It asks people willing  to download an Android or Apple app, post photos of snacks scoffed over 15 days and report the consumption context. They go in a draw for 20 $50 vouchers. No, CMM will not attempt a joke involving peanuts.

In Features this morning

Frank Larkins (Uni Melbourne) crunches the numbers on uni staff losses. They aren’t as big as reported – but casuals still bore the brunt.

with Angel Calderon (RMIT) on why ratifying the global convention on qualification recognition makes sense for Australia. (It could help here on recognition of prior learning and credit transfer between states and institutions.)

plus  Steven Warburton and Mitchell Parkes (UNE) argue it’s time for the sage to leave the stage, for the guide to sidle off the side and to welcome the agile, adaptive academic – the meddler in the middle! This week’s selection by Commissioning Editor Sally Kift for her celebrated series Needed now in teaching and learning.

and in CMM Monday (it’s on the website); Mitch Parsell (U Tas) on the work of John Biggs, the 2021 career achievement winner in the Australian Awards for University Teaching.

Attitudes to gender roles can set scores they award individuals

Katharine Gelber and colleagues looked at the comments in four years of Uni Queensland student evaluations of teaching for a new paper in the Australian Journal of Political Science.

what they found: Students assess teaching according to gender-based contexts. Expectations of women are, “being approachable, giving time, providing feedback, listening, and doing so out of class hours” while men are judged on being, “expert, knowledgeable, funny, enthusiastic, and passionate.”

why this matters: “If the expectations on the part of students from male-identified and female-identified teachers are different, and some types of teaching behaviour are rewarded for male-identified teachers and critiqued for female-identified teachers, and vice versa, this may result in SETs not functioning to measure only the quality of teaching, but also to reinforce gender-stereotypical behaviour in teaching,” write Professor Gelber and Katie Brennan (Uni Queensland), David Duriesmith (Uni Sheffield) and Ellyse Fenton (independent researcher).

what it leads to: “Institutions that rely on SETs are rewarding female and male staff for behaviours that conform to gendered stereotypes, and that are likely to have differentiated impacts on the amount of time and energy available for research activities. This suggests that it is incorrect to regard SETs as purely a measure to assess the quality of teaching performance.”

the take-out: “Qualitative analysis can reveal gender bias that is invisible in quantitative analysis.”

Uni Queensland continues closed today due to floods and classes are cancelled for the week.  QUT is the same – closed until Monday, when semester one classes will start, a week late. At Southern Cross U hope is that the Gold Coast campus can open today but at Lismore the university has been an evacuation centre for 500 displaced locals.  Coffs Harbour was expected to be open today. All Griffith U campuses (ex Logan) are open today but classes are on-line “where possible” and none will be on-site.

by CLAIRE FIELD

In recent weeks a number of positives have emerged for Australia’s international education sector. Regrettably though there are also potential negatives which must be addressed

Firstly the good news.

I missed this IEAA webinar from late December where the Department of Home Affairs’ representative makes clear that visa processing staff have received explicit training to ensure they properly understand and apply the Genuine Temporary Entrant test, so that now “just because someone has an aspiration to apply for permanent residency does not mean they would be refused a visa”.

More good news was last week’s announcement of $10 million to support the implementation of the new National Strategy. The funds are designed to help providers expand their offerings and move into new markets.

The bad news (especially as providers try to diversify their source markets) is this analysis on the annual State of Southeast Asia report, which shows a declining regard for Australia as an international study destination amongst decision makers in the region.

Survey respondents were asked to rank destination countries/regions as their first choice for a scholarship-funded university place – Australia has fallen from the preferred destination of 21.2 per cent of respondents in 2019 to the first choice of just 9.9 per cent this year.

The analysis shows Australia has moved from the “clear third choice” after the US and the EU in 2019 to the “contested fourth spot with Japan, China and New Zealand, or any other Southeast Asian country also sneaking up.”

While most students from Southeast Asia obviously do not come to Australia on scholarships, nonetheless the sharp decline in interest in Australia as a preferred destination needs to be urgently addressed.

A final note given the times we are in – in addition to taking refugees from Ukraine, I applaud the international education agents calling for the Australian government to allow Ukrainian students to lodge visa applications in centres other than Moscow, to remove fees on visas for Ukrainian students, and for education providers to offer scholarship places to Ukrainian students.

Claire Field is an adviser to the tertiary education sector

Amanda Dawson (Uni Newcastle) is awarded the inaugural Royal Australasian College of Surgeons NSW Women in Surgery Leadership award.

Chris Hennessy becomes chief of staff to Swinburne U VC Pascale Quester.

If they are unhappy with government telling them what to do it does not show

There’s a plan for a policy to allocate student places to teacher education faculties according to performance on measures the government approves of (CMM February 25).

But instead of outrage there’s a measured response from the Australian Council of Deans of Education. “All members of ACDE are committed to ensuring that initial teacher education for prospective teachers is the best it can be,” president Michele Simons (Western Sydney U) says.

And while ACDE warns, “careful implementation will be needed,” it says members “look forward” to working with Uni Sydney VC Mark Scott. Professor Scott is charged by the government with over-sighting change.

Science and Technology Australia wants to supercharge research commercialisation

In a speech today STA president Mark Hutchinson will call for unspecified start-up capital so it can create, “the first generation of bench to boardroom scientists,” to build on outcomes from the government’s new $1.6bn research commercialisation fund.

What he proposes is identifying “hundreds of scientists and researchers … with the aptitude and passion to become commercialisation stars.”

“We know we can equip a diverse and talented cohort of experts … and we can give them skills and support to create new businesses based on brilliant science.”

Professor Hutchinson points to STA’s Superstars of STEM as an example of how it could be done. This programme, “equips brilliant, diverse women with advanced communication skills and opportunities” to promote careers for women in STEM.