New directions for professional learning

Associate Professor Dominic Verity

Many teachers, when contemplating further education, find the time needed and the costs involved too daunting. But there is an urgent need to improve skills in areas such as information technology and science.

This issue has been examined by an interdisciplinary working party within Macquarie University, which was founded by Associate Professor Dominic Verity. He is Academic Director of Postgraduate and Professional Development Programs in the Division of Information and Communication Sciences.

Recent policy changes have shifted the responsibility to identify and budget for professional learning activities onto New South Wales’ schools themselves. However, finding cost effective and appropriately structured activities upon which to spend their new resources is still a substantial challenge for the average school.

A unified system

Verity and his colleagues have proposed that Macquarie establish a new “virtual institute”, the working title of which is the Macquarie Institute of Professional Learning. This would provide an easily accessible system to which diverse academic departments would contribute to provide interdisciplinary study opportunities.

Participating teachers will be able to choose to attend a single short course and gain accreditation for it in isolation. Alternatively, they might attend a complete sequence of such courses, accumulating credit towards units of study in a postgraduate degree they might later decide to take up.

Such short courses might consist of weekend workshops, interactive online lessons, Web-based multimedia presentations, evening classes on campus – or combinations of all of these. Each one would involve a total time commitment of about 50 hours.

The watchwords in designing the virtual institute’s delivery mechanisms and academic program have been accessibility and flexibility. While a short course might involve a significant time commitment, they will all be structured to allow teachers to easily fit these activities around their day-to-day duties

Next steps

Aside from setting delivery standards and encouraging interdisciplinary activities, this institute will also allow the University to draw together all of its activities in this arena under a single management and promotional banner. In short, it will provide an accessible and distinct “one-stop shop” for any of a school’s professional learning requirements.

Implementing the full system is a long-term process.

“If we’re going to unify a range of disparate activities to support teachers’ professional learning, we need to focus on our best skills and open up our programs to make them more accessible,” says Verity. “We need to focus our awareness-building and marketing. We will be providing something that has structure, that is tied in with the broader activities of the University, and will be in place for some time.”

For more information, contact the Postgraduate and Professional Development Program at pgadmin@ics.mq.edu.au

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