Creation
Adaptable Resources for Teaching With Technology
University of Technology Sydney
Dr Mais Fatayer
Adaptable Resources for Teaching with Technology
This case study highlights the enhancement of shareability in teaching approaches, fostering collaboration among academics and learning designers in higher education through The Adaptable Resources for Teaching with Technology (ARTT).
The ARTT project is an initiative led by the Learner Experience (LX) Design team at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). This project aims to create a collection of adaptable learning activities and assessments that can be shared and adapted across various learning environments in higher education. ARTT tackles the issue of underutilised teacher-generated pedagogies that have been developed and trialed, providing evidence-based practices that significantly enhance the student learning experience. For example, the collection offers activities that engages students at different stages of the academic session (e.g. academic semester), considers the size of the cohort and provide reusable digital assets that can be imported directly into leanring management systems (LMSs).
The ARTT collection consists of two main sections: Learning Activities and Assessments. These resources are developed using a standardised template, peer-reviewed, and published on the UTS website as open educational resources (OER) under Creative Commons licenses. This approach ensures quality, consistency, and open access for users. As OER, the collection not only benefits UTS academics but also extends its reach to the broader higher education community. The project also engages academics in open educational practices (OEP) through meaningful contribution to the developing complete guides on implementing leaning activities and assessments for others. By enhancing the clarity and shareability of learning and teaching approaches through OEP, ARTT also contributes to the professional development of academics and learning designers, fostering innovation in pedagogical practices.
Overview
UTS academics, like their counterparts elsewhere, create their own learning activities and assessments (aka teacher-generated pedagogies) that undergo continuous refinement over years of teaching. Despite the substantial number of academics across all universities, certain activities/assessments gain significant value through iterative improvements. Unfortunately, these valuable resources often go underutilised. The project highlighted in this case study endeavors to tap into these teaching ideas, restructuring them in a manner that others can derive value from. By doing so, we enable fellow academics to seamlessly incorporate these teaching activities into new educational contexts. This approach ensures that teacher-generated activities and assessments have an extended life, benefiting a broader spectrum of students.
Interestingly, teaching practice varies widely, encompassing both formally trained educators and those drawing on their practical experiences, navigating through trial and error, intuition, and engaging in social interaction and co-creation (Echempati, 2023; Lund, 2016; Rodríguez-Triana et al., 2020).
As professional staff, we acknowledge the wealth of teaching activities and assessments generated by academics. The central question is: How can we effectively harness this surplus of academic-created resources?
This case study proposes that the methodology and design principles applied to ARTT can be adapted by the wide range of academics in higher educational institutions into different learning contexts. The primary benefit of this work is enhancing the clarity and shareability of learning and teaching approaches among academics and learning designers at UTS and beyond.
Using this case study
Understanding the context: Why ARTTs?
In higher education, academics comprise both formally trained educators and those who rely on their own teaching practice. The latter often navigate through their experiences, relying on trial and error, intuition, and muddling through situations to articulate and justify their teaching choices (Echempati, 2023; Lund, 2016). While the teaching practices honed by experienced academics through years are highly valuable, they often remain overlooked and underutilised.
The ARTT project tackles several critical challenges in the educational landscape:
- Underutilised Teacher-Generated Pedagogies: despite years of refinement, many effective teaching methods remain isolated with individual teachers, leading to a missed opportunity for sharing valuable experiential knowledge. The project aims to capture and disseminate these pedagogies, ensuring they benefit a wider audience.
- Sustainable Support for Learning Designers and Technology Integration: As the demand for rapidly developing online courses within tight timeframes continues to grow, faculties require ongoing, scalable support. This increasing demand places significant pressure on learning designers, who are tasked with creating engaging and effective learning experiences under challenging conditions. The ARTT project directly addresses these challenges by offering robust resources and frameworks designed to empower learning designers, enabling them to quickly and efficiently develop technology-enhanced courses that meet the evolving needs of education.
