Dual Delivery Rooms at ANU

Since June of 2020 ANU has made some good progress in the creation of Dual Delivery rooms which will enable active participation in the same class, and at the same time, by students who are present in the room as well as with students attending online.

Throughout the setup phase there has been testing of the facilities and as a result some learning along the way.

Equipping the Dual Delivery rooms with technical components constitutes an essential starting point — how tutorials are designed and delivered impacts heavily on the quality of the learning and teaching experience.

Before noting some of the insights gained in the testing of these facilities – it is worth repeating two points made in last month’s article on the same topic.

Firstly, 19 centrally timetabled tutorial rooms have been established with Colleges invited to nominate a few more rooms as demands increase. And secondly, the expectation is that there will only be a few on-campus activities at the start of Semester 2 (2020) – but they will increase as pandemic restrictions are further relaxed and more people move back onto campus.

That being said, what have we learned in the setup phase includes:

• For a successful class, it is important to practice using these rooms, both for tutors and for students;
• Teaching two different groups of students at the same time requires significant rethinking of teaching practices, therefore:
• engage your students in the challenge
• encourage in class students to join the video conference (with sound muted)
• pair up remote students and in class students for discussions
• ask a student to monitor the chat and alert you to questions and comments from online students; and importantly,
• COVID restrictions need to be carefully complied with.

With an expanding knowledge-base, you can find a growing list of resources at CLT’s Dual Delivery Wattle site covering a wide range of topics:

To engage further, please contact clt@anu.edu.au or your College Education support team for more ideas.

July 2020