Professor Belinda Tynan discusses USQ's approach to technology enhanced learning

Hi, I’m Belinda Tynan, The PVC Learning Teaching and Quality. USQ has a proud history of using technologies to enhance our online learning environments. To provide our students with more interesting and engaging learning experiences. We as a group have come along way over recent years in developing a comprehensive suite of online tools and support mechanisms to help support you in your teaching.

The recent Moodle upgrade has laid the foundation for our next wave of enhancements and innovations in this exciting space. We are moving quickly to ensure that all our learning environments and the materials that we provide to our students, in those environments, can be accessed from any device they choose to use. Whether that be a computer, a pad of some description, or even a smart phone. We’re also looking to making our systems more integrated, to provide our students with a seemless learning experience. For example, the integration of our Mahara ePortfolio with our USQ StudyDesk, will deliver a clearer learning pathway for our students. Providing for them a platform on which they can provide clear evidence of their immerging professional practise and to help them to create a professional identity for themselves and for potential employers.

USQ is playing a major role along with some other universities in developing a new functionality in the assessment capabilities within Moodle as well. As these enhancements are introduced and USQ StudyDesk matures as a product, this will allow us, as a university, to further streamline the large suite of systems we are currently required to manage. However, this will only happen as the functionality of our older systems are superseded. Again making it easier for you to do your job in providing our students with the seemless online experience they are asking for. These two examples only start to scratch the surface of our exciting future together and we in Learning Teaching and Quality look forward to working with you to make this exciting future a reality.