There are four aspects to the strategy behind Distance Learning at Scale: A new online pedagogy rooted in our strengths in high quality, research-led teaching; the building of a scalable capability and capacity; the cross fertilisation of courses and the University’s Digital Education Ecosystem.

Distance Leaning at Scale (DLAS) is seen as core University business. The DLAS Pilot will focus on research and development and is aimed at building, testing and proving the University and its partners’ capability and capacity to plan, create and execute online learning at scale without compromising quality. To achieve this, this programme will deliver new pedagogy, underpinning innovative technologies, new University processes, an “at scale” partner relationship and new course creation with the capabilities to scale production. This will include a new programme business model and approach that structures clearly how each programme will be supported allocating staff academic time, administrative work and the leveraging of central shared services such as media, course development, IT, marketing and pedagogical support. The pilot will first create and then test the capabilities through the delivery of pilot academic programmes.

The end goal is to have a proven, scalable, reusable and quality University capability so that additional schools can leverage this capability for their own courses.

A robust governance and approval path both for the project, its strategic links and implications as well as the individual business cases and courses is being established for approval through the University Executive and other relevant University Committees.