026 Professor Sandra Wills

Sandra Wills recently retired as Professor and Pro Vice Chancellor of Learning and Teaching at Charles Sturt University, New South Wales, Australia. Sandra has as very broad experience across education spanning four decades and her work in multimedia, distance and e-learning is internationally recognised.

Interview: https://episodes.castos.com/onlinelearninglegends/026-Sandra-Wills-Final.mp3 | recorded May 2019

Sandra’s profile: https://researchoutput.csu.edu.au/en/persons/swillscsueduau

Nominated links (free to access):

• First Fleet Convicts database. First humanities software, distributed free to all Australian schools in 1982 on floppy disk, since 1999 available on the internet. A pioneering website of the time still used by millions of Australian school students: firstfleet.uow.edu.au
• Learning Designs Project, sharing best practice learning designs for online teaching: http://learningdesigns.uow.edu.au
• Project EnROLE. Encouraging role based learning environments, a follow up to the learning designs project focussed solely on online role play as the learning design: https://web.archive.org/web/20190312013547/https:/enrole.uow.edu.au/. See also:
  • Wills, S. et. al. (2007). Encouraging role based online learning environments. In Atkinson, RJ, McBeath, C., Soong, S.K.A. & Cheers, C. (eds). ICT: Providing choices for learners and learning, Proceedings of ascilite Singapore 2007. Centre for Educational Development, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 2-5 December. Paper available here.
  • Wills, S. et. al. (1009). Encouraging role based online learning environments: The BLUE Report. Australian Learning and Teaching Council. Paper available here.
• Cloudworks follow up to Learning Designs Project and Project EnROLE researching multiple representations of the role play learning design: https://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloudscape/view/2344
• Promoting Teaching project. An international project to build parity of esteem for teaching-related activities in university academic promotion processes via an evidence-based approach – promoting teaching.com – and The CSU Academic, a follow up project in my university taking the principles of evidence-based promotion one step further to align all aspects of the academic role, including online teaching – https://www.csu.edu.au/division/learning-and-teaching/home/teaching-staff/academic-promotion-promoting-learning-domain
• CSU eLearning Strategy and the Online Learning Model. https://www.csu.edu.au/division/learning-and-teaching/home/online-learning/strategic-directions.
• OpenEdOz project. Developed a National Roadmap for Open Education in Australia: http://openedoz.org/

Nominated publications (may require purchase):

• Wills, S., Leigh, E., and Ip, A. (2011). The power of role-based eLearning. Routledge.
• Wills, S. (2012). The Simulation Triad In Nygaard, C., Courtney, N., & Leigh, E. (2012). Simulations, games and role play in university education. Faringdon [U.K.: Libri), Chapter 2.
• McDougall, A., Murnane, J.S., and Wills, S. (2014). The educational programming language LOGO: its nature and its use in Australia. In Tatnall, A., and Davey, B. (Eds.). Reflections on the History of Computers in Education: Early Use of Computers and Teaching about Computing in Schools. Springer-Verlag, pp.394-407.
• Wills, S. and Pegler, C. (2016). A deeper understanding of re-use: Learning designs, activities, resources and their contexts. In Dalziel (Ed.) Learning Design: Conceptualising a framework for teaching and learning online, Routledge, Chapter 6.