- Accessible and Adaptable Teaching Resources: There’s a significant need for a centralised repository of easily accessible and adaptable resources that leverage technology for teaching. Academics frequently reach out to learning designers or curriculum developers for assistance in developing educational activities or assessments. While these requests originate from various faculties, they often share similar themes and demonstrate consistent needs in how technology can be utilised to facilitate learning. Usually, efforts spent supporting individual academics are often tailored to a specific subject, addressing the needs of just that one academic. When another academic reaches out with a similar request, a different member of the central support team repeats a similar process, resulting in duplicated efforts. In essence, the same kind of support could have served multiple academics simultaneously, streamlining the workload and maximising impact. More importantly, the current approach means that the effort benefits only the specific subjects involved in each request, despite the fact that many other subjects across the institution could equally benefit from the solutions being developed. The project seeks to fill this gap by creating a comprehensive collection of resources derived from real-world experiences, making it easier for educators to integrate technology into their teaching practices, while at the same time maximising the benefits of these resources for other academics to adapt into their own teaching.
The ARTT project aims to provide a solution to these challenges by creating a centralised, open repository of adaptable teaching resources. This platform seeks to address the void by providing a way to share practices and resources in a collaborative and accessible manner. By doing so, it aims to improve the quality and efficiency of technology-enhanced teaching across various learning contexts in higher education, while also validating and utilising the valuable experiential knowledge of academics.
Similar projects
Many higher educational institutions initiated instructional design resources for teaching with technology. For example, the Center for Distributed Learning at the University of Central Florida in the US, established the Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository for faculty and instructional designers interested in developing online and blended learning environments. Their resources are open for public access and they also offer the opportunity for contributors from anywhere in the world to share online learning pedagogies.
OneHE is an initiative that is committed to fostering a culture of sharing and accessibility in education, particularly through the creation and dissemination of OER. As part of this commitment, OneHE offers a variety of free courses, activities, and resources designed to support faculty in enhancing their teaching practices.
Another local example is the Flexible Learning project, funded by the Australian Universities Teaching Committee (AUTC). The “Flexible Learning project” is a collection of reusable learning design resources to assist academics to create high quality and flexible student learning experiences (Agostinho et. al, 2002).
Key stakeholders
The ARTT project involves a diverse group of stakeholders, each playing a vital role in its progress. From project leaders to end-users, these participants collaborate to create, maintain, and utilise the ARTT collection.
- LX Design team are the primary drivers of the ARTT project. Their responsibilities include: a) Leading the overall project b) Developing resources for the ARTT collection c) Creating and maintaining the template for resource development d) Peer reviewing resources and provide feedback to authors and e) Coordinating with other stakeholders.
- Editorial team works closely with the LX Design team. Their main role is to ensure the quality of content in the ARTT collection. They build resources in the LX website, and maintain content standards.
- Contributors includes a diverse range of professionals: a) Academics: University professors and lecturers b) Learning designers: Specialists in creating effective learning experiences c) Curriculum developers: Experts in designing educational programs. Contributors come from both UTS and other universities by providing the actual content for the ARTT collection, sharing their teaching activities and assessments.
- UTS faculties are the various academic departments within UTS. They are the primary beneficiaries of the support provided by the LX Design team. Faculty members can use the ARTT resources to enhance their teaching practices.
- Wider academic community of academics and educational professionals beyond UTS. They are potential users of the ARTT resources, as the collection is openly accessible. They can also become contributors, adding their own resources to the collection.
ARTT promotes diverse perspectives and innovative approaches to learning, fostering openness and empowerment among contributors. The complexities of education, particularly in the assessment sphere, have increased, emphasising the need to partner intentionally with students, academics, faculties, external industries, and communities to broaden the scope of these resources (Krause, 2023). This collaborative partnership, rooted in OEP, guarantees the preservation of authorship and upholds the integrity of the artefacts.
The ARTT development process
The working group of this project consists of three learning designers and technology specialists and two curriculum designers. The members of the project team have significant experience in teaching, educational technologies, and research. These three domains of knowledge are crucial to sustaining the project and improving quality of outcomes.
