Information Technology in Teaching
in the Faculty of Arts

1. Structures and policies:

There has been a considerable amount of work done in the Arts Faculty in this area. The principal organisational problem now faced by the Faculty is the unco-ordinated development of this activity, with the risk of duplication of effort and resources. The Arts Faculty has therefore established an LTOP Implementation Committee (still to be approved by Faculty Board) which will attempt both to promote the use of new educational technologies and to identify and co-ordinate existing activities.

There already exist, at Faculty level, a Flexible Learning Committee and a Web development team. Each School has a Webmaster. There is some technical support, but new initiatives require considerably more investment in this area.

 

2. Information Technology in teaching:

There are a variety of ways in which Information Technology is used in teaching in the Arts Faculty, and the examples given here are not comprehensive. Distance Education, particularly strong at Gippsland, uses all of these approaches.

a). to provide material for student use, inside and outside the classroom. Visual Arts have digitised large quantities of visual material, and their Web site is the most frequently visited one in the Faculty. A small number of lecturers provide lecture material on-line, and Philosophy in particular have considerable quantities of readings available in this way. Australian Studies make extensive use of on-line materials and Geography have courses using on-line maps and images. Such material can be used either as an adjunct to classroom work or to assist in flexible delivery. Many courses right across the Faculty make use of the Internet as a resource (languages, politics, history, geography, etc.).

b). interactive uses: CD ROM materials have been developed for advanced students in French and German, and interactive exercises have been used in French for some years. Web-based materials using texts, images, and sound have been developed in Vietname se, Japanese, Chinese, Indonesian and Korean, with further Japanese, Italian and Spanish materials in development. Short on-line exercises are used in History to develop bibliography and note-taking skills.

c). to facilitate communication, both between staff and students and between students. Philosophy and Australian Studies have developed newsgroups. Obviously, e-mail is widely used in some courses, both for raising questions and for the submission and return of work.

Priorities:

Apart from developing the technical skills of both staff and students, there is an urgent need to develop ways of evaluating these forms of teaching (particularly through user evaluations); to address equity issues; and to consider the resource and workload implications for both students and staff.

Assoc. Prof. David Garrioch
Associate Dean (Teaching)
Faculty of Arts
21 April 1999