Ako Aotearoa's Annual Report for the period January 2009 - December 2009 is now available.

Director's Report from Annual Report 2009

Jump to:

• End of our first phase of development
• Major funding streams to support work in the sector
• Building our resource base
• Celebrating and supporting excellence
• Working for Māori and Pacific learners
• Developing partnerships to improve teaching and learning
• International linkages
• Building the organisation

End of our first phase of development

The 2009 year was Ako Aotearoa’s second full year of operation. It represented the end of the first phase of our strategic development, which was about establishing and positioning ourselves as the champion of tertiary teaching and learning in New Zealand. I believe we have been successful in this, and would like to thank and pay tribute to our excellent staff who have been absolutely committed to the cause of improving tertiary teaching and learning in New Zealand.

Ako Aotearoa has made a strong start in focusing attention back on the need for a system-wide and organisational approach to the enhancement of teaching and learning. Tertiary teachers and learning support staff (in all their multitude of guises) are critical to maximising learners’ opportunities for success in tertiary education, but the task cannot just be left to individuals, however committed they are. That task must be actively supported by the organisations who employ them, and the system supporting these organisations must recognise, incentivise and reward success. This was the basis of our submission to the government’s Tertiary Education Strategy 2010–15.

It is, therefore, good to see government policy moving in that supportive direction. The difficult part, however, will be in the detail of implementation and willingness of organisational leaders to make this an operational priority amongst all the other pressures they face. It is our role to help in this process.

In last year’s annual report, I outlined four particular challenges for us; these are worth repeating here.

• Existing good and excellent practice is not shared well amongst practitioners.
• The research base for tertiary teaching within New Zealand is highly fragmented and, in general, has a limited impact on practice.
• Most tertiary organisations in New Zealand (with some notable emerging exceptions) are not strategic about the enhancement of teaching and learning.
• Teaching and learning is often undervalued within our tertiary sector.

These challenges remain significant issues. Experience, in the last year in particular, suggests we should add a fifth point that in part underpins each of the issues listed above.

• We are not good at working off an evidence base to improve practice.

This is not simply a New Zealand problem: it is increasingly recognised as an international issue and one that will become fundamental to our next phase of work.

The following boxed text highlights the statistics of our achievements in 2009. Just as claims about effective practice need evidence to support those assertions, our focus is to ensure our activities actually have an impact on improving the experience of New Zealand’s tertiary learners. Such things are not easy to measure, but it is essential that we do.

Major funding streams to support work in the sector

The National Project Fund 2009 supports projects of between $50,000 and $150,000, with the potential to make strategic and sustainable improvements in tertiary teaching and learning. Seven major new projects were commissioned in the 2009 National Project Funding round to the value of $800,000. We are excited about these new projects, each of which has considerable potential to support enhancement of teaching and learning. We are also considerably encouraged by the developing balance of the National Project Fund portfolio, both across disciplines and topic areas and because all parts of the tertiary sector are now involved.

However, while the fund was seven times oversubscribed, panellists in both the Māori Initiative Projects and Pacific Peoples’ Projects funding streams chose to fund only one project in each case, with both panels having reservations about the potential strategic impact of other work proposed. In all funds, there are still too many expressions of interest that address what the panels feel should be business-as-usual for tertiary organisations.

In the first half of 2010, we will give active consideration to the redesign of the fund and will consider introducing a request for proposals around tightly specified pieces of collaborative work for at least part of the funding available.

It is clear we need to continue to be proactive in supporting capability building in tertiary education research. Our 22 funding workshops around the country in 2009 were well received by attendees, but the quality of many expressions of interest received was still less than we would have hoped for.

The Regional Hub Project Fund is an open fund designed to support smaller projects of up to $10,000 to improve tertiary teaching and learning. The regional hubs facilitated the approval of 32 new projects, bringing the number approved to 92 and committing a further $262,000. We see this as a capability building fund and, accordingly, have worked to keep it as an open fund. Further details of this workstream are set out on page 33.

The Collaboration Projects Fund is a separate part of the National Project Fund designed to support effective inter-institutional collaborations in improving teaching and learning. To our surprise, fostering meaningful collaborations that bring a range of capabilities together to achieve potential outcomes greater than the sum of the parts has been more difficult in the tertiary sector than we expected.

Nineteen groups explored ideas with us in 2009, resulting in four projects getting under way, with others still under development. Nevertheless, we believe this funding stream has the potential to provide considerable value for money. Our one completed project in this area, Te Hononga Mātauranga, has proved its worth, and other new initiatives, in particular work by two private training establishments (PTEs) and a wänanga on strengths-based learning (see page 48), are also showing promising results.

Good Practice Publication Grants are designed to promote and share proven good practice in the tertiary sector. These grants are progressively being published in an e-book on our website as the final drafts are approved. Of the 33 applications accepted in 2008, 22 are now published, and 19 further grants have been awarded from the 48 applications received in 2009. Once again, this workstream has highlighted for us the lack of experience many people have in developing a systematic evidence base around their practice. Accordingly, we tightened up the criteria for the 2009 funding round and have gone to considerable lengths to explore the nature of the evidence available with prospective awardees.

