Our university is implementing a program for enhancing teaching that aims to ensure effectiveness through high quality design of learning outcomes and assessment regimes, multifaceted activities, and optimal delivery methods. The course chosen to spearhead a program for enhancing teaching across our university was SCI2010 Scientific Practice and Communication. The course deals with the nature and origins of science, ethical practice and science communication. This large, interdisciplinary unit is compulsory for all science students studying at the Melbourne and Malaysian campuses, or by distance education. There are approximately 1200 students (600 per semester) mostly in their second year of University and taking degrees in Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Biomedical sciences, Mathematics and Psychology. Students are, on average, 20.3 years old, with over one-third from homes where a language other than English is spoken (more at the international campus). A survey of graduates found that only one-fifth of students would have taken the subject if it was not compulsory, but in hindsight over two-thirds said they had learnt things not otherwise covered in their degree and that it should remain compulsory (unpublished data, The Faculty of Science, Monash University 2009). It is thus both challenging and rewarding to present the subject matter in a way that is intellectually engaging and relevant to students from a wide range of disciplines.
The course had always had a 'Quick links' section at the top of the page (as seen in Figure 2b). This guided the students to resources that they needed to access in a timely manner. These included Assessments, Lecture resources, Quizzes, and the highly rated, What's on this week? that linked directly to the relevant page with the weekly learning activities. The buttons had been used for the past few years, and only required minimal modification to reflect the new navigation system. The unit Introduction (which was already in the Unit Guide) was brought into the online course front and centre, presenting this unit in context in the wider course and emphasising the learning outcomes as they applied in practice.
There was an obvious need to change the weekly headings to something that best described the topic and give the student more clues and support for their learning. As  propose, a well-designed structure underpinning the learning process will facilitate students' understanding of the concepts leading to successful outcomes. The section headings were changed from Week 1, Week 2 to topic names such as Is science special? Can we afford self-deception? Can scientists be bad? Each topic was presented with a consistent weekly structure to create expectations of learning activity. This structure included an introduction to the topic, the learning outcomes, and a pre-class activity to activate thinking for this week's concept, learning activities - Something to read, Something to do, Something to think about- a series of questions for reflection, and the link to the lecture slides.
As we worked through this makeover, it became obvious that by contextualising the topics with more supporting information and activity, we were actually accentuating the major themes of the unit. It must be emphasised here that at no point did the content change, but rather the way that the learning resources and activities were presented changed the focus from a list of resources to a more thematically contextualised, learner-centred structure. This caused a re-think in the delivery and a shift in the paradigm to where the online space was truly connected to the face-to-face interaction.
As a start, the design of the online space in Moodle was changed from collapsed topics to a more open setting. This different unit layout eschews the linear format, introduces images to guide the learner to different sections, whetting their appetite for further investigation. Each section in the new configuration has its own image and description to guide the students quickly to course material that they need ( Figure 3). This design and clear learning pathway was implemented to make obvious to the student the actions required to achieve specified learning outcomes. The learner is guided through scaffolded activities, discussions, opportunities for reflection, self-test quizzes, and extension activities if needed or desired. We believe that an altered learning landscape motivates the learners to engage with the prescribed materials and activities at a deeper level and reflectively participate in the learning experience. In doing this they are learning to become pro-active participants in their environment, actively reshaping their landscape to support on-going learning ( ).
For us, contextualising the learning means adding value to the materials and activities presented online; interacting with the learners through the instructions and guidelines; and being present in that space with them, similar to that described by . In order to get to the underlying purpose of each activity, the learning designer (BM) prompted the teacher (RG) by asking: "If you were to present this video/activity/article to read in a face-to-face class, what would you say by way of introduction?" This forced the teacher to really think about the context and that then shaped the writing surrounding the learning activities so that the purpose was crystal clear, and would make sense to the students, forestalling questions such as: Why am I doing this? What's the point of this? 
The learning pathway was designed to guide the learner through clearly sign-posted themes and topics in order to help the students understand the progressive and cumulative building of knowledge; and to help them synthesise and apply the key concepts ( Figure 5). Students could, of course, access all the weekly resources through the quick links at the top of the page, and some did. However, our feedback and analytics of the hits per page suggest that most students took advantage of the learning opportunities presented in this format.
A typical layout and introduction for each 'lecture' activity is shown in Figure 6. At the top there is a very short introduction, followed by a very short video and a Moodle Choice activity. This was designed to stimulate thinking on the topic, and by voting the students had to consider the issue and act, thus activating their thinking on the new concept and preparing them for the new learning. The next step for students is to access the Lecture resources. Again, the information was organised in a consistent format, designed to fit on a single screen of a computer, (see Figure 4) incorporating a short introduction, a list of learning outcomes, and a list of things to do post-lecture, called ' Something to read' (content and further reading), 'Something to do' (a related activity) , 'Something to think about' (opportunity to reflect, extend and apply the learning.). The link to the lecture slides was at the bottom of the page.
In order for this blended model to be effective, all the tutors on the course were encouraged to participate in the online activities in private discussion forums (on-line and face-to-face) and bring those discussions into the classroom. The guided online activities were referred to and discussed in class, reinforcing to the students that the online space was valued as much as the face-to-face interaction. This seamless interaction in the online and face-to-face spaces highlighted to the students that the teachers were active in both spaces and the each mode was an essential element of the course delivery.
There were 763 students enrolled in the unit: 633 at the Melbourne campus in Clayton, 109 at the campus in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (where students do the same program but have their own lecturers) and 21 students taking the unit by distance education. Data on student responses to the new layout and structure was collected in four ways. Firstly, we determined how many students were accessing the material and participating in the non-compulsory pre-lecture choice activities. Secondly, an online survey was conducted in Week 9 of the teaching program (see Supplementary material for wording of the questions). Thirdly, observations of attendance and engagement, and the type of questions that students were asking during the lead up to the final examinations were made.
