Highly intensive teaching in tertiary education: A review of recent scholarship

[Extract] Tertiary providers in Australia and other nations have increasingly begun to offer subjects at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels through a compressed or blocked form of teaching and learning known as Intensive Mode Delivery (IMD). The rising popularity of IMD is evidenced by the recent production of good practice guides (e.g. Male, Baillie, Hancock, Leggoe, & MacNish, 2016; Wlodkowski & Ginsberg, 2010), yet despite this rising popularity, however, researchers state that education providers need greater knowledge about how to effectively deliver education in compressed formats. As Dixon and O’Gorman (2019) reported, “research into …[IMD] is relatively limited in comparison to other innovative approaches to curriculum design and implementation” (p. 2). More research on IMD is important as tertiary providers need to help students achieve any stated learning outcomes as well as feel satisfied with their learning experience. Providers need to know which formats of IMD, if any, are most suitable for different types of students and subjects as well as how best to teach within this mode. Providers also need to understand the strengths and limitations of IMD, what changes need to be made to traditionally taught subjects to make IMD successful, and what support teachers need to make the transition to IMD. Overall, an education provider’s decision to put IMD in place should be a thoughtful one