Highly Intensive Teaching in Tertiary Education: A Review of Recent Scholarship

Introduction

Tertiary providers in Australia and other nations have increasingly begun to offer subjects at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels through a compressed or blocked form of teaching and learning known as Intensive Mode Delivery (IMD). The rising popularity of IMD is evidenced by the recent production of good practice guides (e.g. Male, Baillie, Hancock, Leggoe, & MacNish, 2016; Wlodkowski & Ginsberg, 2010), yet despite this rising popularity, however, researchers state that education providers need greater knowledge about how to effectively deliver education in compressed formats. As Dixon and O’Gorman (2019) reported, “research into …[IMD] is relatively limited in comparison to other innovative approaches to curriculum design and implementation” (p. 2). More research on IMD is important as tertiary providers need to help students achieve any stated learning outcomes as well as feel satisfied with their learning experience. Providers need to know which formats of IMD, if any, are most suitable for different types of students and subjects as well as how best to teach within this mode. Providers also need to understand the strengths and limitations of IMD, what changes need to be made to traditionally taught subjects to make IMD successful, and what support teachers need to make the transition to IMD. Overall, an education provider’s decision to put IMD in place should be a thoughtful one.

This chapter consists of a literature review of empirical studies conducted on face-to-face IMD formats available since 2006, and builds upon the work of Davies (2006) who published a review of face-to-face IMD formats in the tertiary education sector that authors writing on this topic frequently cite (e.g., Dixon & O’Gorman, 2019; Hesterman, 2015; Crispin, Hancock, Male, Baillie, Macnish, Leggoe, Ranmuthugala, & Alam, 2016). Davies’ (2006) review defined IMD, outlined where different types of it are practiced, reviewed literature on this teaching mode including empirical studies, discussed issues in interpreting data from the empirical studies, and outlined IMD learning issues. He argued that although IMD can offer some advantages, he offered warnings about implementing it. Davies concluded that more research is needed on the learning outcomes that postgraduate students achieve through IMD, how different IMD formats impact upon adult learning, the Australian situation for this practice, the IMD formats specifically in Economics and Commerce, and potential pitfalls of IMD. This chapter furthers Davies’ work by looking again at definitions of Intensive Mode Delivery, discussing why providers choose this mode of teaching and evaluating IMD through the lens of Cognitive Learning Theory. The chapter also furthers Davies’ work by reviewing empirical studies of IMD published since 2006, considering methodological problems of those studies, and offering a list of areas for further research. The research method used in this chapter discusses how the authors located and reviewed empirical studies. As the authors confined their research to face-to-face delivery, it is important to note that other issues would need to be explored if the definition of IMB were relaxed to include technologically enabled delivery. The chapter should be most useful for traditional academics and administrators seeking to augment their traditional delivery with Intensive Mode Delivery.