Having completed a short course in university teaching, I was keen to learn more about how to design and deliver courses at the tertiary level. While I have been teaching at ANU for ten years, in a classroom and on-line, I would like to study what works and why, in detail.
Australian National University
The obvious program is the ANU's own "Graduate Certificate in Higher Education". This has similar content to the programs offered by other universities, with an emphasis on a constructivist approach, action learning, student centered learning, formative feedback, community of practice and reflection. One point of difference is that the ANU offers a course in "Research Supervision" (EDUC8004), appropriate to the university's leading role in research.
The ANU courses are delivered in intensive and blended modes. However, my interests lie in e-learning and so it is worth looking at other institutions which specialize in distance education.
University of Southern Queensland
The obvious choice is University of Southern Queensland. USQ have a Postgraduate Certificate in Tertiary Teaching and Learning (PGTT: PostgradCertTertT&L). This program is delivered via e-learning and includes "Online Pedagogy in Practice" (EDU8114). While I have missed semester 2, they have semester 3 commencing 14 November, with applications closing 28 October, 2011.
ANU and USQ have an alliance for education. USQ also has Professor Gilly Salmon as Executive Director and Professor (Learning Futures). The model of on-line learning described by Professor Salmon in "E-Moderating: the Key to Teaching and Learning Online" is the one I have been trained to use by the ACS and use to deliver courses at ANU.
Open Universities Australia
The next to consider are the postgraduate education programs from Open Universities Australia. OUA obviously has an interest in on-line learning and my Green Technology Strategies course is offered by ACS through OUA.. Two of the universities in the OUA consortium offer certificates:
New England, CQU, Ballarat, Edith Cowan, Canberra Consortium
Another Graduate Certificate in Tertiary Education (GCTE) of interest is the one offered jointly by University of New England, CQ University, University of Ballarat, Edith Cowan University, and University of Canberra. There is a very detailed GCTE 2011 Course Handbook.
However, the course suffers from being a consortium approach, making the administrative details complex. Also the course has blended components, that is some of it is delivered face-to-face, which makes the logistics of study much more difficult.
Other Australian Programs
A search of "Postgraduate Certificate Tertiary Teaching" at Australian universities returns 13,000 web pages. This shows that many other universities have such courses.
International Programs
Many universities around the world offer courses for university teaching. Some of note are: Postgraduate Certificate in Online and Distance Education (Open University UK) and those from New Zealand.
Not School Teaching
It should be noted that these university teaching programs do not generally qualify the student to teach at a primary or secondary school. Schools have much more rigorous requirements for education of their teachers than universities (plus the requirement for a police check).
1 comment:
Another course which has been recommended to me is the CQU Graduate Certificate in Tertiary Education.
However, when I first tried to fill in their query form, I got:
Validation Error
You must correct the following error(s) before proceeding:
JBO-29000: Unexpected exception caught: oracle.jbo.JboException, msg=JBO-33035: Row currency has changed since the user interface was rendered. The expected row key was null
JBO-33035: Row currency has changed since the user interface was rendered. The expected row key was null.
It worked the second time.
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