Across all FLO sites at Flinders University, you will find the Acknowledgment of Country in two key locations:
- When you open the Topic Management panel or Topic My FLO for students
a short statement is displayed at the top of the pop-up box:
- Within the dark blue footer at the bottom of the FLO page, clicking Our commitment to Indigenous Australians will open a new tab with more comprehensive information.
Why in these locations?
Much of FLO is customisable to allow the addition of content that meets your needs. There are times when it is important for the content to be the same across all FLO sites to ensure consistency and accuracy for students. The Topic Management/ Topic My FLO panel and the footer are locations that will achieve the latter and are visible to both students and staff. Placing acknowledgements in these locations ensures all sites have consistent and approved messaging. It also enables the University to update all FLO sites with one single edit should this approved messaging be updated in any way in the future.
Some topics, for various reasons, have added an Acknowledgment of Country message to other parts of the FLO site. Although well intentioned, this may inadvertently be associated with the following issues:
- if University endorsed changes are made to the current wording of the Acknowledgement, statements added in addition to the approved one will not be automatically updated.
- if everyone adds Acknowledgements to different places, and potentially with different wording, the consistency for students across topics will be reduced.
If you would still like to draw more attention to the Acknowledgement of Country, why not consider doing this within the Welcome video, orientation video or another agreed place. If you would like to begin your Welcome video by speaking your own Acknowledgement of Country, that would be awesome too.