Don’t spend it all in one place

“Tell us about your first few weeks of uni at Deakin and you could win a $100 gift card!,” DU pitches to commencing students, via Twitter yesterday.

There’s more in the Mail

in Features this morning

Individual assessment tasks don’t necessarily support the development of higher level graduate attributes or employment outcomes,” argue Nicholas Charlton (Griffith U) and Richard Newsham-West. What’s needed is a focus on programme, rather than course, learning outcomes. New this week in Commissioning Editor Sally Kift’s celebrated series, Needed now in teaching and learning.

plus Merlin Crosley (UNSW) on the big Accord issues – access and research funding. “We don’t know where the next Einstein will come from, but we don’t want to miss her.”

(Nearly) all the opinions on international education

Lobbies representing will appear at a parliamentary inquiry today – just not all together

The commonwealth parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade is inquiring into tourism and international education and has hearings in Melbourne today.

First up the International Education Association of Australia has 90 minutes to itself – which on the basis of its submission it will have no trouble filling (CMM March 8).

It’s followed by sector-lobbies, with public university groups appearing together, followed by private provider reps.

Universities Australia, the Australian Technology Network the Group of Eight and the Innovative Research Universities will share (undoubtedly amicably) 90 minutes. But the Regional Universities Network, which made a  submission is not on the list. Executive Director Alec Webb is overseas, but hopes for a chance to appear before the committee when he gets back.

What works at work

After all the pandemic pain it’s time to work through the lessons of lockdown and build better HE workplaces

HEjobs invites you to an in-person event to talk, listen and learn about jobs that work better HERE.

Todays Headline Story

Senate Committee flicks student debt to O’Kane Accord  

The Greens bill to freeze indexation of student loan debt and lift the threshold for repayments is rejected by an upper house committee

The Education and Employment Legislation Committee’s  single recommendation yesterday was that the Senate not pass a bill from NSW Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi.

But while the committee fairly reports the case  made for the bill, one par explains why it was never going to make it to the Senate floor, “the committee is particularly concerned about the un-costed financial implications of the bill which, according to the departments’ evidence, could be in the order of $2 billion, and $9 billion for ongoing revenue effects.”

To which, in part, Greens Senators responded, “student debt is an immediate and growing problem that must be addressed now – people cannot afford another round of brutally high indexation. The government can’t keep pretending that the system is working. They can’t keep sitting on their hands or kicking the can down the road.”

Which is exactly what the committee has done, the road being Accord Avenue. “Discussions around the affordability of the higher education system be continued within the Universities Accord process,” the committee suggests.

The basis for this is that the Department of Education and that of Employment and Workplace Relations suggested that the Accord, and work for a new Commonwealth-state skills agreement are the place, “to consider any immediate relief for students or long-term policy changes, so the implications for the broader higher education system can be considered holistically.”

Certainly the Accord terms of reference, include, “explore funding and contribution arrangements that deliver equity, access, quality and longer-term investments to meet priorities in teaching, research, workforce and infrastructure.”

However it is more than a bit rich to expect the Accord team to address the budget impact of changes of student debt, present and future.

Perhaps Mary O’Kane and her Accord colleagues should brush up on nuclear submarine construction costs, lest they also be asked about funding them.

Finding fraud with nothing to go on

Research publisher association STM announces a paper-mill detection tool

Details are sparse but apparently it scans a manuscript for “pre-identified indications of potential fraud.”

Might be harder in cases where human researchers can give an AI a specific brief and where all the references in the resulting paper are real (CMM April 6).

Happy to be at work today?

If you work in HE, we really want to know – about your week, your year and your working life in general

Twig Marketing and CMM are collaborating to survey Australian higher education staff, to get a better understanding of why you do what you do, and how you are enjoying your job.

There’s a random prize draw for a $250 gift card if you choose to leave your details at the end (all results will of course be de-identified) and we are going to use the results to provide some insights into where the HE sector is headed.

The survey should only take 2-3 minutes, based on early respondents, and will really help get new discussions underway on a whole range of issues that usually fly under the radar.

