About GATE
About
Residing with the Centre for Learning Enhancement and Academic Development (LEAD) and located on the John Henry Newman Campus, GATE provides the space in which College staff and postgraduate students with teaching responsibilities can engage in professional development, the sharing of practice, experimentation and innovation in relation to educational media as a contemporary necessity in educational practice.
Through this engagement, GATE will support the enhancement of teaching and learning, enable collegial collaboration and practice sharing, facilitate academic investigation and contributions to scholarship and broadly develop professional skills that are practical in teaching and learning while also being transferable to a range of other environments.
GATE is not a service or production delivery unit and does not provide a learning technology or media support desk as these services are provided elsewhere.
What GATE means within MIC
Stakeholders & Partners
Through its operation, GATE serves a range of stakeholders and partners:
- Expanding agency in evaluating and selecting media
- Building confidence in educational media creation and usage
- Providing space for testing and experimentation
- Supporting the sharing of practice and learning
- Enhancing HE teaching capability
- Expanding digital and media literacy skills
- Supporting personal and professional presentation skills
- Promoting personal scholarship and its dissemination
- Development of transversal and transferable professional skills
- Enhancing the quality of College teaching;
- Growing the College's capacity for innovation
- Building a stronger institutional community
- Increasing contributions to scholarship and its dissemination
- Providing a structured innovation environment
- Supporting improved functional integration
- Facilitating a means to test and pilot new approaches
- Offering a focal point for professional development and learning
The Rationale
Teaching, learning, professional communications and scholarship take place through increasingly diverse media modes. Be it communication with students, teaching, presenting research or disciplinary knowledge, engaging in scholarship, facilitating discussion or contributing to broader discourse, academic staff and postgraduates are increasingly required to communicate effectively through a variety of media.
As a consequence, educational media has become a necessity as it forms a common means through which information and knowledge are represented, interpreted, collaborated on and distributed both within and beyond higher education. The capability to make informed decisions about media, to communicate effectively through media and to critically evaluate the role that media plays in educational practice has become an important dimension of professional engagement.
Concurrent with this, the evolution of digital technologies, media-enhanced communication environments, generative artificial intelligence and shifting learning expectations continue to grow both the opportunities and the complexities associated with media in education. Academic staff and graduate students are therefore required to not only understand media technologies and their relevance, but they are also required to develop the agency, confidence and capability to determine when, why and how media can and may be used in a purposeful manner in support of teaching, learning, scholarship and communication.
GATE responds to this by providing a developmental environment that supports the exploration, experimentation, creation, shared practice, innovation and evaluation of media in education. Through this work, GATE contributes to the enhancement of teaching and learning while simultaneously strengthening the confidence and capability held institutionally in media-related practice. This, in turn, supports the scholarly investigation, evaluation and dissemination of experience through a community of educators skilled in contemporary educational communication.
GATE complements the work of LEAD which already provides extensive support for academic development, learning design, digital learning and related projects in teaching, learning and assessment. Collaboration between GATE and LEAD facilitates synergies between media and digital learning technologies.
The Vision
In alignment with the MIC Strategic Plan 2025–2030; Pathways Lit, Futures Found, GATE’s vision is:
To develop confident, critical and innovative educational media practice in the service of human-centred teaching and learning.
In so doing, the GATE Centre aligns with the objectives of the National Forum’s Strategic Alignment of Teaching and Learning Enhancement Funding, which seeks to promote the digital transformation of the Higher Education sector.
Principles Guiding GATE
GATE is founded upon the following principles:
GATE supports the College teaching community in developing the confidence and capability to make informed creation and curatorial decisions about educational media rather than producing resources on their behalf.
Media and related technologies are explored for their human and purposeful educational value rather than for technological novelty.
Professional learning and development are strengthened through shared practice, peer engagement and interdisciplinary collaboration.
Purposeful pedagogical development, research, reflective practice and scholarship underpin GATE and the outputs it enables.
Recognising that resources are finite, GATE focuses on maximising individual and institutional capability for the purpose of enhancing teaching and learning
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- What GATE means within MIC
