A learned reader asks what a new $212 000 job at UNSW actually involves. The university is recruiting a director of service improvement to lead the business unit, “responsible for building and deploying expertise in continuous improvement, innovating with new digital and other technologies and driving customer service excellence.” That it all needs to be done proactively is presumably a given.

There is nothing like a big navy build requiring skilled staff, and quick, to encourage fraternity between universities of partner nations. Yesterday the University of Adelaide and Ensta Bretagne agreed to offer double  masters in marine engineering, as visiting French president Macron and the prime minister looked on. Flinders U was also there, signing one research collaboration on propellers with engineering school EC Nantes and another with contractor Thales and EC Nantes  on “electro-optical links,” (sorry, no idea.) Presumably, a learned reader remarks, Flinders U, has forgiven the French for imprisoning Matthew Flinders RN, for whom the university is named, during the Napoleonic Wars.

LaTrobe U is building accommodation for 600 students at the Bundoora campus, there are now beds for 1500. The university has 8000 international students, most of whom are subject to the vagaries of the Melbourne housing market. Flats nearish to campus  go for $350-$400.

Data on education exports is, “fragmented and somewhat inaccessible to the majority of interested parties,” new research for private provider Navitas warns.

The report, prepared by consultants Nous, details datasets collected by multiple agencies for multiple purposes across different reporting periods with mixed availability.  In the case of some Austrade reports information is only available to paying customers of the commission. None of this works to all of the industry’s advantage. Thus, the report warns,

“there exists a large group of users who may never be in a position to undertake detailed research and analysis, as a result of shortages in resourcing, capability or other constraints. For this group, the key to understanding notable trends in international education and training data lies in short and easily digestible data snapshots.”

The report sets out a range of ways to improve IET data resources:

Data on international enquiries as a lead indicator

Wider distribution of and detail on visa applications and approval, including information on source regions, (“China” or “India” are a bit broad for target-marketing)

More frequent and detailed international student experience survey than the existing biennial product

Data on post-study outcomes

A single tertiary education dataset

And that’s just for starters.

That furious typing you can hear is people in multiple agencies writing briefs on why giving up power and sharing information with the public is a bad idea.

Across the ditch Victoria University of Wellington is contemplating a name change to distinguish itself from all the other Victoria Universities in what was once the British Empire. VC Grant Guilford says there are 16 of them. Perhaps Melbourne’s VU could become Victoria University of Victoria.

CQU wants to codify research workloads for academic staff, allocating them to five categories from teaching-intensive (75 per cent teaching/15 per cent scholarship/10 per cent engagement) to research-intensive (20 per cent teaching/ 70 per cent research and  10 per cent service and engagement).

The university sets out research productivity based on ARC data from Excellence for Research in Australia, ranging from not much for junior HASS academics to 24 publications and $750 000 over three years for a research intensive STEM professor. There are two detailed charts specifying required outputs in great detail by discipline and academic rank. With this system in place it would be easy indeed for the university to suggest to staff that their performance dictates moves either to more or less research intensive categories.

The campus branch of the National Tertiary Education Union is surveying staff on this, including questions which could consign CQU to second-class status.  Thus the union asks members if the measure for research publications and income should be the national ERA average for their discipline, or the average for academics at institutions in the Regional Universities Network. This would be an excellent way of reducing performance pressure and an even better way to concede that CQU staff do not want to be compared against their peers at research intensive institutions – an outcome the Group of Eight would remember come the next argument over research funding distribution.

But the CQU comrades could be underestimating the RUN group’s research performance. Last year XinGu and Karen Blackmore from the University of Newcastle crunched journal data for three unnamed universities, a sandstone a middle tier institution and a “non-comprehensive” one (CMM September 8 2017). Among many other findings, they discovered that in recent years output per researcher at all three has converged.

Maria Raciti (University of the Sunshine Coast) is 2018 research fellow at Curtin U’s National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education. Aspro Raciti will work on disadvantaged students’ perception of the risks of studying at university.

A learned reader points to a bunch of YouTube stars promoting essay writing service EduBirdie, reviewed for the Australian market here (The BBC has just pinged the product).  “It’s hardly surprising that students have such difficulty grasping academic integrity when their YouTube idols are promoting contract cheating as ‘cool’. Lecturers simply cannot compete with entertainers in this regard and have a challenging time trying to inculcate very different cultural standards in their students,” the learned reader ruefully remarks.  Making contract cheating an offence under law, as outlined by UNSW’s Alex Steel (CMM April 4) might help.