Donelle Batty is a talented teacher and professional learning mentor based 
at Riverside High School in Launceston, Tasmania. Donelle is a Grade Coordinator and teacher of face to face classes at Riverside High, while also facilitating blended online learning for students aged 11 to adult, across a number of rural and regional schools, where small numbers of students and isolated locations, mean that specialist subjects eg. Child Studies cannot otherwise be supported.
In this interview, conducted as part of the annual evaluation of Distance Education Tasmania’s Online Campus, Donelle describes what she teaches, how she works and key success factors for maintaining a distributed model of blended online delivery.
The map below shows the range of schools involved in both delivering and receiving blended online vocational and technical education (VTE) programs, however Donelle also provides blended online programs to Years 7-12 and Gifted and Talented students.
Delivery centres are marked in red and receiver schools in blue. In 2006, there are approximately 35 programs being delivered to 700 students. Flinders Island (top right) is also now delivering Sports Science. Almost all schools receiving programs are in rural or isolated areas. Capability to receive and/or deliver blended online learning has been developed in up to 40 of Tasmania’s 220 schools.
This is a recorded telephone interview with some keyboarding accompaniment (sorry).
Click to listen to the Students come first interview (17 MB).
To download the podcast interview subscribe to the RSS feed in Bloglines.
Click to download the print version of Students Come First Word (69KB), PDF (52 KB).
Click to view a short video (9.5 MB) of St. Helen’s Students Michelle Wilkinson, Jenna Gillick, Fraser Pihema and Jessica Meech expressing their perceptions of Rural VTE programs at the North East Education & Training Centre Inc.
For more information about the distributed model, view articles in Edition 1 and Edition 6 or contact the Manager eLearning Delivery, Distance Education Tasmania, Mick Chalmers.
Donelle is widely recognised as an outstanding online teacher. We are lucky to have her in the Online Campus. It is increasingly difficult to entice Principals to allow teachers with Donelle’s skills to deliver programs to students in remote schools and skill centres, and to lead other schools into online and flexible delivery.
The strength of Donelle’s program comes from Donelle’s skills - not all teachers are ‘good’ online teachers AND from the strength of the distributed model i.e. Donelle is based in a school. Her online students are also in groups in schools with Donelle as their online teacher - but with a support teacher who is really team teaching with Donelle.
Donelle’s program is mainstream. It is improving retention in education and rural opportunity.
Please feel free to ask questions about online blended delivery and the programs that I am involved in.
Hi Donelle, I love your videos. Great idea! I’m an educator in nursing. Can you tell me briefly what a “distributed model” means?
Margaret