“Too many good ideas in our nation are funded by taxpayers through the university system, through R&D grants and concessions in our tax system, and, just as they are getting ready to become commercially viable and successful ventures, they leave our shores for the primary reason of seeking capital in other countries that have access to risk capital,” – Jason Falinski (Lib-NSW) presents the Tax and Revenue Committee’s report on an Australian bond market, House of Reps, yesterday.

Makes a change from creating rules about IP (CMM October 20).

In Features this morning

“TAFE bachelor degrees are able to break away from the competency-based model of vocational education that some providers consider to be a constraint on their responsiveness to industry,” Susan Webb, Elizabeth Knight, Steven Hodge and Shaun Rawolle suggest. Why, they ask, are there not more of them, in a new contribution to Commissioning Editor Sally Kift’s celebrated series, Needed now in teaching and learning.

plus, Sean Brawley (Macquarie U) looks at the short history of the UC and wonders what, if anything, is next for the qualification. If it goes people who leave UG study early will be the losers, he warns.

and, Merlin Crossley (UNSW)  on the rhetoric of conflict in university life. There are better ways to deal with people and set goals.

Research grant approvals and uni casual pay could come up

Its Senate Estimates week with education, skills and employment portfolio officials and agency managers on Thursday.

CMM is looking forward to 8.15 pm (AE summer time) Thursday when the Australia Research Council appears. But probably not as much as ARC officials, who are undoubtedly hoping to be asked questions about the impact of the brief inclusion of a ban on references to pre-prints in grant applications.

The other must-watch will be the Fair Work Ombudsman, (7.30pm, Wednesday). A couple of weeks ago agency chief Sandra Parker told a Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency event that FWO is investigating 14 universities over staff payment practises.

“We will take a firm approach with those who do not cooperate with us. We are investigating in technology and data analytics to assess compliance on a large scale. We can and will undertake independent validation or recalculations,” Ms Parker said (CMM October 11).

Senators might be interested to know how all that is going.

The Professional Services Transformation plan rolls on

While academic jobs going has attracted much attention at Macquarie this year the plan to reduce faculty administration by $25m rolls on.

A management proposal for student support services is expected this week. So is a new admin model for all faculties.

Team-based quizzes on no budget from Amanda loves to audit

Australia’s favourite lecturer on auditing, Amanda White at UTS, integrates technologies into her teaching to inspire and engage her students. In this post, she shares her approach to creating weekly branching quizzes that are taken firstly individually and then in small groups to create opportunities for collaborative learning via multiple attempts. She discusses how she has created a solution that bypasses LMS quiz limitations but which retains accountability.

***

Support Designer-Teacher Collaboration in Educational Game Design Using Learning Science Principles from Ma and Harpstead, CHI-PLAY 2021 proceedings

A common concern held about educational technologies is that the tech is prioritised about the pedagogy. This work in progress from Ma and Harpstead (Carnegie Mellon University), presented recently at the Computer-Human Interaction in Play conference outlines their work on educational game design support frameworks linked closely to evidence based learning science principles. Given the potential of educational games to create rich, authentic learning experiences, this work shows great potential.

***

Vale Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi from Jane McGonigal (Twitter)

For people with an interest in learner engagement, motivation and productivity, the loss of Csikszentmihalyi last week was a sad moment. His 1990 book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience developed the idea of a ‘flow state’, the sweet spot between challenge and skill where people find themselves fully absorbed in an activity. This has been highly influential on education and game design and games in education. The comments that follow this tweet from McGonigal, an influential figure in serious game design thinking, offer a taste of the impact his work had.

***

UTS Video Meetup #10 Podcasting, Live-streaming and designing educational media Tues Oct 26, 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm (AEDT)

This video meetup this afternoon features academics and learning designers from a range of organisations presenting about using educational video (Mark Parry, AISNSW), live-streaming on Twitch (Jamie Chapman, UTAS), learner generated digital media (Beverley Myles, OpenLearning) and podcasts as learning and teaching resources (Fidel Fernando, Macquarie Uni).

***

Towards a taxonomy of assessment types – webinar/workshop Thurs Oct 28^th 12 noon (AEDT)

Hans Tilstra (Keypath Australia) leads what should be a lively set of activities intended to lead towards a meaningful taxonomy of assessment types in modern tertiary education. This is the final ASCILITE TELedvisors Network webinar for 2021 and caps off a stellar year of these events.

***

Colin Simpson has worked in education technology, teaching, learning design and academic development in the tertiary sector since 2003 and is employed by Monash University’s Education Innovation team. He is also one of the leaders of the TELedvisors Network. For more from Colin, follow him on Twitter @gamerlearner

Staff and students at 47 participating universities will have open access to read and publish in 366 Oxford University Press journals

The arrangement was announced yesterday by the Council of Australian University Librarians.

Chair Jill Benn calls the agreement a “one of the keystone achievements in CAUL’s journey towards opening up access to publicly-funded research.”

It is the third OA deal announced by CAUL this month, following one with Cambridge University Press (CMM October 15) and with journal-giant Springer-Nature (CMM October 21).

There is, it is said, a fourth to come.

At Deakin U the VC’s award for team teaching goes to the Psychology Honours Team, Nicolas Bennett, Jaclyn Broadbent, Christian Hyde, Nicolas Kambouropoulos, Jarrad Lum, Nicholas Ryan, Elizabeth Westrupp.

At Monash U Nellie Georgiou-Karistianis becomes PVC (Research Training) at Monash U. She moves up from Deputy Dean (Academic) in the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences.   And Jacek Jasieniak is the new PVC Research Infrastructure – he is now Associate Dean (Research) in Engineering.

The 2021-24 membership of the National Health and Medical Research Council is announced. Caroline Horner is reappointed to the council and becomes the new chair Members are: * Emily Banks * Ainslie Cahill * Ian Frazer (reappointed)* Bronwyn Le Grice * Jane Gunn * Elizabeth Hartland * Yyonne Cadet-James * Richard Murray * Carolyn Sue  * Nicholas Talley * Debra Thoms * Alison Venn (reappointed)  * Steve Wesselingh (reappointed) and * Ingrid Winship (reappointed). State and Commonwealth chief medical officers are ex officio members.

Craig Neal (UNSW) is a runner-up in the International Air Transport Association thesis competition for his masters dissertation on demand for cargo airships in Australia. The other runner up is Tereza Bartlová (Brno (Czech Republic) UT) for a study of uncrewed VTOL vehicles. The winner is Martina Brysch (Uni Groningen) for a thesis on air cargo in the “physical internet.”

Stuart Parsons is moving from QUT to Uni Sunshine Coast to be dean of Science, Technology and Engineering. He starts there in January.

At UWA Tim Colmer moves from DVC R to interim Senior DVC – he replaces Simon Biggs who is moving to James Cook U as VC.  Anna Nowack takes Colmer’s old job, for the first six months of 2022. There is no word as yet on who will act in her position, PVC Health and Medical Research.