Massey transforms courses to additional digital offerings under Digital Plus

Provost Professor Giselle Byrnes says the successful initiative, developed through a partnership with Wiley Online, is just one of many designed to ensure that Massey University students and staff have world-class digitally enabled learning and teaching experiences.

“This is part of the Digital Plus strategy announced earlier this year to help future-proof Massey as a leading New Zealand university, and it sits alongside our efforts to build our internal capability and capacity, such as through the Activate programme, where we have a 15-strong team of people working to transform our courses into high-quality online offerings,” Professor Byrnes says.

“Massey is committed to offering New Zealand’s best digitally enhanced learning experiences, creating a student-centred learning environment, and being a national leader in high-quality online higher education.

“We want to provide all students with an excellent and equivalent learning experience, regardless of their location or study mode.”

Massey has experienced rapid growth across its three campuses in Palmerston North, Albany and Wellington over the past few decades, leading to duplication of infrastructure and its academic offering. Digital Plus will drive the co-ordinated consolidation of Massey’s academic offering, paired with an acceleration of world-class online teaching and learning.

Other initiatives include the advanced work on redesigning the Bachelor of Social Work and the Master of Clinical Practice (Nursing) to develop a digitally enhanced curriculum. The University has also been carrying out experimental work with new and emerging technologies including trialling virtual reality for teaching human anatomy in a first year Bioscience class.

Trial of virtual reality for teaching human anatomy in a first year Bioscience class.

Massey University digital innovation director Jean Jacoby says there is huge potential for the technology and the University is actively investigating how virtual reality fits into physical teaching spaces.

“We are actively focussed on the development of digitally enriched courses and programmes through effective curriculum design; the support of staff wishing to develop their teaching/facilitation skills; increased technical support; and experimental work with new and emerging technologies,” Ms Jacoby says.

The University is also 3D scanning teaching resources for Classics, Aviation, Sciences, Geology and Massey landmarks. This enables rare, valuable or difficult to distribute resources to be made available to our distance students and the wider community. View the University’s 3D collection here.