Year 1 Report CG10-1549 BTLH FINAL - Murdoch University · Year 1/Stage 1 Report AUSTRALIAN LEARNING AND TEACHING COUNCIL Revised June 2009 Page 3 of 8 DELIVERABLE 2 Website as a

Revised June 2009 Page 1 of 8

Lead Institution: Murdoch University Partner Institution/s: University of Wollongong and Macquarie University

Project Leader/s and contact details: Assoc Professor Jan Gothard Murdoch University [email protected] 08 9360 2998 Mob: 0414 360 022

Not for Publication

Grants Scheme Year 1/ Stage 1 Report - 25th July 2011

Bringing the learning home: program to enhance study abroad outcomes in Australian universities CG10-1549

Year 1/Stage 1 Report

AUSTRALIAN LEARNING AND TEACHING COUNCIL


Project team comprises leader Jan Gothard (JG); Tonia Gray (TG); Greg Downey (GD) and project manager Linda Butcher (LB) 1. Progress against specified outcomes and deliverables for Year 1 / Stage 1 The ‘Bringing the Learning Home’ (BTLH) team seeks to design, pilot, evaluate and disseminate resources to improve the quality of Australian students’ international experiences and the positive impact of study abroad on university communities. The project aims to:

improve Australian students’ study abroad outcomes and increase their involvement in the internationalisation of their home institutions; provide effective teaching resources to support academic staff in internationalisation; further internationalise Australian higher education curriculum; facilitate a sector-wide improvement in approaches to the study abroad experience.

OUTCOME 1 Improved support for intercultural education for out-bound students and more robust re-entry curriculum to increase learning potential from these experiences Trial of pre-departure (>20) and re-entry workshop (1 to date) format, content and materials at Macquarie University (MQ), University of Wollongong (UoW) and Murdoch University (MU). Creation of Oz Students Abroad photo blog (20.6.10) for facilitated peer and academic in-country support. http://ozstudentsabroad.com 164 student posts to 12 July 2011, nearly 300 comments in response, and over 6600 viewings. OUTCOME 2 Greater internationalisation of university curricula on partner campuses Discussions with the Vice Chancellor of Murdoch University and the Director of the International Office, School and Faculty Deans and Head of Academic Council about a proposal for a minor in global competence, based around the core element of supported international exchange. Discussion with Linguistics department at UoW regarding future use of BTLH materials. Discussion of possible development of a 6 point unit in re-entry at UoW, using BTLH materials. Discussion and likely adoption at MQ of re-entry material from August 2011 by MQ International and possible adaptation by MQ Faculty of Arts PACE programme. Attendance at Internationalising the Curriculum seminar at MU 23.11.10. OUTCOME 3 Heightened awareness amongst academics across sector of pedagogical value of study abroad through facilitated integration of experience into university classrooms. Presentation to Australian Universities International Directors Forum (AUIDF) at MU 24th March 2011 and Power Point subsequently uploaded to AUIDF website at AUIDF request. Presentation at the Teaching and Learning Forum held at Edith Cowan University on 1st and 2nd February 2011. Paper (JG) accepted for the Internationalisation of Pedagogy and Curriculum in Higher Education conference in June 2011, University of Warwick, UK. JG had to withdraw but the project will be promoted through an article in their quarterly newsletter, July 2011. Link of BTLH website (at their request) to Assoc Prof Betty Leask’s website (current holder of an ALTC National Teaching Fellowship, Internationalisation of the Curriculum in Action). Participation at Networks Enhancing the Scholarship of Teaching (NEST) forum on Internationalisation at Murdoch University lead by the Chair of the working party drafting the Internationalisation policy at Murdoch. 4.6.2010 Discussions with individual academics, including Learning Teaching Committees, at partner institutions. DELIVERABLE 1 Development and dissemination of a three-phase learning and teaching module for study abroad students, suitable for use across the Australian university sector, based on experiential learning principles and incorporating an additional focus on pedagogical outcomes for students after re-entry. Content of module, generated across the team, is being developed and trialled through the workshops. Face to face workshops in Perth and Wollongong in July 2011 have led to significant development of teaching material.. Videos of workshops have enabled the team to reflect on and develop exemplary teaching strategies to use in teaching materials. A photo competition, the blog, and videos of both pre-departure and re-entry workshops, and of individual students, are all generating material suitable for inclusion in a teaching module and re-entry workshops, and evidence for scholarly articles.




