The Swinburne University of Technology (SUT) and Seek Ltd joint venture began in 2011 and created Online Education Services (OES), a Centre of Excellence in Online Learning. Swinburne works with OES, matching discipline experts with online learning specialists to deliver high-quality courses in business, education, social science and psychology to a national community of online learners. As the partnership has developed, there have been increasing opportunities to leverage the expertise of each organisation to create outstanding learning experiences for students, share learning materials and activities between online and on-campus cohorts and trial innovative teaching practices that can be implemented on or offline.
This presentation outlines how Swinburne and OES have worked together to innovate and implement equivalent supports for student success in LANTITE, the external literacy and numeracy tests mandated by the federal Department of Education. The Swinburne ITE students’ ‘LANTITE journey’ has been a joint effort to design, pilot, evaluate and iterate a scaffolded and student-focussed support model in a context of shifting government policies and procedures. This case study demonstrates that a partnership of this nature cannot successfully operate in a unidirectional manner and that genuine collaboration between higher education and online providers is critical to success. Finally, this presentation briefly outlines further learning and teaching and research initiatives that have emerged from the trust developed through this partnership.
Keywords: online learning; LANTITE; partnership