ISANA

Fiona Henderson, Alan McWilliams

Abstract: Student academic literacy and learning support at Victoria University is an integral part of the educational experience offered to students by Student Learning Unit (SLU) lecturers. Good practice in student language and learning support includes a shift from prevailing ‘remedial’ approaches that imply service provision from outside the curriculum towards systemic approaches involving embedding support material in curriculum through collaboration with mainstream staff (Skillen et al., 1998).

The compulsory first-year undergraduate management subject Management and Organisation Behaviour (MOB) is taught across three campuses in Melbourne, and at partner institutions in Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong. Seventeen staff, including 10 sessional staff, are involved in the delivery of the subject. Students in MOB come from a diverse range of degree specialisations including Applied Economics, Accounting, Tourism and Hospitality and Management.

The team, which consists of the SLU lecturer and the subject lecturers, has developed a model to foster academic skills and deep learning (Biggs, 2003, Biggs and Telfer, 1987) within the very diverse student cohort enrolled in MOB. This partnership is innovative in that it involves the skills of both discipline and SLU staff onshore, and of offshore discipline staff in a way rarely seen in Australian tertiary institutions. The offshore lecturers are guiding the team to understand issues unique to their environments, and, with the team, building a response to offshore students’ needs which is culturally appropriate. The inclusion of offshore partner staff in such teams acknowledges the expertise of staff from partner institutions and was one of the key recommendations in Victoria University’s Australian Vice Chancellors’ Committee (AVCC) project report entitled Improving Language and Learning Support for Offshore Students (Dixon, 2005).

Assessment, central in forming students’ perceptions of learning, has been restructured and redesigned to include learning materials using Biggs’ concept of constructive alignment; two of Victoria University’s Core Graduate Attributes (CGAs – written and oral communication and group work); the unpacking and scaffolding of assessment tasks and the provision of flexibly accessible multimedia learning materials including linguistic models. There are practical, operational and cultural differences between the different locations which have led to the current developments.

Key Words: Offshore, assessment, constructive alignment, transnational education, equivalence

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