DELIVERABLE 2 Website as a repository for the learning materials generated and trialled through the project, include teaching strategies and exercises, assessment suggestions, readings, workshop materials, sample student interventions and exemplary video presentations The website has been created http://www.tlc.murdoch.edu.au/project/btlh/ Teaching materials have been generated and are being stored in a Drop Box folder until all materials are ready for release via the website. The Re-entry Workshop at UoW, 24 Feb 2011, and the pre-departure workshop at MU on 25 May 2011 were both recorded on video and the editing process is underway. A student was videoed in June 2011 and further video recording of workshops and individuals is planned. Once completed, essential associated commentary on how to make use of these exemplary videos will be generated and the materials made available on the website. DELIVERABLE 3 Peer-reviewed national and international publications reporting the project results A list of appropriate international and experiential education journals has been identified and a writing schedule agreed. Projected publications include: photo-reflection as a tool in experiential learning; new technology and the exchange experience; the distinctive Australian exchange student cohort; measurement instruments in study abroad and exchange; re-entry and professional development; and the multi-faceted re-entry process. JG is also developing a plan for a book length publication charting the Australian exchange experience and drawing on the blog material, although this will not be completed within the life time of the project. DELIVERABLE 4 Presentations and workshops on re-entry processes at national and international education conferences Presentation at the 2011 Teaching and Learning Forum held at Edith Cowan University, WA. 1.2.11 (JG). TG participated in workshop at The Forum on Education Abroad Conference, in Boston (attendance at this conference was sponsored by CIEE).

Planned Conferences Nov 16 – 19 2011 Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE) Conference: Redefining Student Learning Abroad: new directions and opportunities. Workshop on experiential learning in the exchange experience (JG’s attendance is sponsored by CIEE). A poster of the project will be presented. As part of the embedding of the ALTC’s Finding Common Ground project as part of an extension grant at MU, aspects of the BTLH project will be presented at forthcoming Learning Teaching Forums, Feb. 2012. 2. Review of progress 2.1 Major achievements against schedule/project brief Project management documentation and processes are in place, in the hands of project manager LB. Ethics approval is in place. Branding and website are in place http://www.tlc.murdoch.edu.au/project/btlh/ Student information sessions and follow up workshops have been held at each institution for three outbound cohorts and one inbound cohort, with preparations in place for further returning cohorts. Drop Box folders have been established for document sharing across the project team and a large database of literature has been reviewed. Excellent working relationships with International Offices have also been established on each campus.

Development and trial of teaching materials commenced in June 2010 with our first series of pre-departure workshops. At UoW, TG in conjunction with GD, has developed a trial workshop presentation which has served as the basis of later pre-departure workshops at MU (Nov 2010 and June 2011) and MQ (Nov 2010). The workshop at Murdoch has been filmed. TG and GD have also developed a re-entry workshop which was co-presented at UoW in Feb 2011 (first returning cohort) and filmed. The materials created and trialled by GD and TG have served as a foundation for a similar re-entry workshops at MU, where JG has worked with campus careers advisor Alex Semmens on developing teaching materials focusing on career and professional development.




Our team approach, with learning teaching materials largely developed and trialled in the east and then transferred and applied in the west, has been an excellent trial of the portability and adaptability of our materials. Teaching materials, exercises and resources such as PowerPoints, have been adapted by each team member to suit their individual needs, teaching approaches and time available for presentation. They will ultimately be supported by videos which will show different team members ‘modelling’ different approaches. As the range of presenters using our materials is likely to be very wide, including teachers and faculty but also international office staff, we believe the teaching material and the manner in which the videos dovetail with the PowerPoint presentation and exercises to model a range of effective teaching practices, will be very transferable across different teaching campuses and adaptable to different teaching styles.