Building our resource base

Our website continues to be popular, and usage continues to grow. We now have over 1,000 registered users. Considerable work was done on our website during 2009, and a significant evaluation was undertaken through a user survey, a usability analysis and the establishment of a new web reference group. As a result, a programme of gradual enhancement of the site is under way and will continue through 2010. Much of this work is focused on increasing ease of use, particularly as the site becomes loaded with more resources.

Earlier in the year, we commissioned short, user-friendly summaries of resources by topic area and we will continue to build on these. As noted above, we also published our e-book of the Good Practice Publication Grants in September. We anticipate this, and outputs from other projects, will continue to build into a major online resource. We are continually harvesting new material for our website and exploring ways to link to other sites.

A particularly encouraging development has been Adult and Community Education (ACE) Aotearoa’s decision to use our communities of practice facility to support professional development in that sector. This has been a valuable learning experience for both parties, in particular, identifying the strategies necessary to build active online communities of practice (see page 16).

Our national register of research and projects in tertiary education in New Zealand has proved to be a significant asset and enabled us to start analysing recent work being undertaken in tertiary education in New Zealand. We are particularly interested in examining the reasons why research so often fails to impact on practice and, in common with commentators overseas, we are forced to conclude this is often because of the way the research itself has been framed. Often, work in New Zealand scores poorly against the dimensions of both methodological integrity and practice focus. This has re-emphasised for us the need to work with the tertiary sector to enhance our collective capability to drive the enhancement of teaching and learning from an evidence base. This topic was a key theme for many of our presentations and workshops during 2009 as we worked to manage expectations in the sector about how to achieve success in our funding rounds.

The other thrust of this work has been the effective dissemination of research-based thinking about quality enhancement of teaching and learning in the tertiary sector. We are beginning to adopt a layered approach to publishing well-designed summaries or news items capturing key ideas and, importantly, key questions to be asked when considering intervention for the improvement of teaching and learning (see page 54 for details). We believe this is money well spent and are  encouraged by the support we have received for these initiatives at both the political and policy level.

Celebrating and supporting excellence

Another key role for Ako Aotearoa is the recognition, celebration and support of tertiary teaching excellence.

In 2009, we welcomed Emeritus Professor Noeline Alcorn as the new chair of the Tertiary Teaching Excellence Awards Committee. Noeline is a hugely experienced educator and researcher, and it has been a privilege to work with her and share her insights into what makes for teaching excellence.

As a result of our promotion of the Tertiary Teaching Excellence Awards at the end of 2008 and early 2009, we were pleased with the increase in interest from the PTE sector. We worked hard during the year to develop new criteria for additional awards for staff demonstrating sustained excellence in teaching in a kaupapa Mäori context. It was with great pleasure that we received approval for these new awards from Minister Tolley for implementation in 2010.

Details of the 2009 award recipients are provided on page 57 of this annual report, and it is worth noting the general view of the panel is that the quality of nominations for these awards is continuing to increase. The portfolios that nominees are required to present are, in themselves, exemplars of evidence-based improvement of practice.

To complement our work on the awards, we are also supporting the development of an Academy of past award recipients, the Ako Aotearoa Academy of Tertiary Teaching Excellence. With well over 100 national awardees, Aotearoa, New Zealand has a considerable resource of practice excellence. The role of the Academy, as an independent voice of expert practitioners, is to make that resource available to the whole of the tertiary sector. With an active work programme and two symposia under its belt, the Academy is already making considerable progress in this respect.

Working for Māori and Pacific learners

As identified in the government’s new Tertiary Education Strategy 2010–15, educational success for Māori and Pacific learners remains a key priority. As noted on page 28, our focus on working with Māori has been to develop an integrated, strategic approach to what we do, guided by our Mäori Caucus.

The appointment of our kaihautū Māori, Ngahiwi Apanui, in the middle of 2009 has given this work considerable impetus. In total, we are now supporting projects specifically designed to benefit Mäori learners to the value of over $1 million. We feature some of the diverse range of projects designed to enhance Māori tertiary educational outcomes on page 29. Two other projects worth mentioning are: first, our commissioned project with The Open Polytechnic of New Zealand and Massey University, now successfully completed, that resulted in a te Reo language administration pack for Moodle and, second, a joint project with Te Puni Kōkiri on mentoring Mäori learners, which we hope to publish in the second quarter of 2010.

With this work under way, our next focus was to develop a Pacific Caucus for the organisation. I am delighted we have been successful in gaining such strong support from senior Pacific tertiary educators. Dr Margaret Southwick, dean of the Faculty of Health, Education and Social Sciences at Whitireia Community Polytechnic, has been elected chair of the group, while Fiso John Fiso has been elected deputy chair and also appointed to the Ako Aotearoa Board. John is chief executive of the New Zealand Institute of Sport and president of the Pacific Islands Tertiary Education Providers of New Zealand (PITPONZ).

The caucus has already begun to establish a strategic work programme to support Pacific educators and learners and has oversight of the Pacific Peoples’ stream of our National Project Fund.

