All Ireland Society for Higher Education
| Name: | Anne Drummond |
|---|---|
| Email: | anne.drummond@ucd.ie |
| Institution: | University College Dublin |
Guerin, Helen, helen.guerin@ucd.ie
In 1993 it was acknowledged that education had a pivotal role in preparing the workforce to implement EU-driven Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) legislation. This higher education programme, with the objective of providing multidisciplinary training in OSH, had a number of unique characteristics that required a novel learning approach: subject experts had limited time to lecture, and learners were mature, in full time employment, from diverse academic and occupational backgrounds and not in a position to travel to UCD.
Lecturers are nationally recognized OSH experts, and Information and Communication Technology strategies are used with traditional teaching and learning methods, such as local face-to-face tutorial support and comprehensive distance learning materials.
The course has been periodically reviewed from a pedagogical perspective introducing situated learning, enquiry based learning, peer and self-assessment, as well as from a technological perspective, moving from analogue to digital and integrating video conferencing to IPTV.
It is considered that the continued success and growth of this approach has been primarily due to the technological solutions being employed in response to pedagogically driven factors and because academic staff and academic support staff work together to develop suitable solutions that best meet the learners' needs. Ongoing review and reflection are key success factors in continuing to attract large student numbers and new subject experts.