A successful photo reflection blog has been established for students on exchange and pre-departure. It serves as an informal forum for student reflection and for staff to offer support and encourage experiential learning. In the absence of any requirement for participation, its use as a teaching tool has faced some limits, but it serves an important role in this preliminary phase of the project, enabling team members to themselves reflect on the blog, and to begin to analyse the range of student experiences shared, the opportunities for structured intervention and reflective learning. The project manager has also developed a themed matrix of material on the blog, making its material extremely accessible for research, writing and finding illustrative examples.

Surveys. The project team selected two different surveys to gauge the extent of cultural competence of our student cohorts. The voluntary surveys are administered at the beginning of each student’s exchange experience and again while the students are still in country. The surveys are not intended to measure the ‘success’ of our teaching interventions, but to assess the extent of student cultural competence using two different vehicles. The survey data collected will serve to clarify the characteristics (hitherto unknown/unquantified) of the Australian exchange student, and as the basis for at least two scholarly articles. All students have been surveyed once; first and second cohorts have been surveyed twice. Results will be analysed once the final surveys have been conducted.

Research Literature sourced by LB is lodged in a common online drop box to facilitate access by the team. This literature is informing the development of theoretical bases for our teaching learning modules which are in the process of development. Team members have decided on their collaborative roles in producing scholarly articles which will emerge from this project and have targeted refereed international education journals. Projected publications include: the value of photo-reflection as a tool in experiential learning; new technology and the exchange experience; the distinctive Australian exchange student cohort; measurement instruments in study abroad and exchange; re-entry and professional development; and the multi-faceted re-entry process. A book length publications charting the Australian exchange experience and drawing on the blog material as evidence is also being designed. The end of the ARC’s policy of ranking journals has been greeted with enthusiasm by the project team, as the peer-reviewed international education journals which have the greatest interest in study aboard and exchange were not necessarily A* journals. This will significantly enhance our capacity to disseminate and publish quickly in the international field.

Meetings Three face-to-face meetings of the team have taken place. The first, in June 2010, focused on goal setting and preliminary design; the second and third, both in July 2011, enabled the team to undertake intensive work on their teaching materials, including videos. Four face-to-face meetings have taken place between members of the team and the evaluator, and all team members have participated in phone or Skype consultations with the evaluator. We have also had two teleconferences with the advisory panel. We remain in correspondence with individual members who have provided suggestions re approaches literature, conferences, survey instruments, experiential teaching etc. at relevant moments in the process. Meetings on campus with representatives of our individual International Offices have occurred on numerous occasions over the year, and email contact is constant.

Conferences JG presented a paper on BTLH and campus internationalisation accepted for Teaching Learning Forum, Perth, Feb 2011. TG attended the Forum on Education Abroad in Boston in April 2011, http://www.forumea.org/ JG did not attend the CIEE conference in Istanbul, Nov 2010 which had been foreshadowed; but will participate and contribute to a workshop on experiential learning in exchange at the CIEE conference in New Orleans in Nov 2011, which will be an important opportunity to present this Australian project before an audience of American study abroad educators.




2.2 Lessons learnt Different campus schedules initially limited the success of our workshops at Macquarie and Murdoch. However with the cooperation and support of their respective international offices, Murdoch and Macquarie both put in place slightly different strategies for introducing students to the project, and both achieved significantly larger numbers of students from the second and third cohort of outbound students. Understanding campus differences and how to deal with them has been important, and we will communicate this in our teaching materials.

Though the idea of a photo-blog has been extremely successful, the extent to which reflective dialogue has developed amongst students has been a little limited. In a developed teaching module, a requirement to participate will undoubtedly make a difference. In the meantime, in the absence of any such ‘requirement’, the quality of the contributions has been high and the number of hits is testament to the value of sharing and reflecting on experience through photography. The material generated on the blog has been invaluable and will be a fundamental resource for publications.

