Abstract:

With increasingly diverse student populations, rapidly changing technologies and growing economic pressures affecting the tertiary education sector, new methods are needed to address the challenges facing learners and institutions. FRED (Freely Relational Educational Data) is a new educational method established and currently undergoing stage 1 pilot testing at Griffith University, Australia.

This paper offers a case study of FRED’s application within the Master of Digital Design Course and how it has evolved in response to the needs of educational institutions, academics and students. The FRED method shifts the focus of educational delivery, at both the individual and institutional levels, towards adaptive plasticity. This plasticity enables integrated educational methods to respond to technological, social and cultural influences independent of place or time.

FRED is designed to help learners and lecturers break out of the classroom, out of the institution and to break free of their geographical limitations to create a global educational CORPUS of qualified information.

Keywords:

FRED, adaptive plasticity, corpus, relational data, feedback systems, educational management systems, EMS, Digital Design, Australia.