HIGHER ED CONFERENCE

The tertiary education sector continues to reimagine the student experience amid sustained demand for seamless, hybrid and tailored learning experiences. Developing new digital capabilities to satisfy changing expectations is imperative to student engagement and retention, enhancing learning and employment outcomes, and more effectively competing on the global stage. 

This fireside discussion will focus on what’s driving the transformation of learning environments, how universities can respond and the significant implications for education providers, students, and the broader economy.

What have we gained from the pandemic? An accelerated path to the future of learning!

Future-thinking education leaders around the world are leveraging the learnings and opportunities of the pandemic to create their vision and build new flexible learning ecosystems at their institutions. Meanwhile, others are wondering why not just go back to "the way it was"? 

From the chaotic pivot to emergency remote teaching toward an intentional strategy for the future of learning, we will explore the key opportunities and challenges for administrators, educators and students.  

The benefits of Work Integrated Learning (WIL) are well established, but so are its challenges. In this session, we address one of the most critical challenges of WIL - scalability. Scalability is the cornerstone of bringing industry experience to each and every student completing a university degree, but most existing WIL initiatives only offer boutique-style learning opportunities for small cohorts of students. This session will introduce the Sandbox experiential learning pedagogy pioneered by the UNSW Sandbox Program (unsw.to/sandbox) and discuss how the pedagogy has transformed 13 courses across 4 disciplines into real-world “Sandboxes” that have brought 55 contemporary industry challenges from 22 industry partners to over 4,300 students in less than 3 years. 

Azendian Solutions has partnered leading institutions to apply AI for a quantum leap in progressing every learner to their fullest attainable potential while stretching the education dollars, looking into the future rather than managing via the rear view mirror. 

• What we learned from Industry as part of our review of industry collaboration in teaching and learning. 
• What were our recommendations and why we believe they matter? 
• What is the opportunity for universities to work with industry to support lifelong learning? 

• Teaching and learning has gone through a dramatic shift over the past 18 months as students disperse around the world
• Creating an environment of active student engagement can be enhanced with the use of film and television but the question remains; can it create or solve equity issues for domestic vs international students?
• Understanding how film and television shapes social views (gender bias, ethics, culture) and expose cultural differences can help students build critical thinking skills
• Explore the future of media in teaching and learning and the impact it can have on student outcomes

• Introduce ‘myBCom’ as a framework and gamified online platform for the holistic development and assessment of professional skills from curricular and co-curricular opportunities in a Bachelor of Commerce. 
• Solve the widespread problem of poor ‘soft’ skills in business graduates. 
• Demonstrate how a visual dashboard and intuitive ‘point’ system allows students to track their progress in achieving program learning outcomes; choose how to address lesser strengths; and showcase achievements in digital portfolios.  

When students engage in online learning, they leave behind digital footprints, artifacts that trace their activities such as contributions, page views and communications.  

These data are one aspect of the wider field of learning analytics (LAs). LAs encompass the broad data mining, collection, analysis, and sharing/reporting/disseminating of students’ digital footprints. 

The collection, analysis and communication of students’ data should account for addressing structural inequalities such as the ways in which data has been used to predict students’ potential, to perpetuate exclusion and the ways in which data have been used commercially rather than for learning. 

Attendees are called on to reimagine and discuss how LAs can be used to reconstruct students from passive “data subjects” into active participants in the processing of their personal data for their academic decision-making and success. 

We will discuss the pitfalls of data-driven pedagogy as well as how LAs can serve to empower students in the pursuit of equitable human-data interaction through legibility, agency and negotiability.