Digital integrity and the teaching/learning nexus: Taking the pedagogical pulse of the multilocation university

Abstract

This case study considers questions of pedagogical and educational integrity in relation to multi-location or distributed learning environments that deploy blended learning models. Specifically, we engage with the implications of these models in light of recommendations that Australian universities continue to improve access for students from low socio-economic backgrounds and other identified equity groups. We provide an overview of the critical success factors germane to the implementation of these models at the University of Wollongong in 2000 and examine some of the pressure points that have emerged as the project expands into 2010.

"Are we there yet?": Making sense of transition in higher education

“…The regional campus students represented by the narratives offered here-and these are only a very small sample of representative scenarios-find themselves having to negotiate, becoming what Giroux (2009) calls "border crossers" (p. 691) as they move between university, family and their broader communities. This sense of location, dislocation, re-location, can have profound effects on a student's capacity to learn and to also take satisfaction in that learning (Stirling, Hopkins & Riddick, 2010). The ambivalence expressed in their views is inflected through the multiple and intersecting discourses of gender, class, age, ethnicity, and cultural differences constituting diverse subjectivities at a particular moment of a particular sort of transition.…”