Losing the will to go on? Cheer-up, Senate Estimates is on this week

The fun starts Wednesday afternoon, with the Australian Skills Quality Authority – senators are often well informed on issues in the Agency, demonstrated by extremely well-informed questions on June 4 last year (start at 16.05).

And on Thursday (5.30pm) the Australian Research Council is on. If the always-expert Senator Faruqi (Greens NSW) is there she will undoubtedly have challenging questions on grant administration.

What could be more important for a few hours this week than to consider new opportunities and ideas from emerging Indigenous leaders in higher education?

A host of current and emerging leaders have signed onto panel discussions for Poche SA +NT’s online conference Are You Ready, Australia? hosted by Twig Marketing and Campus Morning Mail.

Tickets are available for next week’s sessions, which run over November 10 and 11. Sign on here: www.indigenoushe.com.au

in Features this morning

GEORGINA BARRATT-SEE, ELLA KAHU and KATHY EGEA on ways to avoid burnout. “We can only be compassionate caring educators if we are well ourselves,” they write. New in Commissioning Editor Sally Kift’s celebrated series, Needed now in learning and teaching.

plus PhD students did it tough in the pandemic. AI TAM LE (Deakin U) sets out six ways to help them

and JIM NYLAND (Uni Southern Queensland) on why we need an engaged universities accord and what should be in it.

The Council of Australian University Librarians strikes again

CAUL announces a read/publish agreement with journal giant Taylor and Francis. For three years from January, researchers at “participating institutions” can publish in T&F hybrid journals open access, without paying article processing charges. Hybrid journals include OA and subscriber only content.

The agreement is in-line with previous arrangements CAUL has reached with publishers, with a “significant proportion of previous levels of publishing” to be OA “accommodated within subscription fees.”

The deal, CAUL states, is also in-line with the National Health and Medical Research Council’s new open access policy (CMM September 22).

On CMM’s count this is the seventh CAUL open access agreement with publishers including three with one of the five major for-profits, following John Wiley and Springer. But an agreement may be in the offing with one of the other two, Sage or apex publisher Elsevier. CAUL states, “agreements with a few other publishers, including at least one major one, are imminent.”

CDU is putting an enterprise agreement offer to staff and the National Tertiary Education Union is unhappy

So unhappy that national president Alison Barnes is in Darwin campaigning against the management proposal, which she tweets is a “shoddy deal” on pay and “workers’ rights.”

Management’s offer is a 4 per cent pay rise on staff agreeing to the offer, with another 2 per cent in October ’23 and again in ’24, plus leave improvements and a signing bonus (max $500).

There may be another reason Dr Barnes has gone north – the union opposed an agreement at Southern Cross U and narrowly lost the vote last week. The NTEU does not often lose like that and with bargaining underway across the county may not want it to look like a trend.

Voting commences next Tuesday.

Suggestions on dealing with AI-generated papers that don’t get flagged by plagiarism-checking software from Twitter.

Umar Ruhi (@Informatician) raises the question that won’t go away in this Twitter discussion about how he might investigate a student submission that doesn’t feel quite right. The explosion of high quality AI text generation tools this year is having a major impact on the integrity of assessment and without a clear technological solution in sight, rethinking the design of assignments is the only logical step.

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How do we do effective feedback?: A practical example from Teaching Matters blog.

Feedback is routinely identified as an area for improvement in discussions of good learning and teaching practice in Higher Ed. Providing and using meaningful, actionable feedback is time-intensive and requires a certain measure of feedback literacy on the part of both educators and students. This post from Jane Hislop and (my soon-to-be colleague) Tim Fawns from Uni of Edinburgh outlines a way to build peer feedback into rich assessment activities that draw on students’ inclinations to compare their progress with their peers.

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Student support spotlight cards in Education Insights from Microsoft Teams for education

Many big tech firms have been steadily establishing beachheads in the education space in recent years and Microsoft’s appears to centre around their Teams communication and collaboration platform. This post on their support site outlines their upcoming learning analytics functionality, which mostly just tracks changes in student interaction with the system and generates a report for educators to follow up on.

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Lessons from Treadmills and Owls: The Most Important Feature in Educational Technology Products from Improving Learning

This short post from David Wiley explores the idea that education technologies can add all the rich data tracking and analysis tools in the world but these don’t matter that much if nobody is using them. He argues that the thing that makes the greatest difference is the behavioural nudge, outlining the way that popular language learning app Duolingo strategically reminds learners to continue to engage with the platform. (And it has worked for me, 668 days into a French learning streak).

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Leadership and Management needs of Australasian Higher Education – Webinar 1/12 4pm AEDT

Advance HE (formerly the Higher Education Academy) is a UK based organisation behind the increasingly popular HEA fellowship accreditation scheme for Higher Ed. They also support research into the sector and this webinar at the start of December covering a July 2022 study by Dr Jo Chaffer looks worthwhile. (ACODE also has a decent set of interviews with Oz HE leaders on their site if this grabs your interest)

Colin Simpson has worked in education technology, teaching, learning design and academic development in the tertiary sector since 2003 at CIT, ANU, Swinburne 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)

The National Research Infrastructure system is the foundation of national-scale research possible but the skills-mix of the people that keep it running aren’t always appropriately recognised. Directors of 22 NCRIS facilities want to fix this

The problem is that many research infrastructure specialists work for universities, which have HR systems that divide workforces into academic and professional streams and NCRIS infrastructure can cross them both.

The Higher Education Worker professional staff classification system does not accommodate research infrastructure specialists’ scientific knowledge and their tech skills that keep facilities functioning. And academic KPIs can be counter-productive for them. Infrastructure specialists succeed by making other peoples’ research possible, not conducting their own.

What is to be done: The directors propose a “simple, fit-for-purpose classification for RI specialist roles  … such as by creating a new job-family” with its own KPIs.

And why: for a start while RIS are not numerous they service 65 000 clients a year, compared to 81 000 researchers in HE. Plus they are hard, and expensive in terms of lost efficiencies, to replace. “Their loss cannot be easily filled and attracting overseas or domestic talent to these roles can be difficult without clear career progression,” the NCRIS directors state.

Remind you of anybody else?: How about the learning technology community who combine tech and teaching skills and aren’t easily slotted in to either classification.

The Commonwealth Government announces a three-person panel to review migration, including Joanna Howe (Uni Adelaide) and Macquarie U chancellor Martin Parkinson.

 S Niru Nirthanan becomes dean of medicine at Griffith U. It’s an internal appointment.