Professor Timorthy Savage:

I must answer for myself Senator Craughwell's question about supporting the lecturers. As I outlined earlier, when I was talking about the design process, and as the committee is hopefully getting from our shared view, it is about interactions and quality of the experience. Only about half of that is content. We train the lecturing staff in online interaction - how to moderate discussion boards and work with online interactions in a whole-class video conference. In every one of our courses, every week, there is a whole-class video conference. This is not for the delivery of a lecture - that is already done with media-rich content - but to run a seminar-style engagement. This is where the students interact with their peers and with the teaching staff. Not only that, but we must provide technical support staff for those live sessions. If there is a student whose technology is not working, they contact, through a back channel, our technical support person, rather than having to disrupt the lecturer and rather than the lecturer having to become an IT support person as well. There is, therefore, training beforehand, support during that, and we are also developing reflection afterwards, where the staff start to develop their own practice. This is very important to us because this is a cascade model. We have started to see these academics going back to other courses - traditional on-campus courses - and starting, for example, to use the online discussion boards for development of critical thinking as they now know how to moderate them. It is very much part of blending in the online aspect to enhance all of our educational experience in college.