We report on educators' experiences of a massive open online course (MOOC) focused on the Carpe Diem learning design process. The MOOC was developed in‐house using Blackboard CourseSites by a university innovation and development unit, Learning Transformations, at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. We report on a study of MOOC participants' experiences. Conclusions include illumination of MOOCs' value as professional development opportunities that can provide an authentic relevant experience for educators, as well as promote new skills in learning design and delivery for their own teaching. We propose that participation in relevant MOOCs may provide appropriate professional development for academics, and additionally encourage them to develop their teaching practices. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at http://youtu.be/baI4Brc8nOY

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This paper presents a contingency theory of approaches to teaching in Higher Education adopted by university academics who teach heterogeneous student cohorts within a changing university context. The study is located within the substantive context of academics within Australian universities who teach within the broad field of management studies. Orthodox grounded theory is employed to generate a contingency typology comprised of four separate teaching approaches: Distancing, Adapting, Clarifying, and Relating. The model demonstrates how academics utilise a variety of teaching approaches to address their 'main concern', namely maintaining their professional competence within the context of a rapidly changing university landscape and significantly heterogeneous groups of students. We have labelled this process 'Maintaining Competence'. This model stresses the importance of the twin forces of structure and individual agency in determining teaching approaches. It emphasises the value of analysing what academics actually do in the classroom situation, rather than concentrating on normative assumptions of what they should do in terms of best practice.

This paper presents findings of an institutional case study investigating how students and lecturers experienced a new opt-out, fully integrated lecture-recording system which enabled audio and presentation screen capture. The study's focus is on how 'traditional' students (generally characterised as young, enrolled full-time and attending classes on campus) engaged with lecture-recording and how lecturers' experiences with, and attitudes towards, lecture-recording differed depending on their discipline. Students were generally positive about the affordances of the lecture-recording system, whilst lecturers remained undecided on its value. Discipline-based differences in lecturer engagement with the system were noted between lecturers teaching engineering and sciences subjects and those teaching business and social sciences, the latter being more positive towards the system. The paper raises questions about the efficacy of a one-size-fits-all lecture-recording system given differences in disciplinary activities, lecturer styles and approaches to teaching.

We explore whether differences in perceptions of diversity might emanate from the characteristics of perceivers themselves rather than from the characteristics of those observed. Grounding our arguments in self- and social-identity theory, we hypothesize that individuals respond differently to the same diversity stimuli because they differ in their ‘propensity to stereotype’ and ‘diversity experience.’ Since individuals tend to gravitate towards similar others, we also hypothesize that perceived diversity can predict an individual's ‘desire to group’ with others. Over 200 individuals – staff and students – from a university were exposed to diverse stimuli in an online experiment in a bid to test the hypotheses. Structural Equation Modeling of the data generally supported the hypothesized relationships.