PAVE has a long and proud tradition of adopting emerging technologies to improve their students’ experience. The innovation has often been developed in silos and as a result has meant an eclectic approach that has made applying any type of learning or learner analytics challenging. The PAVE strategic plan has an aspirational goal to ensure that 100% of PAVE courses has a blended approach to learning with bare minimum requirements determined to be set as a minimum benchmark. The blended learning project aims to provide a consistent blended learning hub for all courses that will have varying amounts of data. A basic dashboard that focuses on the active components of the learning will be created to sit within a default Blackboard shell.

The Communication Student Forum, chaired by Rob Gill, is an annual event that enables graduating students to further develop their employability skills and prepare the students for the professional work environment. The Forum has evolved and grown over the past five years, incorporating many advances and contemporary designs, along with growing student attendance numbers. The Forum is successful because graduating students and industry have this opportunity to come together and share knowledge relating to what are critical skills, challenges, and issues to becoming outstandingly employable! The Forum’s key objective aims to better prepare graduating students for the workforce by enhancing employability skills.

The panellists in this session will discuss their experiences and examine approaches regarding engaging Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledges, pedagogies and curriculum. The panellists will explore a range of critical debates and questions, including: What are 'best practices' when engaging Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledges, pedagogies and curriculum? What contributions can Higher Education and PAVE make to engaging Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledges, pedagogies and curriculum? What are the issues for different disciplines, such as arts, business, design, education, health, humanities, law and science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)? How do we prepare our students to be inter-culturally competent professionals? How is institutional readiness created for engaging Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledges, pedagogies and curriculum?

As tertiary education becomes more blended student engagement is harder to take for granted, requiring more active leadership and management. This keynote shares insights on assessing and enhancing student engagement, drawing from 15 years working with hundreds of institutions. The presentation clarifies the concept, takes stock of prevailing contexts, looks at key research findings, and advances suggestions for engaging learners with blended higher education.

The built environment is made up of spatial prompts that provide overt and subtle messages to the occupants of the environment about its usage and appropriation. Design Factories which are both working and learning environments situated in universities and research institutions utilize spatial prompts both overtly and subtle to communicate, facilitate and enhance the culture of Design Factories - a culture of co-creation, experimentation and innovation. These spatial prompts are analogue and digital and they are both permanent and temporary. We will discuss the purposes behind the spatial prompts of Design Factories and how they have been specifically implemented to assist in the creation and continual development of a culture of co-creation, experimentation and innovation.

Many of our students completing their course at PAVE are unclear as to what their next best steps are in their careers. The student off boarding online resource offers students an opportunity to reflect on their journey and consider their goals and aspirations. Based on a student’s goals and aspirations, they explore possible study pathways which will help them achieve their goals, or direct them to services which will help support them embark on their career. As part of this project, students will have access to online resources to support their decision making, access to a careers counsellor for either a class-based counselling session or one-on-one interview, and phone support for three months after their exit from their formal qualification. This resource is designed from a student perspective and aims to promote and direct students to services within a specific context. An outcome for Swinburne PAVE with the opportunity to improve student’s retention, improve student graduate employment outcomes and increase students pathwaying to higher education.

As the convenor for TOU20003 Special Interest Tourism, I had been looking for a way to incorporate technology-based innovative assessment that provided students with practical knowledge and skills. I felt strongly that the assessment could be improved, in particular, I wanted an alternative to the traditional PowerPoint presentation. This is where my idea to create a walking tour assessment using Google Maps was first formed. The Walking Tour assessment was designed to enable students to harness their inner creativity, whilst providing a more active learning experience, which is both engaging and entertaining. Incorporating videos and images to produce more authentic learning opportunities for students helped to facilitate deeper learning of the subject, enhance team work and communication skills, and promote learner autonomy.

The Swinburne Student Union is the peak student representative body at Swinburne which covers the three Melbourne campuses as well as online students. Recently the Student Union ran an end-of-semester survey of students on the topics of lecture recording, marking rubrics, and exams. The presentation will focus on the results of the survey and a discussion around the results with academics and students.

In the education and training of STEM graduates, one broadly recognised shortfall is the development of professional or 'soft' skills competencies, often blamed on a relatively content-heavy curriculum. Indeed, while the mathematical, analytical, computational, and technological abilities of our STEM graduates are generally commended, they often tend to demonstrate deficiencies in other areas key to employability. Employers now are looking for professional skills as well as technical skills ... In FSET, we have been developing an approach that encompasses all these skill sets under one banner: a contextual international immersion program. The core of the program is to bring together a group of students from various disciplines to engage in an international education trip that will require them to tackle critical issues in a completely different socio-economical context. The Australian students are paired with overseas peers and work as teams for two weeks to generate genuine project proposals with measurable outcomes. These authentic experiences help to motivate and develop crucial employability skills in our STEM graduates.

Professor Mike Keppell welcomes participants to Swinburne's Transforming Learning Conference, held on 13-14 September, 2016. He is joined by Professor Andrew Gunstone who delivers an 'Acknowledgement of Country'.