Fostering a Technologically Innovative Teaching Culture

Abstract

[EN] UTS:Insearch is a pathways provider preparing students from diverse language and learning backgrounds for study in Australia, particularly at UTS. With education increasingly moving towards technology enhanced delivery we identified the need to use these approaches with our students, however as a starting point realised that for this to be successfully embedded into our subjects we would have to create a technologically innovative teaching culture amongst our teaching staff.In fostering this culture the organisation needed to clearly articulate the concept of ‘blended learning’ to our teaching staff. Following this a suite of strategies to engage teaching staff with diverse understandings of technology enhanced teaching and the opportunities it offers for improving students’ learning experiences and understanding were implemented. The strategies that were most successful were those that were ‘hands on’ and employed blended learning approaches where teaching staff could experience first-hand how students could be engaged with content through the appropriate and meaningful use of technologies. While the project is on-going, the approach has led to 76% of the learning strategies in our subjects either well progressed or fully compliant with a blended learning approach within a year