Understanding the needs of stakeholders (International Offices (IOs), students and staff) is important to the ultimate goal of embedding the project outcomes. While all have been encouraging IOs at each partner institution have had different views on how the project will fit into their particular campuses. This is the strength of our multi-campus approach – our teaching module will need to accommodate such differences. 2.3 Challenges faced At Macquarie, the finalisation of ethics approval limited the time available to work with the first cohort of students before they went on exchange. The second and third cohorts from Macquarie were significantly larger. At Murdoch, it proved difficult to schedule follow up workshops after the initial presentation to the first departing cohort of students. This was remedied with the second and third cohort, with the cooperation and encouragement of the IO, by turning the presentation to later cohorts into workshops in their own right. This was possible because of the relatively small numbers of exchange students at Murdoch, and was an effective means of responding to this problem.

Many students signed up for the BTLH project but did not go on to post on the website. Nonetheless, the number of hits suggests that students who do not post still monitor the site; the number of students actually participating far exceeds the number we had originally expected to work with; and the amount of rich resource material generated (text and images) has been huge.

The most important challenge – and lesson learned - has been that students themselves do not necessarily recognise the need for or value of re-entry support, a fact which reinforces our belief that the tertiary education sector has not yet created a culture which supports exchange as a learning activity. While we were able to ‘capture’ students for our project through pre-departure workshops (in concert sometimes with the IO requirements that students attend such workshops), and to continue to engage their enthusiasm through the blog, capturing students on re-entry has proven more difficult. Time issues such as re-enrolling, finding work and re-commencing study have limited students capacity and interest in participating in a re-entry workshop, even where we have promoted it as enhancing the value of their exchange experience by, eg demonstrating its relationship to professional development. We have adopted strategies to improve retention rates (largely to do with IOs being prepared to ‘require’ students participate) but have still not accessed a group of returning students sufficiently large to enable us to undertake our planned focus on developing and trialling material related to application of acquired learning and cultural competence in the classroom.

We had also envisaged working with continuing cohorts of ‘before’ and ‘after’ students, who would have shared a common period away and a common exposure to our teaching materials. This has not proven possible. As a result, we have not been able to undertake some of our planned re-entry activities for 2011, namely working with individual returned students and academic staff at the three partner institutions on in-class activities and assessment, including producing sample video clips based on in-class activities and assessment; and running workshops and student presentations with academic staff. 2.4 How these challenges impact on the project outcomes, the timeline or the budget As explained above, our inability to work with continuing groups of ‘before’ and ‘after’ students means we are not able to undertake the task we set ourselves in our application, namely providing diagnostic materials for recognising a student's stage of intercultural awareness, as we have not been in a position to work in a systematic way with a continuing group of students. The survey data will provide some insight into this, but it will not be as rigorous nor as wide-ranging as we had originally anticipated.




