Skills sets for subs

Port Kembla is a speculated homeport for the RAN’s future nuclear submarines – it’s got more than a harbour

Local Uni Wollongong already teaches physics, “our degrees are taught by academics at the forefront of their disciplines and fields of research, and are accredited by the Australian Institute of Physics”

“We will make sure you get more than a theoretical education,” UoW announces.

And Wollongong TAFE teaches courses designed for ships and seafarers.

There’s more in the Mail

In Features this morningOpen ed experts are talking about how to embrace AI for student and staff productivity. Michael Sankey reports the results from the Australasian Council on Open, Distance and eLearning, HERE.

 plus Jaymee Beveridge and Kylie Austin (Uni Wollongong) on how their university reimagined graduations by connecting them to Indigenous history. Commissioning Editor Sally Kift’s new selection for her series Needed now in learning and teaching, HERE.

Todays Headline Story

Data driven to data informed: better ways to rate research

What would universities have to put up with in the absence of ARC performance measures?

“Unaccountable, commercially-motivated providers of league tables,” is what, Cameron Neylon (Curtin U) and James Wilsdon (University College London) suggest in CMM this morning, HERE.

For an idea of what this could mean they point to the idea of merging WA’s four public universities with the intent of creating a rankings winner, a proposal with a, “vanishingly small prospect of success.”

Rather than replace existing metrics with commercial products, they argue Australia should join the international discussion on how to move from “data driven” to “data informed,” “mixed method frameworks for research evaluation.”

Last year Professor Neylon and colleagues from the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative created a ranking pilot using public datasets to demonstrate, “it is feasible to implement an automated workflow for the production of ERA 2018 and ERA 2023-like benchmarks and indicators.” (CMM September 21 2022).

The industrial heat is on

Enterprise bargaining is warming up

Action by National Tertiary Education Union members is now in the offing at Deakin U, Uni Melbourne and UNSW) where the Fair Work Commission has approved union members voting on taking industrial action. Members start voting at Monash U today.

They are already are into a long campaign at Uni Sydney and the union is challenging recent management wins in bargaining at Charles Darwin U and Southern Cross U.

 

Colin Simpson’s ed tech must reads of the week

GPT4 is coming this week? from Heise Online. Speculation is rampant that a major upgrade to GPT, the language learning model behind ChatGPT, will be released this week following a comment at an event for partners and prospective clients of Microsoft Germany last week. No firm details are confirmed but it is believed that the update will increase the number of “parameters” used by the tool from ~175 billion to 10-100 trillion and it may add multi-modal inputs and outputs (text, images, audio and possibly video). How will this impact learning and teaching? Outputs will probably be better, but it shouldn’t really alter the changes that are already occurring. The associated discussion on Reddit adds some useful surround details, including the fact that Microsoft does have an AI focused event scheduled for Thursday.

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Engaging with students on the use of GenAI tools from Twitter (and USyd). Coming back to Earth a little, student perspectives when it comes to the responsible use of GenAI tools like ChatGPT have been light on the ground in all the wider discussion. This twitter thread from Amanda White (UTS) captures the process she worked through with her students in deciding what usage is reasonable. Additionally, the Educational Innovation team at Sydney Uni recently held a couple of panel discussions with students covering their perspectives and the recordings are quite illuminating. While a certain type of high achieving student commonly appears in these sessions, it was interesting to note that they didn’t want to let the tools weaken their own writing skills.

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Learning Designers as Expert Evaluators of Usability: Understanding Their Potential Contribution to Improving the Universality of Interface Design for Health Resources from International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. While learning content and activities may be vital elements in good online learning courses, the visual and structural design (the User Experience or UX) has a massive impact on their efficacy. This valuable research from Adams, Miller-Lewis and Tieman of UniSA and CQU compared the ability of Learning Designers, healthcare professionals and end-users to identify UX problems in resources based on previously identified end-user errors. They observed that Learning Designers correctly identified nearly three times as many design issues as the other evaluators, highlighting their value in assisting the development of these resources.

Colin Simpson has worked in education technology, teaching, learning design and academic development in the tertiary sector since 2003 at CIT, ANU, Swinburne University and Monash University. He is also one of the leaders of the ASCILITE TELedvisors Network. For more from Colin, follow him on Twitter @gamerlearner (or @[email protected] on Mastodon)

 

Appointments

Paul Barnes becomes manager of the Queensland Disaster Research Alliance (the allies are, CQU, James Cook U, Griffith U,QUT, Uni Queensland, Uni Southern Queensland and Uni Sunshine Coast).

Mamello Thinyane is appointed inaugural Optus Chair of Cyber Security at Uni SA. He moves from United Nations University Institute, in Macao.