“Malicious attacks are becoming more common place, and more difficult for individuals to detect, however we must all remain vigilant,” Deakin U advises 46 000 past and present students have had their records hacked, (scroll down.)

People get research helps us all – the pandemic proved that

But popularity does not set policy and researchers face new challenges of purpose and priorities. Join policy experts and opinion shapers at CMM-Twig Marketing’s on-line conference, “What’s next for the people who can save the world.”  Sessions today on  commercialising research: have we got the model right and the future for basic research.  Details HERE.

In Features this morning

Conor King (from Tertiary Education Analysis) suggests the issue to address on graduate employment is not are people doing jobs that need a degree. “The more useful question is what could a graduate bring to the role that would be sufficient reason for the higher level of education.”

plus Cathy Stone (Uni Newcastle), Sharron King (Uni SA College) and Chris Ronan (Country Universities Network) on how metro universities can best present to regional students. This week’s selection by Commissioning Editor Sally Kift for her celebrated series, Needed now in learning and teaching, HERE

and Merlin Crossley (UNSW) asks “do you really need a committee on volcanos?

And pretty soon you are talking about real aeons

The Australian Science Media Centre apologised for an error yesterday in its first issue of a story on an image taken by the James Webb Telescope. It was of galaxies as they appeared 4.6bn years ago, not 13bn years back as first stated. Elephant stamp for accuracy especially as CMM suspects as many as no-one would have noticed the mistake.

A team running for the National Tertiary Education leadership says top salaries are “excessive”

The New NTEU ticket says pay for the union’s three top officials, “serve to distance the leadership of the union from the conditions that ordinary workers face on a daily basis.”

Candidate for general secretary, Anastasia Kanjere says if elected she and her colleagues will reduce their pay by 43 per cent to 50 per cent.

The union’s national office states that pay for the three top jobs are pegged to academic pay scales for  Level E (professorial) positions. Pay rates are now $212 000 for the president  and national secretary, with a loading and $192,000 for the assistant secretary.

Salaries are set by non-salaried members of the union’s national executive, who are themselves elected.

The New NTEU team has a support base among casuals academics.

They are challenging an officers ticket, incumbent federal president Alison Barnes, national assistant secretary Gabe Gooding and present NSW state secretary Damien Cahill, who is running to replace retiring general secretary Matthew McGowan.

The Council of Australian University Librarians is keen on open-access texts, in part because commercial editions can be beyond the resources of students

In February CAUL announced a two-year pilot, for participating universities to publish four titles in “priority disciplines” (CMM February 16). And now there are small grants  ($34 000 in total funds) for 15 teams led by academics at nine Australian universities and Victoria U of Wellington to publish. Disciplines include health science, law, sociology, psychology, business, languages, education, science, statistics and Indigenous studies.

There’s also new guide for people to “confidently find, use, or even create open educational resources” 

It’s by a team at the RMIT library, Julian Blake, Jane Halson, Ian Kolk, Anne Lennox, Stuart Moffat, Frank Ponte, Rebecca Rata and Carrie Thomas.

Open education resources, provide students with “digital learning opportunities in the form of open texts, open images, open courseware and self-assessment tools, and can reduce the cost of study by removing financial burden.”

It’s from (how it could it be otherwise?) RMIT Open Press.

The university’s enterprise agreement expired a year back and there are no new salary increases agreed in negotiations for the next one

Vice Chancellor Iain Martin tells staff, “we are very conscious of the cost-of-living increases across Australia and the resultant financial pressures on you and your families.”

The increase is below the 4.6 per cent increase announced by the University of Tasmania, in similar industrial circumstances, but ahead of the 2.1 per cent (plus $1000 flat) Uni Sydney committed to in May (CMM July 11, May 31).

However all are below the National Tertiary Education Union’s call for all universities to pay a 5 per cent per annum rise across new three years agreements.

Professor Martin explained the pay rise as, “to reasonably balance the need to ensure our current and future financial position, key external economic indicators and our commitment to supporting you and recognising your contributions.”

Enrolments were up last year with 5 per cent more students enrolled in government-funded voced course than in 2020, to just under 1.2m

The data is in a new report from the estimable National Centre for Vocational Education Research.

TAFE was steady (down 2.7 per cent) to 652 900 students while private providers were up 19 per cent to 434 600.

Student numbers continued to grow off the 2018 bottom (1.13m) to 1.25m last year.

by CLAIRE FIELD

more learning may not be enough

In the context of last week’s Universities Australia conference, it was pleasing to see there will be an explicit emphasis on improving productivity at the upcoming Jobs and Skills Summit.

In his UA conference address, the Chair of the Productivity Commission, Michael Brennan asked why productivity is at a 50 year low despite Australia never having had a more highly educated population nor more people employed in research?

While the Summit will have a strong focus on immediate actions the government can take – and Skills Minister Brendan O’Connor leading the work on education and skills suggests the VET sector is a keen area of interest – the subsequent Treasury white paper process should allow the higher education sector the time it needs to respond to Brennan’s question.

Brennan suggested one of the possible reasons for this productivity dilemma is that higher education is increasingly focussed on conformity and not on innovation/creativity. Therefore when graduates enter the workplace they are less able to think differently about problems and less able to suggest new ideas.

It is a provocative suggestion (and was not the only hypothesis Brennan offered) – especially in the context of comments to the conference by Coursera co-founder, Daphne Koller.

With over 100 million learners having used Coursera and more than 4 000 universities subscribed to “Coursera for Campus” to gain access to courses developed by other universities, Koller posited that the future of education needs to involve content which is broad enough to be scalable combined with content which is customised to add a local dimension. She defined this as another form of hybrid learning and went on to make the point that this is not just where higher education is heading but where it “needs” to head: i.e. offering students both a generalised and a personalised learning experience.

While personalised learning offered by the best EdTech companies can improve learning (with students learning more and retaining knowledge for longer when compared with traditional face-to-face instruction) – Brennan’s challenge suggests learning more may not be enough.

As the Fair Work Ombudsman makes the university sector a strategic priority to address chronic levels of underpayment – Brennan’s challenge and the new government’s focus on productivity suggest it is time for a renewed emphasis on university teaching which involves a rethink on how teachers are engaged and remunerated and crucially on what they teach.

 Claire Field spoke with Shirley Alexander, one of the sector’s innovators, on her retirement from UTS. Shirley shared her views on the future of the sector and recent innovations UTS is pursuing. Listen ONLINE or search for ‘What now? What next?’ in your podcast feed

Frank Bongiorno  (ANU) is the new president of the Australian Historical Society, Michelle Arrow (Macquarie U) is VP.

Anne Martin becomes ANU’s inaugural Professor in the Practice of Indigenous Advancement. She continues director of the university’s Tjabal Indigenous Higher Education Centre.

Susan Scott (ANU) is elected a Fellow of the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation.

Molecular ecologist Bill Sherwin (UNSW) is awarded the Australian Museum Research Institute’s lifetime achievement award,