Michele Dale

I am Head, Academic Excellence in the Centre for Education and Enhancement, providing strategic leadership and management to deliver strategies and programs that embed education inclusivity, retention and equity initiatives to enhance the student and educator experience at JCU.

My academic background is plant pathology - after completing my Ph.D. at The University of Queensland, looking at phythophthora root rot in chickpeas (a new and exciting crop at the time in Australia), I spent a couple of years at one of the newly created Cooperative Research Centres, working closely with DPI and CSIRO staff investigating the implementation of pest management practices. I then returned to my alma mater for several years as a lecturer where I focused on research into cultural and biological control of plant diseases, but not before being inculcated into the digital revolution by the advent of public access to the emerging World Wide Web in the 90s.

I relocated to far north Queensland in 2005, furthering my interest and expertise in the online environment as I successfully guided organisations in the community sector to adopt digital technology, through the development of appropriate policies and procedures, to individual and group mentoring and support.

I honed my project and stakeholder management skills, delivering the Cairns Digital Economy Strategy for the planned NBN rollout and its subsequent implementation. In my most significant project to date, I managed the local chapter of the Digital Enterprise Program FNQ&TS, an initiative of the Department of Communications, as a result of my successful application for funding for the region from Ingham to Thursday Island and west to Normanton. Over a 2-year period, I worked closely with the key regional stakeholders such as councils, chambers of commerce and community banks, to plan and deliver a training program to help businesses and not-for-profit organisations improve their engagement with and ability to make use of online technology. Managing a small team of contractors, I organised and presented workshops and one-on-one mentoring sessions and was responsible for the associated reporting, monitoring and evaluation, social media and promotion requirements that supported the project. Formal evaluation showed the project was very successful and over-delivered, with more than 1100 participants attending 60 workshops across the region, and over 180 receiving follow-up individual sessions.

In 2015, I returned to the university sector as an Educational Designer with the Learning, Teaching & Student Engagement team at James Cook University (Cairns). As Academic Developer for the Division of Tropical Health and Medicine, I facilitated contemporary curriculum design, embracing the digital disruption of education through blended and online learning, until I returned to the Centre for Education and Enhancement in 2022.