Getting your head around Industry 4.0? That’s so 2016

“Industry 5.0” represents “a significant shift in the way humans and machines can collaborate to improve the efficiency and productivity of manufacturing production,” Monash U Engineering’s submission to the Reps Committee inquiry into advanced manufacturing.

It’s a bare seven years since Industry 4.0 was the last next big thing (CMM April 29 2016).

There’s more in the Mail

In Features this morning

Tim Cahill (Research Strategies Australia) on why the research strategies Australian universities create all look the same, and often aren’t strategies, HERE.

plus Michelle Whitford on the power of peer assisted study sessions. New in Commissioning Editor Sally Kift’s celebrated series, Need now in learning and teaching.

with Claire Macken (RMIT) on how Vietnam rates, really rates Australian HE

and Merlin Crossley (UNSW) on why universities should shoot for the stars, HERE

Manufacturing the future for teaching and research

The pandemic made chifleyites of us all

The House of Reps Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Resources is inquiring into developing advanced manufacturing, submissions focus on how, not why.

The Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering’s first recommendation is to the use the National Reconstruction Fund to increase “sovereign capacity.” Among other proposals it calls for “education providers” to be helped “to establish priority STEM programmes.

The Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences: calls for “advance manufacturing plants and facilities that can produce medicines and vaccines at scale for export” plus having HQs here and “a skilled local workforce” would mean, “if there is a global crisis we have what we need on Australian soil to provide for the Australian population and potentially also to support those in our region.”

Monash U Engineering: reports on its many excellent initiatives” and suggests, “advanced manufacturing techniques can offer significant opportunities for Australia in terms of job creation, productivity, value-add. It propagates, protects, and preserves sovereign manufacturing capability.”

Deakin U: Deakin U calls for investment in regional manufacturing, “where Australia can take a lead role in translating local research excellence into globally leading manufacturing excellence.”

There’s more from the HE and research sectors but you get the idea

Where this comes from: In the pandemic-depths of 2020 Anthony Albanese celebrated the 75th anniversary of Ben Chifley becoming prime minister, “we need to channel the same spirit – the same leadership,” he tweeted.

Mr Alabanese extended the point in ’21 “Today we face another crisis. Another opportunity to rebuild our country. We used to make things in Australia. With some vision and a change of government, we can do it again.”

During WWII disrupted supply-lines meant Australia struggled with shortages of imported manufactures and a generational consensus followed, that we must manufacture our own essentials.

Our pandemic dependence on imported pharmaceuticals and the crash programme to make the ventilators we did not already manufacture and could not buy overeseas had the same impact.

When it comes to manufacturing R&D Australians are chifleyites now.

A treasure for digital archive TROVE

The national resource, (much loved by family historians) will get $33m over four years in the Budget

The money will go to administering agency the National Library. Home Affairs minister Katy Gallagher, signalled cash was coming in the Senate last week.

Question is what is coming for all the other federal GLAM agencies Minister Gallagher mentioned (CMM March 30). On the basis of what she told ABC Radio in Canberra yesterday – money.

She specifically cited needed repairs at the National Gallery, National Library and Questacon.

“In a way Canberra is the custodian of the national story and our national history. But it’s there for everybody,” she said.

Uni merger in Adelaide: one way or another it’s a happening thing

It does not matter if Peter Høj and David Lloyd can’t come up with a uni merger plan

The VCs of Uni Adelaide and Uni SA released a “vision statement” last week of what their merged unis could accomplish (CMM March 28) – committing to a new Adelaide University starting in January ’26, if they come up with a plan by July.

It does not much matter if they don’t.

Last week SA premier Peter Malinauskas told Adelaide’s excellent INDAILY that if the VCs did not agree on terms the government would establish the university merger commission (CMM June 6 22).

Todays Headline Story

Increasing low SES enrolments: how many students and where

Education Minister Jason Clare wants a 20 per cent HE participation rate for low SES Australians – getting there will be complicated

To achieve it by 2030, low SES enrolments will need make up 35 per cent of all new enrolments, just over double the existing share, the Innovative Research Universities warn in a new paper, which may interest the O’Kane HE Accord team.

So are there alternatives to piling more low SES students into “equity intensive” universities already meeting the 20 per cent target?

IRU suggests four overall options

* all universities have 20 per cent low SES students: one problem is if universities with strong low SES enrolments now maintained them, other universities would have to aggressively recruit to reach target. This could lead to some “recruiting low SES students from equity-intensive universities with no direct impact on low SES participation.”

* all universities take more, but in proportion to present shares: this would achieve the target with the least change in the system. Whether this would be good for students depends on whether the existing pattern of enrolments works for them

* increases in proportion to their present domestic enrolment: this would most impact the Group of Eight, increasing their low SES students from 10 per cent of enrolments to 14 per cent by 2030

* increases proportional to the share of the low SES population by state and territory: Universities in Tasmania and South Australia could get to 20 per cent, due to the nature of their populations. Universities in the ACT would have no hope – bad for reaching growth funding targets.

Overall, IRU suggests, “if the higher education funding system is to remain constrained, growth funding should be ideally funded towards universities with demonstrated commitment and success in supporting low SES students.”

And the lobby also warns low socio-economic status is not the only measure of social disadvantage and under-representation in HE, pointing to, Indigenous Australians, regional-remote students, gender diverse people and persons with disabilities and carers, who “face difficulties accessing higher education.”

Colin Simpson’s ed-tech must reads of the week

This week’s must-reads in education technology

Turnitin’s AI writing detector launches today – or does it? Turnitin’s AI writing detection report is scheduled to launch today. This will appear in the form of a single extra number in the standard similarity report interface representing the percentage of the document that Turnitin is 98 per cent certain may have been created with Generative AI tools like ChatGPT. They claim a 1 per cent false positive rate. This functionality is based on GPT 3 and GPT 3.5, not GPT 4. The simultaneous global release of this report has sparked wide discussion in the TEL community, captured in Twitter threads by Sian Bayne, Tim Fawns and Anna Mills, on a range of topics from the detectability of AI,  whether 1 per cent false positives is acceptable and the need for alternative approaches to assessment.

While there was initially no option for institutions to opt out of the functionality – and there is no way for admins to disable it – a number of universities in the UK and some in Australia (Deakin, Sydney) have decided not to use the functionality just quite yet.

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Designs for our times: adapting assessment in an AI context – Webinar Wed 5th April 5pm AEST from ASCILITE Transforming Assessment, TELedvisors Network and Learning Design SIGs. All of which makes this upcoming webinar about assessment and AI incredibly timely. Featuring a host of prominent academics including Thom Cochrane (Uni Melb), Ruth Dimes (Uni Auckland), Mitra Jayazeri (La Trobe U) and Richard Hall (also LT U), this session will look at practical approaches to assessment in this new AI age. (Or is that AIge?)

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A Free, Open Source Course on Communicating with Artificial Intelligence from Learn Prompting

However things shake out, there is probably some value in learning to speak the language of our new digital overlords. This on-line course appears to be a good place to start, offering a tiered approach to developing skills in writing effective prompts for Gen AI tools.

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The worst volume control interfaces in the world from Twitter

On a lighter note, I’m a sucker for deliberately bad user interface design. This thread of 22 competition entries from 2017 would offer the most annoying experiences imaginable for listening to audio.

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)

 

Appointment, achievement

Mike Ryan (Monash U) receives the 2023 Lemberg Medal from the Australian Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

 Celebrated UTS accounting educator Amanda White (as in “Amanda loves to audit”,HERE) becomes deputy associate dean (education) at UTS Business School. She will keep teaching.