The least developed aspect of our project, as outlined above, is the final module relating to on-campus internationalisation. Development in this area, including working with local faculty, has been constrained by poor student attendance at re-entry workshops. Strategies to deal with levels of attendance are being developed at individual campuses and supported by International Offices. In addition, MU has a strong programme in place for semester two 2011 to work on campus internationalisation. As part of this, the project leader has been asked to participate as school representative in the ALTC’s ‘Finding Common Ground’ embedding project at Murdoch University. This is an ideal opportunity for her to work with faculty at MU on campus internationalisation through drawing on the experiences of returned exchange students, and it will dovetail with the final thrust of the BTLH project. As a result of this work at Murdoch, we believe we will be in a good position to produce teaching learning materials which focus on this significant aspect of our project and our research). The project is designed on the basis of learning and trialling each semester. Our knowledge is cumulative and we modify approaches each semester in response to what we learn about effective strategies and, equally important, the competence of our students. We do not think the challenges we have met will impact adversely on our capacity to meet our objectives; indeed, they are teaching us about factors we need to work with as we continue to design a teaching module which will be applicable or adaptable in a wide range of situations and across many different institutions. 3. Formative Evaluation 3.1 What Formative Evaluation Processes are being used? The formal evaluation is being undertaken by an external evaluator who is a member of our advisory board. On 24 Feb 2011 Dr Maureen Bell, the external evaluator attended the Re-entry workshop at the University of Wollongong where she observed and interviewed the students. The evaluator submitted the attached Formative evaluation report, in June 2011. 3.2 What have you learnt from these processes thus far? The re-entry workshop has been modified in response to students’ evaluations. A set of instructions for use in accessing the blog is being developed. Documents and exercises on writing reflectively are being created as part of our teaching materials. We intend to be more active in seeking the direct feedback of the advisory board on our teaching materials and all members of the advisory board all be given the opportunity to read drafts of our publications as they are produced. Relevant materials and focus questions will be circulated prior to future meetings of the advisory board, in order to use the meetings as a forum for discussion rather than simply an opportunity for sharing information. We will consider redirecting more funding to support teaching relief. Material on leadership and collaborative projects has been read by team leader and team manager who will liaise more formally in future rather than on a task-driven basis. Team has conducted a discussion of collaborative procedures in light of the interim report. Teaching material will be actively designed to incorporate all elements of the experiential learning cycle. Analysis of surveys already conducted will be undertaken. Development of a fine-grained dissemination strategy will be an on-going focus. 4. Dissemination Attendance at Networks Enhancing the Scholarship of Teaching event on Internationalisation at Murdoch University to discuss this project with interested staff. (JG). Attendance to D-Cubed dissemination session, which highlighted the importance of early dissemination. (JG) JG delivered a paper on the project by invitation to the AUIDF Australian Universities International Directors Forum, on 24 March 2011 where more than 30 International Office directors were represented and also to at the 2011 Teaching and Learning Forum. JG was asked to contribute a review of the project for dissemination in the HEA/UKCISA Higher Education Academy, Teaching International Students Project Newsletter, July 2011. 5. Impact Several factors underline the extent to which this project is being embedded in our own campuses, and that awareness of our work is growing across the sector. Negotiations are underway at MU for the introduction of a minor in Global Engagement based around supporting and enhancing the value of Study Abroad and Exchange. The core unit in this minor would draw directly on the teaching materials currently under development in this project. JG has also been asked to address Murdoch




University’s Internationalisation Steering Committee in August 2011 regarding the BTLH project. UoW is discussing the prospect of establishing a ‘for credit’ re-entry course for exchange students, drawing on the BTLH model and teaching materials currently under development. At MQ, GD has held meetings with the director and staff of MQ International, and with Kate Lloyd, the Faculty of Arts PACE Academic Director, about re-entry programming, and both groups are interested in using our materials. The module is being considered in its present draft form but it is likely to be adopted by MQ International by August this year. Project leader JG has been invited to participate in a one-day ALTC Symposium on Global Citizenship in Sydney in August as a result of growing awareness of the work the BTLH team is doing in this area. 6. Events

Date/s of the event

Event title, Location

Brief description of the purpose of the event

Number of participants

Higher Ed inst

Other inst

SYDNEY 15, 16, 17 Nov, 2010

MQ Five presentations to student groups outbound for recruiting participants

Over 300 1 0

2, 3, 6 June 2011

MQ Three presentations to outbound students

About 150 1

PERTH 28 May 2010

MU Presentation to outbound student group for recruiting participants

13 students, 4 staff

1 0

June 2010 MU Individual meetings with outbound students

4 1 0

12 Nov 2010

MU Presentation to outbound student group for recruiting participants


1 0

June 2011 MU Presentation to outbound student group


1 0

WOLLONGONG 18 June 2010

UoW Major presentation to all outbound student groups from UOW

133 + 1 0

June 2010 UoW Five follow-up pre-departure workshops conducted (JG, Murdoch, and GD, Macquarie, attended one)

35 students – 1 - 3

0

4 Nov 2010

UoW Major presentation to all outbound student groups from UOW

67 + 1 0

Nov 2010 UoW Four follow-up pre-departure workshops conducted (GD, Macquarie, and evaluator Maureen Bell, UOW, attended 1)

24 1 - 2 0

24 Feb 2011

UoW Re-entry workshop 7 3 0

7. International collaboration Team members have made contact with other academics working in the area study abroad and exchange in the United States, Canada and the UK.

8. Requests for approval of proposed amendments Any proposal to significantly change the planned activities or project implementation from the original proposal, including any reallocation of budget, needs to be approved by the ALTC. Refer to Pt 10 for revisions to budget.