The project team’s expertise in teaching, educational technologies, and research is indeed fundamental to the ARTT project’s success and sustainability. The three domains contribute to the project’s development and quality improvement:
- Teaching expertise: Experience in teaching enables the team to design resources that align with pedagogical practices. It involves anticipating potential gaps or challenges in the learning sequence and verifying the practical application of the resources with actual teaching scenarios. Teaching expertise helps ensure that the developed instructions are not only logically structured but also pedagogically sound and effective in real classroom settings.
- Educational technological skills: Understanding the affordances and limitations of various educational technologies is essential for creating resources that are adaptable and functional across different platforms. This includes testing for interoperability and ensuring that artefacts attached to an ARTT resource work seamlessly within the UTS Digital Learning Ecosystem (DLE). Familiarity with alternative technologies supported by UTS allows the team to design resources that remain maintainable and scalable, with the university’s support infrastructure able to assist academics in adapting these resources effectively.
- Research competence: Research skills allow the team to engage deeply with the academics, understanding the theoretical and pedagogical foundations underlying the ARTT resources. This enables the triangulation of evidence from both research literature and teaching practices, enhancing the credibility and depth of the resources. Moreover, research skills help identify indirect benefits of the developed activities, such as their impact on different learning environments or on student engagement and learning outcomes.
Combining these skill sets ensures that the ARTT resources are not only well-designed and technically robust but also theoretically grounded and capable of evolving with future educational needs and technological advancements.
In order to maintain consistency of developing the resources, the team has developed a special template that allows for step by step instructional design and technical implementation of the resource. Currently, there are two collections that have been established in this project: (1) Designing Learning Activities and (2) Designing Assessments.
Each resource is designed based on a set of attributes that describe its content as described in the ARTT template box. The set of attributes provide academics with an easy way to make quick decisions of suitability of the resource to their context. The instructions in each resource also cover in detail the learning design steps and the technical implementation of the activity or assessment that identify suitable technologies.
ARTT template
The template consists of the following attributes:
- Short blurb: Includes a brief summary outlining the key activities described in each resource.
- Why do this: Outlines the objective of creating the activity and how it contributes to active learning.
- How to do this: A set of clear instructions that academics can follow to implement these activities or assessments into their own subjects.
- What tools you could use: This element includes a list of UTS-supported technologies required to implement the activity. It also features non-UTS-supported technologies that are well-known to academics.
- When and where to use: Provides recommendations on the optimal time to introduce the activity to students and suggestions for suitable discipline areas. It also specifies whether the activity is designed for fully online or blended learning approaches.
- How long will It take: Includes three time estimates: Build (the time for an instructor to build the activity), Teach (the time to deliver the activity), and Learn (the time a student will spend engaging with the activity).
- What research tells us: This important element highlights research findings on the benefits of the activity or the learning theory that explains how learning occurs within the activity.
- Artefacts and examples: Attached resources, such as learning objects, rubrics for assessments, or templates for specific activities, are provided to assist in resource development.
- License and Attribution: All resources are associated with a Creative Commons license, and authors are properly attributed. This also provides a platform for academics with a teaching-focused role to share their approaches.
The team works in an agile approach and meets every two weeks (i.e. sprint). As a core concept in agile project management, a “sprint” refers to a short, fixed period during which the project team focuses on completing a set amount of work. At the end of a sprint, each member presents progress with resource development to the rest of the team and receives constructive feedback to improve the clarity of instructions and the usability of the resource. On average, a resource is developed every two sprints giving two to three weeks for building the content and one week for the peer review process.
ARTT learning design principles
The opportunity to present the project in different platforms (e.g. UTS Learning and Teaching forum 2019, Open Access Week 2020, CAUL conference 2022, ASCILITE 2023) gave the opportunity to reflect on our learning design practices by seeking feedback from the diverse audience, benchmark against best practices and distilled key principles that continue to guide resource development. These principles include:
- Integration of digital pedagogy: Emphasising the use of digital tools and approaches to enhance learning experiences.
- Active learning focus: Crafted specifically for environments that promote active student engagement.
- Alignment with learning futures: Embedded within the learning.futures framework and LMS guiding principles to ensure consistency and effectiveness.
- Evidence-based methodology: Grounded in a thorough review of literature, teaching practices, and the affordances of technology.
- Rigorous quality control: Continuously refined through a robust quality assurance process.