Please dive in and share your thoughts: HERE

Feedback for students: AI gets an A

Monash U researchers analysed feedback of HE students’ open-ended assessment tasks by instructors and ChatGPT *

They found it,

* “can generate more detailed feedback that more coherently and fluently summarises students’ performance than the instructor”

* “achieved “a high-level of agreement with human instructors”

* could “provide feedback on the process of students completing the task, e.g. suggesting learning strategies in feedback, in addition to feedback on task level that indicates how well students performed”

The paper points to methodological qualifications and performance limitations but the authors also add,

“ “we surprisingly found that ChatGPT could generate a considerable-number of process focus feedback … this implies the promising values of ChatGPT in guiding students towards improving their tasks or even developing learning skills.”

And this was done on ChatGPT, superseded in March by GPT4, which includes a socratic-teaching function.

* Wei Dai, Jionghao Lin, Flora Jin, Tongguang Li, Yi-Shan Tsai, Dragan Gašević and Guanliang Chen (all from the Centre for Learning Analytics at Monash U,” Can Large Language Models Provide Feedback to Students? A Case Study on ChatGPT” EdArXiv Preprints, April 14

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

What is Auto-GPT? Everything to know about the next power AI tool from Zdnet

Another day, another mind bending development in AI land. One of the new exciting new toys is AutoGPT, a Python app published to GitHub on the 30th of March. It can access the Internet and uses GPT4 to iterative set itself a series of tasks to perform to achieve whatever goal you initially set for it. Essentially you can tell it to do X, it will identify that it needs to do A, B and C to achieve this and then also that it needs to do D, E and F to get A done. Then it goes off and does it, checking in with you from time to time that it is on track. One example cited mentions that AutoGPT had been asked to create an app and recognised that the user didn’t have Node software. So, it worked out how to install that, did that and continued. Wild times. I’m not entirely sure what the educational applications are but it might have saved Aneesha Bakharia (UQ) some time.

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Introducing my latest AI creation, EduWeaver from Aneesha Bakharia

Aneesha Bakharia was one of the expert panellists in the TELedvisors/CCCL AI webinar earlier this year and continues to impress with her new AI based online module creation tool, Eduweaver. It allows users to nominate a topic and the tool outputs a set of simple text content and MCQ pages. She offers examples covering Meteorology, Learning Analytics, Javascript and more.

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Auto-GPT Unmasked: The Hype and Hard Truths of Its Production Pitfalls from Jina

As with most new tools, AutoGPT has its challenges to work through. This in-depth post from Han Xiao, founder of Jina AI offers a fairly comprehensive breakdown of some of the practical challenges that users might face with this just-over-two-week-old technology. It gets techy but the gist isn’t too hard to pick up.

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Empowering learners for the age of AI from Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence (Open Access)

For a slightly more scholarly take on the current mess/age of wonder, this recent issue of Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence, features articles from George Siemens, Dragan Gašević, Lina Markauskaite, Kirsty Kitto, Simon Buckingham Shum, and a host of other luminaries on many facets of what we can and should do next with AI in education.

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We need to change the way universities assess students, starting with these 3 things from The Conversation

And now for something (almost) completely different, this article from Joanna Tai, Margaret Bearman, Mollie Dollinger and Rola Ajjawi proposes some simple yet essential changes in the way that universities handle assessment, including more student choice, more feedback and greater inclusivity.

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)

On-line, on campus: where students want to study

The big three choices for study selection are course (37 per cent), location (20 per cent) and flexibility between on-line and on-campus (14 percent)

The finding is in a survey by academic support adviser (and CMM advertiser) Studiosity for its new Student Wellbeing Report (chapter II, here).

On-line particularly appeals to older students with more commitments than campus. Those 24 plus, part-timers and parents/carers are two to nearly three times more likely to value flexible study than other groups.

As do regional students, 23 per cent compared to 11 per cent for metros.

Preference for in-person connection with fellow students also declines with age, from 80 per cent plus among 18-21 year olds, to 52 per cent for those 30 plus.

As to what attracts people to campus, 59 per cent of total responders cite friends, 53 per cent mention “incentives – free food, merchandise, concerts” and 49 per cent want free parking.

 

Appointments

Cara Beal is the new director of Griffith U’s Cities Research Institute. It is an internal appointment.

Lisa Calabria joins Victoria U as director Strategic Engagement. She is a former chief of staff to the state health minister.

Anna Sullivan becomes acting dean of research at UniSACreative.