Dawn Gilmore

Dawn has worked in various roles in the higher education sector for the last 20 years. She has worked as a Researcher, Lecturer, Unit Coordinator, Academic Developer, and a Director of Teaching & Learning. Currently, Dawn is the Academic Director at RMIT Online. She plays a leading role in managing and interpreting academic standards and processes, and the continuous improvement and innovation of the student experience.

Previously, Dawn was the Director of Quality and Enhancement at RMIT, where she worked in the office of the Associate Deputy Vice Chancellor Education to deliver a program of work for university wide academic quality. Before that Dawn was the Director of Teaching & Learning at RMIT Online where she oversaw a team of 18 staff to recruit and coach 850+ teachers in online pedagogy and support 16,000+ student enrolments through the application of personal learning profiles. Dawn introduced and scaled a coaching model that established a culture of best practice teaching and continuous improvement. She led teacher coaching initiatives that increased the GTS by 30 percentage points from 2017 to present.

Dawn has a strong background in research and university program evaluation. She has led various projects in this area, including a university-wide Academic Quality and Enhancement Process at a dual sector university, an end-to-end review of simulated learning law curriculum, and consulted on a benchmarking project that mapped the business curriculum of an Australian university to the Bologna Process (the Framework for Qualifications of the European Higher Education Area). In 2015, Dawn was awarded funding as a Visiting Research Scholar at South Africa’s University of Witwatersrand Centre for Learning, Teaching & Development where she spent 8 months reviewing the university’s Post Graduate Diploma of Higher Education.

Dawn has been invited to speak at events for the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) and the Distance Education Accrediting Commission (DEAC). She has presented peer reviewed papers at various academic conferences including the Australian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education (ASCILITE) and The Australian Sociological Association (TASA). In addition, she is an active member of the Society of Learning Analytics Research (SOLAR) and the Microanalysis of Online Data Network (MOOD). She has authored peer review academic journal articles, news articles, and is a book reviewer for Higher Education Research Development Society of Australasia (HERDSA). She is also the President for the Open and Distance Learning Association of Australia (ODLAA).