Simon McIntyre
Simon is the Associate Dean Education at UNSW Sydney | Art & Design, and a member of the Scientia Education Fellowship. He is a multi-award winning educator, passionate about improving the effectiveness, quality and relevance of the student learning experience, and about pedagogically driven use of technology to innovate learning and teaching practices. He is committed to continuing to improve and innovate the learning experience of students in art and design disciplines.
Simon has led the design and management of several innovative professional development and educational programs; working with teams of dedicated academics and collaborators. He leads internationally successful open education initiatives such as widely used open education resources, the multi-award winning Learning to Teach Online Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) https://www.coursera.org/learn/teach-online, and the Transmedia Storytelling: Narrative worlds, emerging technologies, and global audiences MOOC. https://www.coursera.org/learn/transmedia-storytelling
Simon’s commitment to helping students and educators globally develop essential digital literacies is at the heart of his teaching philosophy. He considers these capabilities enable them to actively engage in global, cross-disciplinary collaborative online networks where learning is enhanced by sharing knowledge, experience and curiosity with a diverse cohort of peers. Through such initiatives Simon continues to innovate his own teaching, and to develop his leadership in the field of online education. He is committed to inspiring students, and his work has helped thousands of educators improve their teaching practices in a range of disciplines – locally, nationally and internationally.
Phone: +61 2 8936 0631
Simon has led the design and management of several innovative professional development and educational programs; working with teams of dedicated academics and collaborators. He leads internationally successful open education initiatives such as widely used open education resources, the multi-award winning Learning to Teach Online Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) https://www.coursera.org/learn/teach-online, and the Transmedia Storytelling: Narrative worlds, emerging technologies, and global audiences MOOC. https://www.coursera.org/learn/transmedia-storytelling
Simon’s commitment to helping students and educators globally develop essential digital literacies is at the heart of his teaching philosophy. He considers these capabilities enable them to actively engage in global, cross-disciplinary collaborative online networks where learning is enhanced by sharing knowledge, experience and curiosity with a diverse cohort of peers. Through such initiatives Simon continues to innovate his own teaching, and to develop his leadership in the field of online education. He is committed to inspiring students, and his work has helped thousands of educators improve their teaching practices in a range of disciplines – locally, nationally and internationally.
Phone: +61 2 8936 0631
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Following its release in 2009, the ‘Learning to Teach Online’ (LTTO) project spread rapidly around the world via conduits such as Twitter, Facebook, blogs, institutional links and word of mouth — throughout K-12, vocational, higher education and private consultancies across 146 countries and territories. This thesis investigates how the design of LTTO facilitated its discovery, dissemination and integration in a range of educational contexts. There was a large volume of data collected from Web 2.0 activity surrounding LTTO. Using data visualisation techniques, patterns and hidden relationships between individuals sharing and using the resources were revealed, that provided insight into previously invisible relationships between individuals within vastly different established professional networks all over the world. The concept of the rhizome is at the core of this thesis, inspired by the observation of the growing patterns of connection between seemingly disparate educational communities globally, in a manner that was neither precisely controlled nor predictable.
Key outcomes include a detailed analysis of the design of an online professional development resource that was effective across a range of disciplines and education sectors; the determination of an effective method of researching the spread and use of similar initiatives; and observations and strategies that can help others to improve the design process for future online professional development resources.
As online communication technologies rapidly evolve, the creative industries continue to move towards globally networked and interdisciplinary modalities of practice. These inescapable shifts in the ways designers work have challenged many long held assumptions about the nature of individual design processes.
Such revolutionary changes mean that designers must increasingly master new skills to effectively communicate and collaborate in online environments with colleagues from different cultures, disciplines and locations world-wide. Since they may never meet face-to-face, the success of this new working methodology relies on high levels of trust between practitioners, both personally and professionally in order to achieve effective design outcomes.
In turn the need for design educators to equip students with skills to thrive in the face of this new industrial paradigm is highlighted. Trust is integral to developing the personal and professional relationship building and collaborative skills necessary for contemporary digital working practices. By being sensitive to, and cognisant of these issues, educators can initiate and implement strategies that help create the right conditions for trust to emerge between participants in online learning scenarios.
