New online IT diploma

Want to get a university qualification in information technology, but don’t have the time? Think again.

Macquarie University’s new Graduate Diploma in Information Technology is specifically designed for people who lead busy lives and don’t have time for the traditional university experience, says Associate Professor Dominic Verity, Academic Director of the Postgraduate and Professional Development Program in the Division of Information and Communication Sciences.

“The Graduate Diploma is aimed at people who either have incomplete qualifications in IT that they wish to formalise, or who have no IT background whatsoever but who now find themselves needing to understand the fundamentals for their current or future work,” Verity says. “That means they’re a geographically-diffuse group, and one that finds it really tough to travel to our campus in the evenings, even if we’re just asking them to come here once a week.”

So when Verity and his staff sat down to develop the program a few years ago, they decided to bring the mountain to Mohammed.

“We needed to be able to deliver essentially the same education to people here on campus as to people sitting at their desks at work or at home, and to spread their teaching out over the week,” he says. “What IT students want is interaction with people who know what they’re talking about. They can read material in a book, but that doesn’t come to life unless you have people who are experienced and who can guide you through the material that you’re reading and absorbing.”

The obvious way of delivering the program from an IT perspective was electronically via the Internet, which is now much more viable due to technological advances.

“The current phase in electronic learning is very much about collaboration, using the Internet as a communication medium between teachers and students and amongst fellow students. We’re using the latest collaboration technologies – things like instant messaging, virtual classrooms, desktop sharing and collaborative whiteboarding,” Verity says.

“So you’ll find that in our Graduate Diploma we don’t give lectures. Each course has a well-defined textbook which students are expected to have, and we work through it in a disciplined way. We take all of the time we would have been using in lecturing and instead we do tutorials and practicals – individual, small class sessions on a multimedia platform, which allows us to set up a classroom environment on the screen, including chat, voice, streaming video, surveys and quizzes.”

Verity says that while it is now possible to do the entire Graduate Diploma program without ever entering the Macquarie campus, none of it is exclusively online.

“We also understand that for many students uni is a social thing as well – they want to meet other students, talk over a cup of coffee, and see lecturers in person, so the online program is supplemented by voluntary workshops at least three times a semester,” he says.

For more information on the Graduate Diploma in Information Technology, or other related postgraduate degrees, visit http://www.ics.mq.edu.au/ppdp/ or email pginfo@ics.mq.edu.au

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