TaLT Spotlight

Greetings!

I'm Deb McCormick, the Senior Education Designer for the TaLT (Teaching and Learning Team) in the Monash Business School. I have been deployed by the Office of the Vice-Provost (Learning and Teaching) to work with the Monash Business School for three years to help teachers who want to innovate but are not sure how to start or proceed, or who don’t have the tools and expertise they need to innovate. I have two main areas of focus: Unit Innovation and Capacity Building.

Unit Innovation 

Unit Innovation is a process where a teacher reflects on their unit (either alone or with my assistance), and checks that ‘all their ducks are in a row’.

• Is the curriculum is aligned?
• Does the unit have a mixture of pre- in- and post-class activities?
• Are the assessment tasks relevant, appropriate and interesting

Depending on a variety of factors, Unit Innovation can be very small or very large. Peoples needs will vary and because there will only be two of us available to support teachers, we are taking a measured approach.

The process will involve myself and the second Educational Designer working directly with the teacher or teaching team of a small group of Units the semester before they are due to be taught, which means that Units we work with in S1 will be delivered in S2. We are initially focussing on Core and Capstone Units however if you feel you or your Unit could benefit from some support let us know through your Director of Teaching and Learning and we will see what we can do. 

Capacity Building

The TaLT team believe there are some basic skills that all teachers should have, and we will be using a variety of methods to help people to ‘skill up’ to these baselines. We believe every teacher should:

1. Understand the basics of teaching (working with groups, working with small/large classes, pedagogic theory)
2. Understand the requirements of an aligned curriculum
3. Be able to create a well-designed Moodle Unit
4. Be able to use Moodle to create and manage content and activities
5. Be able to record, edit and publish a video
6. Have the ability to choose and use appropriate tools for teaching and learning
7. Understand and use appropriate modes and methods of delivery to facilitate active learning
8. Know how to design relevant, appropriate assessment tasks (yes, I know this is repeated but it is important!)
9. Know how to reflect on their Units and make changes if necessary

I've met quite a few of you but I'm looking forward to meeting, and working with many more over the next few years.