The Open Polytechnic of New Zealand Exchange Program

Very much in its preliminary stages, this exchange program would link SSU with an all-distance learning campus in New Zealand with nearly fifty years experience in that medium of education. The heart of their curriculum is a highly sophisticated course design program that delivers sophisticated, specialized material for students to study in a remote location. Courses are developed by teams that include people with expertise in designing for this mode of delivery, and top professionals and scholars in the various academic disciplines involved.

The OPNZ is located near Wellington, New Zealand, and is undergoing an extensive internationalization program. The Polytechnic has just opened new offices in Hong Kong and Singapore, and can count an annual pool of some 40,000 part time students across the southern and eastern Pacific. To support this expansion, the OPNZ is developing both the necessary physical facilities, and a new array of electronic curriculum packages based on cutting edge information technologies.

The exchanges with SSU would consist of two basic types. Individual SSU faculty can serve as consultants or "content specialists" on the OPNZ's course development teams. Many of their programs dovetail nicely with those of our own, particularly in the areas of business, economics, communications, library sciences and information technology, ecology, and environmental planning. Contracting out the position of content specialist has proved to be a central component of OPNZ's internationalization program, with scholars from Korea, Japan, China, South Africa, India and Canada participating in the exchange. This would provide SSU faculty with a great opportunity to combine their teaching and other scholarly activities, involving them in collaborative work in their own field, while developing integrated teaching materials for the classroom.

Potentially more significant for the campus community as a whole is the possibility for collaborative work between OPNZ and SSU professionals interested in exploring the ways that the new information technologies are changing our classrooms and our course materials, whether the teaching and learning is done at a distance, or in the face-to-face environment of the classroom. One of the great assets of the OPNZ is that, after nearly fifty years in the business, they are not easily dazzled by the new media for distance learning. Their unwavering focus on the content of their courses, and their long experience with manipulating a variety of technologies to deliver that content, has led them to emphasize two main pedagogical themes: information literacy, or the ability to assess and integrate the vast amount of information made available by electronic media, and assessment strategies for both the student and the educator, that are tailored to assessing students' abilities in information literacy, critical thinking, and evaluative skills in an electronically supported open learning framework. These themes strongly complement a host of SSU campus initiatives dealing with the new information technologies, open learning, distance learning, and pedagogical innovation. The anticipated construction of the new SSU Information Center makes the opportunity to collaborate with the OPNZ on these exciting innovations even more timely.

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