Please find below the submission from Professor Richard K. Coll, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Learning, Teaching, & Student Services, The University of the South Pacific

Best practice in Distance and Flexible Learning at the University of the South Pacific

Distance and flexible learning (DFL) is often viewed as the poor cousin, in terms of quality, of the student learning experience compared with face-to-face.  This perception is widespread including in the south Pacific region, where students based on their high school leaning experiences much prefer face-to-face-to-face teaching.  However, such a stance ignores what quality measures a university may have, and does not take into account how online teaching may leverage ICT to provide for innovative pedagogies.  At USP all online courses are preceded by face-to-face offerings; that is we do not develop online courses unless we have already taught the same course face-to-face previously.  When ‘converting’ a face-to-face course to online (or blended) mode, we map course and graduate attributes and link this to ICT use and pedagogies that address the learning same outcomes.  Likewise, the assessment regime is exactly the same.  Each conversion is externally reviewed before it is run, and again after the first iteration.  We do not need to be defensive about education quality for wholly online course if our quality measures are in place.  What we do need to do, is ensure student who are normalised in face-to-face teaching are scaffolded into online (and blended) learning.  Moodle ‘help’ goes some way but current interest is an online tutorial and competency test for which students must complete before being allowed to enrol in online courses.  This is consistent with previous work by COL which indicates the need for student training in online learning.