Outside in: Beyond blended learning

A review of the teaching spaces at Charles Darwin University merged top-down directives with bottom-up requirements from user groups (students, academics and support staff). The space of tension between the three top-down drivers from outside and within the walls of a regional Northern Australian university had to be managed and prioritised to ensure the needs of local stakeholders were met as far as economically and practicably possible. By going beyond blended learning the aim is to provide a deeper level of engagement and collaboration to create synergies designed to bring the distant external students into the classroom. This will be mediated by the use of web-conferencing within the teaching spaces. The change process is examined with respect to five issues identified as relevant for this teaching mode to improve the sustainability of our teaching practices.