On average, 159 students took part in each pre-lecture poll, ranging from 415 in week 1 to 92 in the final week ( Table 1). Participation in the ten polls was completely optional, and attracted no marks. The weekly online revision quiz opened after the lecture and closed the evening before the lecture the following week. Students could make up to three attempts in this time. Students were rewarded with a 'participating mark' of 0.25% of the semester grade for attempting each quiz, but while they got feedback on their answers, no marks were given for getting the right answers. On average, there were over 1000 attempts at the quiz each week, which means that some students were attempting them multiple times.
 "Your Moodle site is awesome! I wish all our units were like that." 
 "...By far my favourite moodle page of any subject." 
There was the opportunity for students to provide open-ended responses (see Supplementary Data) as well as the ranking of specific aspects. Overall students were very positive about the changes:  
Students were particularly positive to the questions about the navigation of the site, with 80.5% agreeing that the navigation was logical (Question 2), and the information easily accessible ( Figure 7). Students singled out the Quick Link buttons at the top of the page with 60.3% strongly agreeing that they liked being able to navigate the site using the buttons on the home page, and 55.2% strongly agreeing that is was easy to find information about the assignments. This was particularly rewarding, as a recurring complaint in student evaluations in past years was that it was hard to find out what was required for the assignments.
 "The start buttons made for excellent navigation..." 
 "It [the quick link menu] makes it easy to find the quizzes, information for workshops and information from lectures. Moodle isn't always easy to navigate so this has definitely helped." 
 "I didn't like the organisation of the course content on Moodle. I much prefer the normal unit layout with everything on one page under different subheadings. It was often quite annoying having to click through many different pages in order to find information." 
Of course, not everyone liked the new layout. The comment (below) highlighted one of the problems that we anticipated: if information is only accessible via the themes, then more clicking is required. It is good web design to be able to access the same material in several different ways, and this was incorporated into the design, but clearly this was not immediately obvious to everyone:  
The major focus of the revisions was the lecture pages, while the workshop pages had only minimal information on them. Interestingly, this could be detected by the student responses. Over 55% of students strongly agreed and a further 30% somewhat agreed that " the lecture support pages helped me understand the lectures..." but only 29% strongly agreed with the statement that "that " the workshop support pages helped me to get more out of the workshops". Other comments on the changes included:
 "Really liked the things to read, do and think about sections for every week. Really helped me keep on track with the subject and what is required." 
 "Workshop resources should be linked to the lectures rather than having a separate tab." 
 "I found the course content to flow logically from week to week." 
 "Suggest you make the slides more text rich? The way they are you have to listen to the whole lecture to work out what it is about" 
The Moodle book was developed in response to students wanting more specific information; something particularly important in this course as there isn't a textbook. Reluctant to move from good design and communication practice (few words, lots of images), I transferred and edited existing written materials into the on-line Moodle Book format. For example, feedback from 2014 included the following:  
 "please put more explanation and sentences in the slides instead of a bunch of images" 
Not everyone worked out that this type of information was now available via the Moodle Book, as one student commented in the present survey:  
 "I like the moodle book however it should be supplied by a pdf." 
As so often happens in education, students like what you've done and then want more of it. For example, the Moodle book is the first one of its kind in the Faculty of Science, but one student commented:  
In a typical semester lecture attendance can fall below 20% by the end of semester. Although we did not collate the data formally, counts of students at the end of the implementation program showed a shift closer to 25%. As expectations rise, we expect attendance to further improve. Why does this matter? Lectures should be the place where we inspire, direct and interact with students. By contextualising lectures, and making them part of a blended learning program, students should be better equipped to engage intellectually, and not be passive recipients of information.
" What are we supposed to know about the lectures on....?"
Students in this course actively engage in Discussion forums during semester and in the lead up to the examinations. This semester there were far fewer questions asking for clarification about the objectives of each topic, and more questions about the application, reflecting deeper learning. For example, comments along the lines of:  
 "Just wanted to clarify one of the examples on....given in the lecture..." 
Were replaced by comments such as:  
The learning designer (BM) and the teacher (RG) met for an hour every few weeks at first and then weekly as momentum gathered over a three-month period. At first, discussion was focused around the nature of learning and how best to facilitate that in an online environment. A teaching associate and education technologist (MH) was employed who would implement our ideas into the LMS. The learning designer modelled the design in a separate "trial" shell by importing the course's artefacts and building samples of the Assessment block, the Choice activity, the contextualisation of activities and resources. MH implemented the design ideas into the LMS, incorporating design elements to simplify and enhance learner experience. RG then re-worked the content to suit the new design and wrote introductions and other supporting and instructional text to guide the learner through the material. We were able to access funding through the Faculty of Science to pay for approx. 50 hours of support for MH to build the course according to the specifications and source images for each section and videos for the pre-class activities and to build the topic quizzes (including the introduction of new styles of question), which proved to be very popular with students for revision.
We now have templates for other teaching coordinators to use to guide them through the process. Other units in the Faculty of Science have adopted this design and other faculties are also using a modified version of the unit template and branding it as their own. The topic and lecture templates are in the form of Word documents for those unfamiliar with working in the Moodle LMS and these templates have been developed as Pages in a course called "Model Moodle" for others at our institution to import into their own course and edit. With these resources, unit enhancements similar to our own can be implemented by the unit coordinator with some support and training, and indeed this is already happening. There was no multimedia magic, just looking at the LMS differently and seeing the possibilities. This makes it scalable and easy to replicate. The hard part is in the shift in mind-set to a more interactive and contextualised presentation of learning materials to activate deeper thinking and conceptual development.