‘Digital First’ in a Digital World

(Read article in danish)

Deakin University's overall international ranking has climbed several hundred places since the university introduced its new 'digital first' strategy in 2010, Professor and Vice-Chancellor Jane den Hollander tells Centre for Online and Blended Learning, COBL during a SUND delegation visit to the new university partner in Australia. One of the goals of the visit was to explore how Deakin works systematically to utilise digital technologies to create educational programmes that - according to den Hollander - are at the forefront of the development and which prepare the students for the future job market as thoroughly as possible.

”We create educations for the jobs of the futures and research that makes a difference to the communities we serve. We want our learning to be the most sophisticated premium cloud experience that you can be for as many people as possible,” explains Jane den Hollander and adds: “A ’digital first’ strategy for everything.”

Since den Hollander became vice-chancellor in 2010, the new strategy has led to several acknowledgments, i.e. a ranking as number one with respect to student satisfaction in the home state of Victoria and number five in Australia, a ranking as number two for innovative and educational teaching materials, and a ranking as number three in Australia for employability. And the rankings have been climbing.

”When I got to Deakin we were sub 600, now we're sitting at 214 and that's a big jump and by every year we increase it just slightly, although there's lots of competitors," says Jane den Hollander.
But why focus on precisely the digital to create better education programmes?

A job market that is rapidly changing and digitalised

”The innovative technologies and learning methods are more open and indirectly give the students a cultural understanding, intercultural, digital communication and collaboration skills and the opportunity to create global networks,” explains Jane den Hollander about some of the qualifications she believes the students will need as graduates in the globally intertwined, rapidly changing, increasingly digitised job market. In addition, the daily life of the students is already digital so Deakin must conform in a natural way.

 ”We put the users, the students, at the center and only a few of them are either only 'on campus' without access to the cloud or only 'off-campus', only using the online learning resources,” says den Hollander.

Concrete examples of the 'digital first' strategy are a new chat technology, Watson, and DeakinSync, a digital platform that gathers all student interfaces with the University in a common environment that is accessible from all types of digital platforms. As the first university in the world, Deakin has integrated the live chat IBM Watson which is said to be capable of interpreting student behaviour and thus help the students get fast and accurate help 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

A third example is Deakin CloudCampus, referred to as Deakin's fourth campus, but with no physical walls. CloudCampus offers over 180 purely online courses and has approximately 12,000 enrolled students from various countries. The online students pay the same price and have the same teachers and resources as campus students, and they may use the classroom in the 'cloud' exactly from where and when it suits them, except for a few types of collaborative activities that take place synchronously - online.

But also, Deakin's more than 300 campus courses have been given a new design since 2010 so they too may now be accessed from the 'cloud', the point being that from one year to the next, it was actually no longer a question of whether - as a teacher - you wanted to integrate digital learning technologies, but rather a question of how to best get it done over a short span of time.

From now on we start from the back - with the learning goals

Many millions of Australian dollars have been invested in technology, and further education of teachers and a new common method for redesign of Deakin's more than 300 courses have turned many teachers’ usual working methods upside down.

“So instead of saying 'here's what I'm going to teach' we reversed the order and started asking ‘what are the learning outcomes from this course’, and then we backfilled,” explains Jane den Hollander about a method where you define the working goals before you decide which tasks and other activities the students will work with – and only then do you develop the very content. The method is user-centred and creates a logical linear progression and structure that may be effectively transferred to an online course.

The initiative has had the effect that since 2013 around 56,000 students have been able to choose whether they want to access the more than 300 courses via ‘the cloud’, attend lecturers at one of the three campuses, or alternate between the two formats. So far so good - but not good enough for Jane den Hollander. Many of Deakin's digital learning resources consist of simple, streamlined lectures or other digital learning resources which - according to the vice-chancellor - do not meet Deakin's ambition to deliver 'brilliant education'.

“it's looking dull, so we're just about to upgrade the whole of the bachelor's, the first eight units, to give them a very shiny look for January,” says Jane den Hollander, thus introducing the need for an entirely new working method to ensure a boost in the quality of the learning resources in the most important courses, meaning those courses with the most students.

Media producers and teachers should work in teams

“Academic is prime, but my view is that when your teaching staff are not product development naturals, go and get product developers and team them up with the academics,” says Jane den Hollander.

Besides the fact that professional help with production boosts the quality of the digital learning resources, it also saves course leaders and teachers time so they can concentrate on what they are good at, i.e. developing learning goals, assignments and content. The task of the production team will then be to help translate content, tasks, etc. into digital learning resources and activities and disseminate them on the digital platforms.

“So there's this new industry forming, where we choose high end product development for teaching purposes and if you come in a year's time and ask me, we will have product development teams or unit-teams as we call them, who work on most of our" says Jane den Hollander and adds: ”So that's our big game at the moment and it's a big investment.”

What will be the next digital step for Deakin?
”I would love everything in the cloud to be perfect now”, den Hollander promptly replies. And what does perfect mean in this context?
“I think we need to get the community experience even more seamless, more stylish, more straight-forward, so the interactivity between students and teachers would feel more like the classroom of yesterday”, she says.