Blended Learning Innovations: Leadership and Change in One Institution

The Foundations in University Learning and Teaching (FULT) course is a professional development program aimed at developing the foundational knowledge, skills and attitudes of UNSW teaching staff necessary to inform effective and scholarly teaching approaches. Similar introductory teaching development programs are offered by most Australian universities to their teaching staff (Hicks, Smigiel, Wilson, & Luzeckyj, 2010). FULT has been offered at UNSW Australia for over 25 years in different forms and traditionally, up until last year, delivered primarily face-to-face. However, in 2013 FULT was redesigned to better align with the university’s strategic intent to develop teaching staff capabilities to teach in blended learning mode, incorporating a ‘flipped classroom approach’ as outlined in UNSW Australia’s Learning and Teaching Strategy 2014-2018. This approach is based on the work of Baker (2000) and Lage, Platt, and Treglia (2000) where the passive component of the course, such as reading textbooks, listening to podcasts and watching videos are individually done by students whilst the more active components of the course are used to engage students through problem solving, case studies and discussions. This flipped classroom can help students to increase their motivation and manage cognitive load (Abeysekera & Dawson, 2014), maintain their class attendance (in blended learning) and sustain their out-of-class effort (He, Gajski, Farkas, & Warschauer, 2015), and increase their participation and interactions with teaching staff (Roach, 2014)