In partnership with Microsoft

Universities around the world are racing to offer students on-line learning opportunities that allow them to continue studying despite the restrictions imposed to stop the spread of COVID-19.

Australian universities have pioneered a series of world-leading on-line learning initiatives that have already proven highly effective, delivering impressive results in terms of student engagement and subject grasp. Their experiences provide valuable insights for other universities which are also seeking to deliver genuinely rich learning experiences, by rapidly spinning up powerful collaborative on-line learning communities, with sustained benefits for both students and academics.

Microsoft’s Higher Education Remote Learning Interview Series features some of the nation’s leading experts and practitioners in online collaborative learning. Topics available already include:

• Building a student community without a campus: Dr David Kellerman, senior lecturer at UNSW, has attracted international attention for the collaborative learning community he has pioneered, generating huge increases in student engagement. He reveals how a rich and collaborative learning community can be nurtured on and off campus.

• What best practice on-line learning looks like: Professor Michael Sankey, director of learning transformation and learning futures from Griffith University, explores how on-line collaborative and communications platforms can wrap around learning management systems to fully engage students, and explains the opportunity this affords for co-constructed learning.

• Creating a social learning environment: Dr Amanda White is deputy head of accounting at UTS and has successfully used social learning environments to teach students, delivering deeper understanding particularly of important threshold subjects, as a first step toward creating truly customised and adaptive learning opportunities. Dr White also wields a lobster hat with grace and aplomb (watch the webinar to learn why).

• Creating engaging group learning in an online classroom: Associate Professor Bardo Fraunholz, director of analytics at Deakin University knows that if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it – which is why he is passionate about using learning analytics to improve student outcomes. It is an approach that has allowed him to measure the impact of different approaches to online learning.

Universities seem destined to have to grapple with a new world of learning for the foreseeable future – a future with online learning at its heart. This interview series allows universities to learn from the leaders how to build a thriving online collaborative learning community that will stand the test of time – delivering learning outcomes long after COVID-19 is brought to heel.