staff to discover for themselves the differences and difficulties faced by online international learners, standing in their shoes for a day as they develop essential skills for managing group interactions in an online environment. This workshop offers participants an overview of ways in which we have sought to maximise the student experience, particularly in terms of online collaboration, peer learning and staff development. We will focus on our use of the collaborative tools within our VLE, including asynchronous discussion boards, blogs, journals, wikis and even how to manage a course structure and layout to ensure a smoother learning journey through course materials. Using problem based scenarios we will facilitate group tasks and discussions to identify ways in which communication issues can be effectively overcome when working across the international divide and there will be an opportunity to discuss the merits of our approach and to consider alternative ideas and to share experiences of organising and supporting asynchronous online activities with international groups. Participants will be encouraged to contribute throughout. Bokor, J (2012) University of the Future; Ernst & Young Higher Education Report; Available from cation/vwLUAssets/University_of_the_future/$FILE/University_of_the_future_2012.pdf