CREATIVELY OVERCOMING INSTITUTIONAL RESOURCE CHALLENGES: A TNE APPROACH

Cross-institutional learning and teaching has the potential to enrich teaching programs and offer students greater educational choice. The benefits of cross-institutional delivery are also accompanied by challenges associated with different learning and teaching methodologies, resources and policies. Solving cross-institutional education challenges require a lateral approach with the co-operation from the educators involved. Trans-national education (TNE) introduces additional complexities of cultural and economic challenges, increasing the requirement for a ‘creative solution’. Creative solutions involving Information Communication Technology (ICT) is a popular choice however difficulties arise when a resource disparity exists between the delivery and the host institution. Any solution should focus on the strengths of the institution delivering the course and the capacity of the host institute teaching team to deliver content aligned with the unit’s learning outcomes.

A partnership was established with the University of Tasmania (UTAS), Australia and the AIEN Institute within the Shanghai Ocean University (SOU), China, in 2002. Students are enrolled in two degrees in the partnership agreement. UTAS offers either a Bachelor of Information Systems or a Bachelor of Business in English. SOU concurrently offers a Bachelor of Management degree in Chinese. There are cohorts of 200 students into each of the UTAS degrees.

A number of challenges have been faced with the delivery of the UTAS degrees, requiring each UTAS unit to move from resource flexible to resource rigid. Class-time length at SOU is shorter than at UTAS with class sizes are significantly larger. Difficulties also exist with Internet bandwidth, availability and the access of computer labs to students outside of class time.

The outcome of the offshore delivery of the UTAS degree at SOU has been a positive one, despite the challenges faced. The reduced flexibility in time and space at SOU required creative solutions, ensuring the delivery of each unit represented the western education experience that the UTAS degree was required to provide. Traditional lectures become a mixture of content summary delivery and dynamic problem solving. The lecture initially provides an overview of material and then is dedicated to problem solving via case studies. The local lecturer acts as a facilitator rather than just delivering a static lecture. Practical examples are scaled back so that high load downloads are not required, enabling student exposure to the technical processes of the unit’s learning outcomes without barriers of bandwidth. For tutorials focusing on the delivery of theory, students are required to complete the work prior to attending and are randomly called upon to provided answers on which they are marked during the class.

The lessons learned from the iterative reflective process undertaken by the UTAS teaching team has demonstrated that a flipped classroom approach better supports a western approach to unit delivery whilst working with large class sizes and reduced delivery time. Additionally, the replacement of the traditional lecture with a facilitated approach supports the development of critical analysis skills that previously were not taught. Finally, it was also shown that the cultural impact of teaching a western degree in an eastern institution was appreciated by the UTAS teaching team who saw this as a challenge that could be solved by creative and lateral thinking.