An Associate Dean’s Community of Practice: Rising to the Leadership Challenges of Engaging Distance Students using Blended Models of Learning and Teaching

The Higher Education Sector

HE in Australia is operating in a highly volatile context where external pressures for change are increasing. These include: decreased funding per capita while competition increases; the growing pressure to create new sources of income; more commercial institutions; more numerous students who are becoming more diverse and forthright about getting value for the money paid; emerging instances of litigation against universities; and increasing government scrutiny; in place, and changing, external quality audits (Scott, 2008). Scott adds that rapid developments in Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) have made possible modes and approaches to learning unimagined thirty years ago.

These changes are generating questions about learning and teaching: about the extent to which a university is a place where new knowledge is created and where research occurs away from the mainstream; as well as where learning primarily is seen to involve transmission of set content using a ‘one-size-fits-all’ model delivered in lecture theatres, tutorials and laboratories on a set timetable operated at the institution’s convenience over fixed semesters. Scott (2008) maintains that to remain viable, universities must build their capacity to respond promptly, positively and wisely to this interlaced combination of ‘change forces.’ This volatility is exacerbated for academic/learning and teaching leaders by the particular change forces pressing on them: decreased government funding, growing pressure to generate new income, balancing work and family life, managing the pressures for continuous change, having to deal with slow and unresponsive administrative processes, finding and retaining high-quality staff, and increased government reporting and scrutiny (Scott, 2008).