In reality however, the relative suddenness of this shift has seen some educationalists engage in unconsidered responses to this challenge. In the rush to embrace online technologies, the social and cultural dimensions of online pedagogies are often neglected while the relative functionality of digital tools and spaces is given prominence.
Drawing upon three specific case studies of very different applications of online learning in a design context, this paper aims to highlight the impact that fostering positive, interpersonal, interdisciplinary and transcultural relationships between students in online design education can have upon their levels of trust and the effectiveness and outcomes of their online collaborative processes. The projects examined were conducted by COFA Online and The Omnium Research Group at The College of Fine Arts (COFA), University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Each case study examines particular dynamics associated with global, local and cross-cultural contexts. They include:
• Global - Fully online Masters of Cross Disciplinary Art and Design
• Local - Blended Learning at The College of Fine Arts
• Cross-Cultural (Australia and China) - The Collabor8 Project, East-West online design collaboration
By triangulating data that examines student/teacher experiences through online surveys, interviews, responses to targeted online discussions and peer reviews, this paper outlines online pedagogical approaches that have successfully engaged students in active, collaborative and trust building online learning environments. It also pinpoints problems that can occur in online teamwork related to trust, communication and interpersonal relationships, and investigates several potential solutions.
If strong human-to-human relationships are seen as the foundation for effective collaborative design practice online, educators will be helping emerging generations of designers maximise their creative potential in a globally competitive market where online collaborative, cross-cultural, interdisciplinary creative skill-sets are demanded as the ‘norm’.
Keywords: online, collaboration, pedagogy, cross-cultural, blended learning
• (2004-2008) The Art & Design Fellowship Programs helped to improve the online teaching practice of 75 UNSW academics, leading to the creation of 50 fully online UNSW undergraduate and postgraduate units.
• (2009-2011) The Learning to Teach Online project (LTTO) [tinyurl.com/lttoproject] evolved the concept of the local programs into a series of open educational resources (OERs) that continue to be accessed since the completion of the project. To date, these have been viewed over 367,000 times from 146 countries; linked to by 153 institutional websites in 19 countries; and embedded in 133 postgraduate or professional development programs in 23 countries.
• (2014-2015) The LTTO MOOC [coursera.org/course/ltto] was the next evolutionary stage designed to help educators develop their own teaching strategies by applying the knowledge gained from the LTTO OER. In 2014, the MOOC attracted over 28,000 enrolments from teachers in 192 countries. Its 2nd offering will be in July 2015, and has been incorporated into the US Government’s ConnectEd Initiative [bit.ly/1Aj98Dw].
This evolutionary approach exemplifies the strategies used to extend a successful face-to-face professional development program (with limited capacity, flexibility and academic access), into online, flexible and openly accessible resource and curriculum. The case history will demonstrate how to adapt to, and maximise the potential of, the rapidly changing dynamics of online education and technology, to continue to improve the teaching practice of an ever-increasing number of teachers around the world.
Similarly, many teachers first embarking on a new online initiative can find it an isolating and frustrating experience, with limited peer support (Bennett, Priest and Macpherson 1999) and practical pedagogical guidance while ‘learning the ropes’ or preparing course curriculum.
So what approach can be taken to firstly connect with these teachers at the ‘coalface,’ and then support them through their initial investigations and subsequent development of online teaching practice?
In 2009, COFA Online at The University of New South Wales won funding from the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) Competitive Grant Scheme for a project called Learning to Teach Online (LTTO): Developing high-quality video and text resources to help educators teach online http://bit.ly/d18ac5. The project’s aim was to produce a set of resources to enable more educators, particularly those with no online experience, to successfully adopt and develop online teaching practices, and to reach a diverse audience of teachers across different disciplines and institutions throughout the world.
This paper discusses the strategies adopted by the LTTO Project to ensure the resources focused on pedagogy and were perceived as pragmatic, easy to use and readily adaptable. It also outlines how the adoption of social media as a dissemination method facilitated easy access to the resources by a wide audience of teachers both with and without online teaching experience, and promoted greater awareness and uptake across disciplines and institutions around the world. It demonstrates, through summative and formative evaluations, how this approach effectively encouraged teachers to get started with their online teaching and stimulated their interest in further research on the topic.