Dr Dawn Gilmore | Director of Quality and Enhancement at RMIT
In this video (part 2 of 2), Dawn Gilmore extends the discussion on preserving academic quality with emphasis on online delivery, and elaborates on her work in coaching, the value of incorporating more industry voices in authentic assessment to supplement work readiness, and factors shaping the sector.
Dawn shares how she encourages the application of research to prepare academics for online teaching and help establish a coaching partnership that encourages reflective practice. Drawing from her own experience constructing RMIT Online’s coaching program, Dawn examines how she arrived at best practice learnings with academics in partnership with students to ‘close the feedback loop’, and how this experiential learning leveraged behavioral change in the classroom.
Tackling the complicated question of ‘what is student success?’ and how institutions can measure it, Dawn looks at the perspective of what students want to achieve (with scalability issues in tow), and the matter of reconciling it with institutional definitions that tend to view student success as a product of program learning outcomes and can lose sight of students’ individuality.
Referencing an industry focus as the backbone of RMIT courses, Dawn points to gaps in academia that may be plugged by ongoing industry collaboration to maintain innovation. She describes a tension in the tightly regulated higher education space of pursuing these less traditional methods, and advocates for building flexibility into higher ed standards to add legitimacy for such mutually beneficial relationships between industry and academia that anchor student motivation and outcomes.