Lorissa Hazelman, the School’s Student/Industry Coordinator has been accepted to receive a 2011 Executive Endeavour Award to undertake two months of professional development in Australia. The Endeavour Awards is sponsored by the Australian Government
This involves full funds for two months to spend a month at the Blue Mountain International Hotel Management School and another at Griffiths University, to study their hotel management programmes, and – in particular – to look at their system of placing students in industry.
The Endeavour Awards is the Australian Government’s internationally competitive, merit-based scholarship program providing opportunities for citizens of the Asia-Pacific, Middle East, Europe and Americas to undertake study, research and professional development in Australia.
Staff Participate in Moodle Training
Two of our staff recently completed training in moodle. Marika Kuilamu and Pasirio Kitione on 16th – 17th November 2010. The workshop looked at how moodle could be used as an effective teaching and learning tool. The following activities were carried out during the workshop:
- Creating an assignment: Staff were taught how to create and set an assignment.
- Discussion forum: The use of discussion forum was also discussed with a short exercise. For this training each staff had a ‘Sand Box’ which was used the exercise. A sand box is a portal with lecturer excess created for training purposes and participants did the activities in this box.
- Turnitin: will be used by the whole university in 2011. Workshop participants were shown how they can access, view, mark and return assignments to students.
Since USP’s strategic Plan aims to enhance teaching and learning, it’s important that teaching staff are regularly upskilled with their knowledge of new learning tools that are now being introduced.
This will benefit STHM as most of our courses are also offered through DFL.
The use of moodle enables one to create and assignment online, mark, grade and provide feedback and the turnaround time could be shorter. It will also reduce problems like ‘assignments not reaching the lecturer’.
Online learning teaching and learning is what other universities are doing right now and USP aims to be a leading academic institution in years to come.
