Welcome to Extend NZ: Professional Learning for Educators.

Extend is grounded in the belief that the impact of learning should be the primary motivator for creating technology-enhanced and online learning experiences. It aims to empower educators to explore a range of emerging technologies and pedagogical practices for effective online and technology-enhanced learning and teaching.

Extend explores key skills, knowledge, and attributes required to extend and transform our learning and teaching practices, and to enrich our professional development. The programme is designed to contribute to the digital fluency of educators and to support decision-making for the appropriate use of digital tools. The intent of these modules is also to provide the basis for more deliberate course design and digital pedagogical practice.

The modules are designed to be self-paced or used as a customisable component of learning and teaching programmes for educators within their institutions.

This programme is adapted from ‘Ontario Extend’, a professional learning programme developed by a team at eCampus Ontario in Canada. The Extend framework has grown out of the work of Simon Bates (2014) and his ‘Anatomy of 21st Century Educators’ ^[1]. Many academic staff across Ontario, Canada, and elsewhere have engaged with the Extend material and found it to be an immersive and dynamic programme. We have worked closely with the Ontario team, and we are all excited about the New Zealand iteration of these modules.

The Extend programme consists of six modules:

• Teacher for Learning,
• Collaborator,
• Curator,
• Scholar,
• Experimenter, and
• Technologist

Each module generally takes on average 4-6 hours to complete. We recommend beginning with the ‘Teacher for Learning’ module, but there is no set order after that, so you can work on any module you’d like to. You may choose to do just one or two of the modules, and gain the associated digital badges, or you may decide to do all six; it’s entirely up to you! If you complete all six modules, you can also be awarded the additional ‘Empowered Educator’ badge.

You can navigate through the course information and content by using the menu/navigation bar at the top of the page. Click on any of the arrows to see the drop-down menu:

From there, you can move through the module using the navigation arrows at the bottom of each page, and/or the navigation bar.

You can also click on the navigation arrow to the right of any module title, to see and navigate to the pages within that module.