- Targeted support: Focused on providing tailored learning design support for high-impact activities and assessments.
- Designed for UTS technologies: Optimised for use with UTS-supported technologies and commonly used tools.
Practical application
As an academic or learning designer, the ARTT collection offers valuable support for curriculum development. Whether you follow your own learning design approach or utilise an existing model, the ARTT resources empower you to make informed decisions and enhance your content with proven strategies and insights. In the following example I used Gilly Salmon’s “Five Stage Model” (Ruzmetova, 2018) as a foundational framework to develop an online subject. I integrated the ARTT collection at each stage of the model to design targeted activities for learners, ensuring a cohesive and engaging learning experience.
Champions: Insights and reflections from project contributors
The collection provides a valuable resource for academics, enabling them to make quick and informed decisions in their teaching practice. It draws from the real-world experiences of educators, with contributors generously sharing their insights and strategies. For instance, in the video below, Amara Atif, a Scholarly Teaching Fellow at the School of Computer Science, discusses her use of scaffolding as a teaching strategy while instructing the course “Enabling Enterprise Information Systems” in Autumn 2022. She notes that this approach significantly boosted class engagement, enhanced students’ understanding of the material, and increased their motivation as they became more proficient.
Learning designers at a UTS expressed enthusiasm for the project, with one senior learning designer stating, “This is exactly what the faculty needs.” Another learning designer commented, “You guys speak the language that we need between learning designers” indicating that the project successfully bridges gaps in communication and understanding.
Moving forward
In 2024, ACCORD report stated that “Since the cessation of the Office for Learning and Teaching (OLT) in 2016, Australia has not had sufficient national focus on system-wide improvements in these areas. As a result, while there are many examples of high-quality teaching and educational research within Australian universities, the benefits of this work are not shared and systematised.” (Accord, 2024). Although there are pockets of high-quality teaching across Australian universities, the lack of a national framework for sharing and systematising these practices limits their broader impact. The ARTT project serves as a crucial initiative in addressing the gap identified by the ACCORD report.
Another challenge that we are currently facing is that the higher education sector has become increasingly reliant on technology, particularly with the proliferation of Generative AI. However, technology that is moving and changing in unpredictable ways. With resources such as ARTT, academics can make connections between what they want to teach with how it can be reimagined with a technological focus. Assuming that technologies are changing more rapidly than many educational concepts, each of these resources can be reused and updated commensurate with such changes. Open access and visibility of these resources, together with considering their currency, will ensure their usefulness and useability into the future.
In practice
Final advice for future projects:
- As learning designers, we have the power to significantly enhance teaching and learning by creating resources that are both accessible and adaptable. However, to ensure the success and sustainability of such projects, a strategic approach is essential. Here are three key pieces of advice to guide you in building an impactful and enduring ARTT collection.
- Start small with a clear vision: Building a community takes time and patience. Begin by focusing on a limited set of learning activities to establish a foundation, and gradually expand your community to attract more contributors. It is also essential to clearly define your project’s purpose and ensure it aligns with your institution’s strategic plans. This alignment not only reinforces the project’s relevance but also garners institutional support and integrates seamlessly with broader educational goals.
- Collaboration: The collective intelligence of a group can achieve far greater impact than individual efforts. Engage with your institution’s community to gather diverse ideas and support, work across teams to harness varied expertise, and expand your network of contributors through professional platforms. This collaborative approach amplifies the reach and effectiveness of your project.
- Embrace agile development and sustainability: Use an agile approach to iterate quickly, collect feedback, and plan for the long-term maintenance and promotion of your resources.
References
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Acknowledgement of peer reviewers
The authors gratefully acknowledge the following people who kindly lent their time and expertise to provide peer review of this chapter:
- Emilia Bell, Manager, Research and Digital Services, Murdoch University
How to cite and attribute this chapter
How to cite this chapter (referencing)
Fatayer, M. (2024). Adaptable Resources for Teaching With Technology. In Open Education Down UndOER: Australasian Case Studies. Council of Australian University Librarians. https://oercollective.caul.edu.au/openedaustralasia/chapter/adaptable-resources-for-teaching-with-technology/
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