Nicola is a member of the Online Learning and Teaching team within the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching. She is one of six Learning Designers, each of whom is partnered to a College. Although much of Nicola’s work is in the digital space, you can find her in the shared services area in the Flinders Medical Centre, alongside the FLO support (eLearning and Media Support Officers).

Tell us a bit about your work. Before I do that, can I start with saying a heartfelt thank you to everyone in the College for making me feel welcome since I started here in January – this is a truly exciting place to work, and I love it.

My work supports the learning design that is already happening as an integrated part of teaching, and involves weaving together service design, learning design and professional learning. Half of my time is spent working across Colleges on Uni-wide initiatives, and half is spent ‘on the ground’ here in the College.

I am fortunate to be able to bring multiple perspectives to my work. As a professional staff member I try to understand the systems that we work with; as an occasional teaching academic and adult educator, I have some insight into the lived experience of teaching; and because I am finishing my Doctor of Education I am also a student in that world as well. Appreciating the multiples in play, understanding the sometimes-tensions between them, and knowing that ‘it depends’ on what angles we take, how we see, our experiences and our personal proclivities is, I believe, the ‘design’ part of learning design work.

I see that an important part of my work is ‘opening’ – challenging assumptions and posing questions. Connected to this, I am particularly interested in how our philosophies of teaching and learning are present in our practice. I noticed in the Covid-19 ‘pivot’ to delivering teaching online, what seemed to be strongly driving the strategies was a deep concern for the student experience. As we are finding, it is not possible to really ‘know’ what to do. While not-knowing necessarily raises anxieties, it also affords opportunities for working in different ways – notably, anecdotally, increased partnering with the students to find out what works best for them.

The challenge now is to collectively identify, share, extend and finesse those educational strategies and development processes which have proved to work well, and to ask what else is possible, in terms of delivering a truly considered approach to our online deliveries. A small step towards this is the Snapshots video stories of what works online.

What would you like to do more of? Working with teams. Yes, there is an efficiency to be had in terms of service provision on my part, but there is also a potential benefit to the team when problems, solutions, learnings and skills are raised in a common forum – plus, working towards increased consistency ultimately enhances the student experience.

What’s your takeaway message for staff reading this? As one who works across the whole College, I can also help to cross-fertilise ideas between teams. I love to hear about what worked and didn’t work – so please just drop me an email and let me know, even for those little experiments that did not go to plan – there are lessons hiding in every experience 😊