Caught in the net? Innovation and performativity in an Australian university program

In little more than a decade, the traditional model of the Western university has been significantly destabilised by a digital revolution in the recruitment, instruction and assessment of students who may have never attended physically at formal lectures, tutorials or campus activities (Oblinger, Barone and Hawkins, 2001; Moodie, 2010). With the prospect of the new media, what was until recently seen as a novel mode of delivery to a minority of often part-time students, ‘distance education’ has now become both normalised at a policy level and ‘mainstreamed’ at the point of access and delivery. It has been widely argued (Davies, 2012; James, 2012; Ernst and Young, 2012; Corbyn, 2012) that the higher education sector in Australia is now faced with uncertain futures for all but a handful of elite institutions, as traditional academic authority and practice is threatened by the availability of globalised access to packaged courses, the attractiveness of interactive texts and the availability of highly mediated and virtualised learning environments.