Developing partnerships to improve teaching and learning

As a small organisation, it is critical that Ako Aotearoa develops partnerships wherever mutual opportunities arise. These take many forms, from conference sponsorship to working in partnership with the project teams we fund. Of particular importance are our partnerships with other organisations with a keen interest in improving the quality of teaching and learning.

There are too many of these to mention them all, but 2009 highlights at the national level include the growing collaborations with the New Zealand Council for Educational Research (NZCER), including a jointly hosted colloquium for project teams undertaking work in tertiary education, ACE Aotearoa (our key link to professional development issues in the ACE sector), the New Zealand Association of Private Education Providers (NZAPEP), which hosted our regional hubs at almost all of their regional meetings, and the New Zealand Association for Cooperative Education (NZACE), which we supported to develop extended resources on work-integrated learning.

A particular focus area for us in 2009, which will continue in the foreseeable future, was collaborating with the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) to support the use of the Australasian Survey of Student Engagement (AUSSE) in New Zealand. The AUSSE, designed and managed by ACER, was developed to stimulate evidence-focused conversations about students’ engagement in university study. Developed from the North American National Survey of Student Engagement, the AUSSE builds on methodology validated over four decades.

We are working with the university sector to enhance decision making and capability in interpreting what is proving to be a rich diagnostic data source, and with the Institutes of Technology and Polytechnics (ITP) sector to develop and pilot the AUSSE in ITPs. Eleven ITPs have committed to working with Ako Aotearoa and ACER to pilot the AUSSE within their organisations in 2010. This will be the first time the AUSSE has been used outside the university sector.

Supporting institutional professional development is another critical aspect of our work. Apart from working in partnership with professional development groups in the ITP and university sector, we are presently undertaking a stocktake of qualifications and support for teachers in the tertiary sector. We also separately commissioned from Dr Alison Viskovic an updated literature review on professional development, which was completed earlier in 2009. These two pieces of work will, we hope, be the basis for future discussion about collaboration on professional development and what support is
needed for effective tertiary teaching in the 21st century.

Finally, an important aspiration of Ako Aotearoa is to work directly with learners. At the end of 2009, Ako Aotearoa signed an agreement with Ralph Springett, president of Massey University’s Extramural Students’ Society (EXMSS), to fund a student-led project aimed directly at finding out what tertiary learners at Massey University think of the quality of their tertiary education experience.

Titled “Review It”, the tool builds on EXMSS’s current “Rate It” tertiary paper rating system and will provide an online information forum for students to research future paper choices. The evaluation tool is carefully moderated and seeks to recognise teaching excellence as well as supporting continuous quality improvement.

Ako Aotearoa is excited about the project’s potential to provide a model of an appropriately managed, learner-led evaluation tool that may in time be available to the whole tertiary sector. We see the value of this in providing robust learner-perspective information that can be triangulated against provider-driven evidence supporting quality improvement.

International linkages

While the way the New Zealand education system works has to take into account a specifically New Zealand context, it is vitally important our thinking on teaching and learning has an international reference. International links are important to us. Staff and/or Academy members made professional visits to meetings in the United Kingdom, Taiwan, Australia and Canada during the year, and we were privileged to host a range of visitors at Ako Aotearoa, as well as making presentations to other overseas delegations.

While all these visits have been fruitful, it was a particular pleasure to host Professor Philippa Levy from the University of Sheffield and Professor Carl Wieman and Dr Sarah Gilbert from the University of British Columbia.

Philippa Levy is director of the Centre for Inquiry-based Learning in the Arts and Social Sciences, one of the United Kingdom’s Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL), and was in New Zealand as a Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia (HERDSA) Fellow. Of particular interest to us from Philippa’s visit was the evaluation approach undertaken by her centre.

Carl Wieman and Sarah Gilbert are director and associate director of the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative at the University of British Columbia, a $12-million science education improvement project. Carl was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001 and, for the past several years, has been interested in developing an evidence-based approach to improving teaching and learning in science by taking a scientific approach to the problem. In all, around 170 people attended his presentations given over three days in the North Island. Further details of Carl and Sarah’s visit are highlighted on page 9.

Building the organisation

I hope this report gives something of the flavour of what we do. It is diverse, it is exciting and it is important. We also need to be self-critical: as I said at the outset, all this effort is of little matter if it doesn’t translate into benefit for the country’s tertiary learners.

As noted in my introduction, this is often difficult to measure. Our influence and support are often focused on the medium-term horizon and our impact is inevitably mediated by the actions of others.

Difficult to measure or not, we need to demonstrate we are value for money as an organisation. It is to this end that we commissioned an outcomes hierarchy evaluation and monitoring framework to provide a reference for what we do and to identify how we might measure our effectiveness. This framework has become part of our new strategic plan, and provides a context for the current evaluation work we are doing to inform both our priority actions for the future and the way we carry them out. At the end of 2009, we commissioned our first independent full formative evaluation. This work will continue through until April 2010 and will be followed by other independent evaluation work on specific aspects of our operation. We expect to learn a lot from this, test our assumptions that we are doing as well as we think we are and work out how we can do better.

Peter Coolbear
Director

17 February 2010