Education Academy launched

You may have seen the posters announcing that the Monash Education Academy was coming. It was finally launched on 18 March.

The academy is structured around six themes:

  • Recognising
  • Training
  • Mentoring
  • Showcasing
  • Researching
  • Fostering

Introducing the new academy, Professor Darrell Evans, Vice-Provost (Learning and Teaching) was quite adamant that the Academy is:

  • owned by the faculties as its executive is composed of faculty representatives, and
  • it’s open to anyone who’s interested in teaching – both teaching and support staff.

Three main initiatives to start

These are the academies first three initiatives.

  • The CEED framework (Continuing Education Excellence Development) will replace the Grad Cert (in Academic Practice??) that was compulsory for all new teaching staff. It is not an award course, but composed of modules. This gives the Academy the ability to add, change and delete modules as demand changes. CEED is designed as a continuous professional development framework.
  • BTBL Bytes will be a series of online resources on a range of teaching and learning matters. It’s currently being tested and they are looking for volunteers who’d like to try them out and give feedback.
  • Ten foundation fellows were inducted into the Academy today – Liz Davis from MNHS was among them. An ongoing fellowship program will be developed in future.

Student involvement

Dr Nicholas Monk (Assoc. Prof and Director IATL at Warwick University also spoke). Monash and Warwick have been collaborating on this venture as well as others. One point raised by Nicholas is how to involve students in such an academy. Darrell Evans picked up on this and said that Monash still had to work out how it involves students in the work of the Academy. One suggestion is to draw HDR students into its activities as they will become the next generation of teachers. But there needs to be other involvement.

Ideas and input

The last part of the launch was a discussion at each table about ideas for the academy. Angela Carbone was sitting on my table, so we got a very thorough run-down on the PATS (Peer Assisted Teaching Scheme). This will be closely involved with the mentoring aspect of the academy. She also mentioned her involvement with MERG (Monash Education Research Group) as education research is one of the Academy’s “themes”.

They are looking for ideas and input to shape the direction of the Academy: you can email them to education.academy@monash.edu

A question that came up in relation to SRH is “how do you motivate/encourage busy clinicians to take part in some of this?”

Where to next?

There will be another session on 5 May for people who couldn’t go to the launch, but are interested. (See home page for details.)
If you’d like to make comments, submit ideas, volunteer to test BTBL Bytes, volunteer to take part in the pilot of CEED which will start in semester two, email them: education.academy@monash.edu

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