Charles Sturt U’s Centre for Customs and Excise Studies is donating “education course materials” valued at $200 000, “to build the capacity of Ukraine Customs to develop customs policies and procedures that will facilitate its entry into the EU.”  That’s CSU off the Kremlin’s Christmas Card list.

In Features this morning

The pandemic showed us innovation can happen fast – especially with recognition of the best places to foster it. Beth Beckmann (ANU) and Lynn Gribble (UNSW) set out their Four Cs strategy, new in Commissioning Editor Sally Kift’s celebrated series, Needed now in learning and teaching.

plus Merlin Crossley (UNSW) on the pain and plight of early career academics and what can and can’t be done, HERE

And in Expert Opinion

Academic Integrity expert Cath Ellis (UNSW) on the GPT IV challenge. “It is presenting a very real and present threat in terms of how we have done things for a very long time. She talks to CMM, HERE.

As the Senate committee inquiry into reducing the HELP slug was hearing evidence in Sydney on Friday, Catriona Jackson was on ABC radio in Darwin, expressing sympathy, contextualising reality, seizing an opportunity and keeping her members out of it

Universities Australia’s chief executive explained that while indexing debt to the CPI and lowering repayment thresholds increases the HELP payback period it did not hit people with an immediate increase.

And she responded to the idea that education should be free, “free means paid for by the taxpayer. It doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s got to get funded from somewhere. If you think about that really clearly, paid for by the taxpayer means that everyone in the community is subsidising a system.”

But she acknowledged, “we need to have a really good look at the system and how it’s been tweaked and fiddled with over time and just make sure we put it back into balance so that it’s not putting too much pressure on students too early.”

Before passing problems to Mary O’Kane and team, “ we want to address them through the University Accord – a big discussion that’s going on now and a review of all the policy settings.

It was a policy focused performance. The politics weren’t bad either. That the money the Commonwealth loans students’ for study payments goes straight to universities never came up.

“Do not read!” warning for people upset by rankings

Resume.io (it provides what it says) concludes University of the Sunshine Coast is “the happiest university in Australia.”

This is where ranking critics at risk of head explosion should stop reading.

The happy-metric is based on using Amazon’s emotion recognition AI to scan “thousands of Instagram photos” geotagged by university.

USC photos that rate as happy snaps made up 63 per cent of the sample. There’s not much in it for the next ten, but the rest of the top five are Uni Queensland (54 per cent), Macquarie U (54 per cent), UWA (53 per cent) and Swinburne U (53 per cent).

“Being so close to the Sunshine Coast’s scenic beaches may have something to do” with the rating, Resume.io suggests.

Allocations from the Medical Research Future Fund go where NHMRC money goes

Group of Eight universities picked up a big share of last week’s MRFF grants, much like what happens with National Health and Medical Research Council awards.

Of a total of 193 MRFF grants the Group of Eight received 122 – and the share of the Fab Five (Queensland, Sydney, NSW, Monash and Melbourne) was even more pronounced, 104 grants.

In terms of the approximate (rounded by CMM) cash split, the Five received $200 of the total $380m – demonstrating what vast infrastructure and staff resources built over time, can help deliver.

The Khan Academy has big ideas for GPT-Four’s “socratic style”

The example Open AI used in its announcement last week was the programme showing how to solve an equation step by step.

Language-learning apps are already on to this.

So is Khan Academy, which provides open-access on-line, largely school level course in computing, economics, literacy and mainly maths. Which is impressive as is– but what is amazing is what GPT 4 can add, and that is what founder Sal Khan calls, being “a thoughtful tutor.”

How it will work for what the academy does now and can do next is here.

“One of GPT-4’s chief capabilities is being able to understand free-form questions and prompts. That ability—to have a human-like back and forth—provides Khan Academy with perhaps the most key capability: asking each student individualised questions to prompt deeper learning,” a Khan staffer states.

The Academy is testing co-designs of courses with GPT-4.

Perhaps it will be a model for nations with education and training needs way beyond their physical capacity to meet – like, say, India which maybe could use teachers and trainers to focus on evaluative skills, and leave the basic-training to GPT-4

In a broad-ranging interview with CMM last week Cath Ellis (UNSW) suggested AI creates a question; “if it is more efficient, more effective for somebody to be trained to do something by a teacher that is an AI tool, that is infinitely patient, and can find seven or eight ways to explain the same concept … then what is the value of asking a human to do that?”

“ (our) new Financial Wellbeing Hub is an engaging place where university employees can go to empower their financial decision-making, … the state-of-the-art hub offers a diverse range of material … to empower your financial decision-making.” This one appears to be by human hand, from Monash HR to staff, Friday

VC Colin Stirling says it is enabled, “to deliver the world’s best nuclear education in-country as early as 2023, with the ability to rapidly scale our course offerings in line with defence industry needs”

The university announces “exclusive partnerships” with nuclear research strong Uni Manchester and Uni Rhode Island, providing, “ability to rapidly scale course offerings in-line with industry needs.”

The university also has a long-standing relationship with BAE, which builds British nuclear submarines and is leading construction of the RAN’s Hunter frigate class. Back in 2018 Flinders U announced it would use BAE tech to train project workers (CMM July 2 2018, Feb 9 2020).

Flinders U was certainly keen when a nuclear submarine force for Australia was floated in 2021, “we are keen to see more detail about the announcement so that we can examine our curriculum and our research priorities to best support the national interest,” a university representative told CMM (September 17 2021).

Yesterday’s announcement follows Uni Adelaide talking up its readiness “to help train the workforce and provide research expertise that will be required to help Australia achieve its goal to be a nuclear-powered defence,” within hours of PM announcing the submarine programme last week (CMM March 15).

The imminent SA based “skills academy” to train the submarine workforce may have something to do with both.

Warwick McKibbin (ANU) is a member of the advisory council for a Brookings Institution initiative, a model for an “office of carbon scoring” which would report the climate impact of proposed US Government legislation.

New Queensland Government industry research fellows include,

* Hamid Ahmadi (Uni Southern Queensland) * Mobashwer Alam (Uni Queensland) * Yahia Ali (Uni Queensland) *Matthew Bourne (Griffith U) * Gloria M Monsalve-Bravo (Uni Queensland) * Ping Chen (Uni Queensland) * Kameron Dunn (QUT) * Denys Villa-Gomez (Uni Queensland) * Linh Hoang (QUT) * Sundaravelpandian Kalaipandian (Uni Queensland) * Veronica Martinez (Uni Queensland) * Umme Mumtahina (CQU) * Syed Naqvi (Uni Queensland) * Andy Nguyen (Uni Southern Queensland) * Md Masus Rana (Uni Queensland) * Jiayong Tang (Uni Queensland) * Osman Tursun (QUT) * Min Zheng (Uni Queensland)