Education Design

Get help with increasing student interactivity, online engagement, assessment and feedback strategies, designing your WATTLE site, choosing and using educational technologies, digital pedagogy, and much more!

The CLT Education Design Team offers support services in a range of formats. Our goal is to help you enhance your teaching practices and student learning experiences, with practical solutions to your teaching needs. We ground our advice, design and development work with reference to educational research and the principle that teaching and learning are contextual: we put consultation and partnership with your discipline expertise at the centre of what we do.

Individual and small-group support for face-to-face or remote teaching

Flexible, at-elbow support, offered in-person or online, synchronously or asynchronously, offered to individuals, or small groups.

Consultation and support services can include help with:

increasing interactivity in learning, such as interactive lectures (see also Interactive Learning)
supporting student engagement online
assessments, lectures or feedback
re-designing your course site
creating a student-friendly WATTLE site
practicing and testing new educational technology tools and strategies before class
choosing appropriate educational technology suited to your teaching approach

Consultation Testimonials

“You’ve given me so much useful, practical advice that I can apply to this upcoming exam, and also to the future assessment designs.” – Academic, CASS (personal communication)

“Thank you very much, {Claire}! It was a very informative session and I’m keen to try out Polls as well as padlet or Miro. So thanks very much. I’m also looking forward to the upcoming Staff Education workshops on Zoom.” – Academic Skills (personal communication)

"I just wanted to send you a quick email to tell you how the Live Tutorials went last week. I think it was just great I had the practice with you, thank you so much!! They [students] were a bit shy to show themselves at first, but then I split them up into break-out rooms and that was the best part. They started talking and turning their cameras on, and once they were back in the main room, they started talking more.” – Academic, CBE (personal communication)

Contact the Education Design Team

Book a consultation time with an Educational Designer through our Teaching Remotely WATTLE site, or email us at eddesign@anu.edu.au with your query or request.

Education Design Projects

Need help with something more than 'just-in-time' support? Have an ambitious idea you want to develop over an extended period of time? Overhauling an existing course or developing a whole new course?

An education design project may be better-suited to your needs. Education design projects:

are on timeframes between 3-6 months;
generally align for implementation of the design/development work at the start of semester;
involve meeting regularly with educational designers, at least once every two weeks;
are endorsed by local-area Academic Leadership (typically ADEs) and Director, CLT;
have a dissemination plan to share learning from the project;
are focused on university strategic priorities - student engagement and interactive learning.

In general, the phases of an education design project are:

Plan and Prototype – determining your needs and the approach that will be taken
Design – designing what changes you are going to make
Develop – building the learning objects, multimedia resources, WATTLE sites, etc you will use
Deliver – implementing the changes that have been designed and developed for your course
Evaluate – how do you know what worked, what lessons have been learnt?

There is often much iteration between the Plan and Prototype, Design and Develop phases: it is not always (rarely) a linear process! Similarly, Evaluate is considered throughout the project. Evaluation isn’t an add-on at the end, and works best in tandem with the design, development and delivery of a teaching and learning experience.

Examples of Education Design Projects supported by CLT

Pivot to remote learning: Earth Science: redesigning courses for online delivery
On the Fast Track to Creative Problem Solving in Lawyers, Justice & Ethics: bringing text-based seminar problem scenarios to life as radio plays
Piloting a new model for Engineering: redesigning courses to use workshop modules
Social interactivity and remote learning environments: maintaining social connectedness when moving a course online
Interactivity and COVID adaptation in large-group teaching: Torts Law: maximizing engagement and interactivity in a large-group mixed-cohort course
See more examples and case studies at the CLT Interact Blog.

Contact the Education Design Team

Book a time to discuss your idea or proposal for an education design project, or contact us directly at a eddesign@anu.edu.au about education design projects.

Bespoke Workshops

An individual or series of workshops may be a better format when there are common teaching and learning needs or themes in your School or College. Workshops can be School or discipline-based and are an effective means of supporting staff to share practices and work together toward common goals: the genesis of a Community of Practice.

Bespoke workshops can feature all or some of these elements:

A dedicated WATTLE site for participants, with targeted resources
Workshops run online in Zoom or MS Teams (your preference)
Interactive workshop sessions – both with your academic peers, the facilitator and content
Pre- and post-workshop activities to maximise value from the synchronous workshop
Participant groupwork and a focus on action plans to implement course changes
Guest speakers and Q&A – other academics at ANU sharing their practice and experience
A specific theme or challenge, such as interactivity in lectures, or effective feedback
A general question or issue, such as “what does good practice look like in remote teaching?”

Bespoke workshops delivered by Education Design align with and complement, (but don’t duplicate), open-invite Learning and Teaching Workshops offered by the CLT Staff Education team, as well as the range of self-paced online ANU Coffee Courses on T&L.

The Education Design team will work closely with nominated Academic Leadership, usually the Associate Director Education, to develop the workshop objectives and format, and to negotiate the content according to your requirements.

Examples of bespoke workshops facilitated by the Education Design Team:

Spotlight on the CECS Teaching and Learning Intensive: nearly 100 teaching staff together for an all-day intensive to share their teaching ideas and find ways to improve the student experience.
Improving educator’s understanding of online assessment: two workshops to provide support with challenges related to remote assessment.
Research School of Psychology Technology-Enhanced Learning Workshops (WATTLE, self-enrol): WATTLE site supporting a workshop with RSP, including resources used during the workshop
Presenting equations in Zoom: video resource created for a workshop on Zoom presentation skills