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That klaxon you heard this morning was VCs going to outrage-stations as they read the headline on a University of New South Wales budget story “UNSW to assist building AUKUS workforce skills with $128.5m funding boost.”
The body copy makes clear the money is for 4000 Commonwealth Supported Places in submarine subjects but across the sector, not just UNSW.
There’s more in the Mail
In Features this morning
Students are voting with their devices and moving to on-line learning. Alice Brown and Jill Lawrence (both USQ) set out five ways to enhance engagement. New in Commissioning Editor Sally Kift’s celebrated series, Needed now in teaching and learning.
plus Merlin Crossley (UNSW) awards chatbots in education an A (for average, very average), HERE
Found in the Budget weeds
There’s bad news for unis that students don’t rate
Budget papers present increases ahead of inflation across the forward estimates for the excellent Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching. $7.281m this financial year will be $8.133m next
Micro marketplace will shut up shop
The previous government’s National Microcredentials Marketplace has funding doubled next financial year, to $1m – and then it disappears.
The HE and off-shore microcredential pilots, kick on, as promised
One way for a better VET
VETeran Robin Shreeve’s submission to the Reps inquiry into perceptions and status of VET was the first published (CMM February 10) – it must have made an impact because the committee asked him to give appear in-person
Which he did last week – suggesting a solution to VET’s image issues, as brief as it all-encompassing.
“Over the years people have looked at the status of VET. I have been to many meetings where people have argued for big promotion campaigns—and you have received some marvellous suggestions about better careers information, engaging with parents, working with teachers. I believe these are all necessary but not sufficient conditions to actually raise the status of VET. It is about the quality of teaching and learning, and the quality of our relationships with individual students and industry. What VET needs is institutional strengthening—not another restructure, but institutional strengthening.”
Budget announced so back to business
The usual focus on research funding resumes
The Group of Eight was approving of the Budget Tuesday night, saying it, “focused on relieving cost-of-living pressure as it should.”
Which was wise – when the government is announcing help for ordinary Australians, demands for more money for universities was not a message that would sell.
But it was back to business yesterday from the Go8’s Vicki Thomson.
“The focus is now on the University Accord process and future budgets to deliver on reform that will address the current distorted research funding model and lift Australia’s expenditure on research and development.”
Cooperative Research Australia (the CRC Association as was) was also on about money, “The next big challenge for government will be to unlock greater investment in R&D for Australia through a combination of mechanisms … The Universities Accord process will be critical to growing our education and research capacity, the essential platform for Australia’s ability to create a more complex and competitive economy. “
Which is where the focus will stay until the minister releases the Accord, when it will switch, to why even newer money is needed.
From the data refinery
The estimable National Centre for Vocational Education Research proposes ways to do more with different sets
Combining Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth and NAPLAN data can indicate relationships between academic ability and education and employment outcomes. But you have to know how to link the two sets.
Emerick Chew, Somayeh Parvazian and Ronnie Semo show how in a new paper for the estimable National Centre for Vocational Education Research. They set out meshing methodologies and outputs and people-factors that shape results. For example, people “who value cooperation” are less likely to approve their data being used, “perhaps because consent does not involve their active and ongoing participation in the data-linkage process.”
A delight for dataistas to be sure, but worth remembering in Budget Week that policy depends on serious people, creating serious resources.
Who knows about research integrity
The House of Commons’ Science, Innovation and Tech Committee has a new report, on “reproducibility and research integrity”
The committee finds, “there have been increasing concerns raised that the integrity of some scientific research is questionable because of failures to be able to reproduce the claimed findings of some experiments or analyses of data and therefore confirm that the original researcher’s conclusions were justified”
And it recommends, “training researchers in research integrity and the need to ensure reproducibility is inconsistent and often absent. We recommend mandating the provision of such training at undergraduate, postgraduate and early career researcher stages.”
At least the Brits are on to it – if a Senate committee wanted to hold an inquiry it could be hard finding out who to ask.
Adrian Barnett and colleagues surveyed research integrity advisers here, and found finding, “there were multiple institutions where we found it difficult to find anything about research integrity and other institutions where the contact about research integrity was a generic email or generic on-line form,” (CMM May 8).
Appointments
Dietmar Tourbier is named CSIRO’s director of energy. He moves up from deputy.
Olivia Tyler joins Western Sydney U to lead Sustainability and Circular Economy. She moves from consultants Edge Impact.