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No harm in asking
A learned reader reports at RMIT, the National Tertiary Education Union’s log of claims for the new enterprise agreement includes, “ new university policies may only be introduced, and existing policies may only be changed, with the agreement of the union.”
There’s more in the Mail
In Features this morning
James Guthrie (Macquarie U) sets out the eight major changes to university governance and purpose proposed by staff and student organisations
plus Merlin Crossley UNSW) laments education status as social marker. “Privileging a single form of achievement will never help us build an inclusive and cohesive society.”
with Christy Collis (Uni Southern Queensland) on the digital skills gap. “Our students may know how to use digital tools, but we are not necessarily teaching them how to be successful digital workers, she warns in an essay for Contributing Editor Sally Kift’s celebrated series, Needed now in teaching and learning.
and Angel Calderon digs (really, really digs) into the QS subject rankings to rate how the university alliances did. He found good results for the Group of Eight and the Australian Technology Network.
Beyond the emergency row
As international education takes off join us for a zoom conference on what’s next in international education
Speakers include, VCs Margaret Gardner and Iain Martin, policy experts Hamish Coates and Gwilym Croucher and buckle-up for TEQSA chief commissioner Peter Coaldrake in conversation with Sally Kift. Details here.
VC warns staff: James Cook U “living beyond our means”
Simon Biggs tells the JCU community there will be a $25m plus “overspend in ongoing operating funds this year”
What’s the problem?: In a message late Friday the new VC warned that the university’s 2014 restructure was based on 25 000 EFT students by 2025. However JCU student numbers dropped from 16 000 EFTS in 2015 to 14 000 in ‘21, with “a further decline” this year.
And while COVID has not helped, the “underlying issues of scale are not a temporary pandemic induced feature.”
Changes in the student mix also add to the university’s financial problems with a shift from Commonwealth Supported Places and full fee internationals to lower-income partner programmes.
The result is that fixed costs are “an unsustainable proportion of discretionary income.”
Where the buck stops: Professor Biggs response is changes in top management, “consistent with the feedback from staff.”
He proposes abolishing the vacant provost position and ending the two academic division DVC posts, with those portfolios reporting to a new DVC Academy. The now vacant DVC R position will be filled and the DVC Students (Maree Dinan-Thompson) become DVC Education. Around 30 exec roles stay substantively the same.
What’s the point: While the restructure will produce “some savings” this is not the primary purpose. Rather that is, “to provide a more adaptable, nimble, agile and effective leadership framework appropriate to the size and scale of the university, with clear accountability.”
It also appears to indicate that Professor Biggs does not intend to cut his way out of trouble. Given contested course and staff cuts prior to the pandemic this would make a change, (CMM April 19, April 27, July 9, 2018).
Question is whether a reshuffle will be enough to repair the university’s finances.
La Trobe U regional research campaign win
The university had the scoop on $5m in funding to research medical cannabis cultivation
The university announced Friday it leads a partnership which has won the money from the Commonwealth’s $66m Regional Research Collaboration programme, which funds work at 11 regional universities. La Trobe qualifies because it has four campuses in regional Victoria.
Presumably the funding is from Round Two, which opened in February, but there is no word on any other grants (there were six in round one).
Regional Education Minister Bridget McKenzie did not announce the funding to Sunday afternoon, and then on the National Party website, presumably because caretaker conventions are in place.
Perhaps the Nats wanted LT U to get first go at the glory.
Med research election asks
The Association of Australian Medical Research Institutes has made a campaign-call for the budget of the National Health and Medical Research Council to increase from $875m now to $2bn in 2031-32
And it wants the Medical Research Future Fund to generate higher returns on investment so it can allocate $1bn a year to research in a decade.
The increases would amount to a 25 per cent hike on present spending.
“We should ensure there is continued strong support for medical research across the whole pipeline from ground-breaking basic research right through to new patient treatments, underpinned by support for our world-class research workforce,” AAMRI asserts.
The demands are in its “election policy statement,” released this morning.
AAMRI also calls for a national strategy to coordinate funding, “through a whole of system approach” and a workforce plan. “
“The path for advancing a research career through the well-trodden NHMRC route has become more difficult and unclear, with opportunities for women and early and mid-career researchers being particularly limited,” the association warns.
AAMRI is as one on planning with Research Australia, the self-declared, “national peak body representing the entire health & medical research pipeline”
Its election statement calls for a health and medical research strategy which has, “maximum impact on national priorities and exploits areas of international competitive advantage.” It also wants a workforce plan which has “circular mobility between academia and industry” with the next generation of researchers trained by “educators who are research active.”
Colin Simpson’s ed-tech must reads of the week
Intel calls its AI that detects student emotions a teaching tool. From Protocol. Ed tech vendor Classroom Technologies, which sells an overlay for teaching in Zoom called Class (that actually isn’t terrible), has announced that they are planning to test AI based tools to measure learner engagement using facial recognition technology. This handy article outlines how it may or may not work.
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Webinar 28/4/22 12 noon AEST – Shouting into the void? Student engagement in the online synchronous classroom from ASCILITE TELedvisors Network. The question of student engagement in online synchronous classes like Zoom has been a hot topic in recent years, with wide ranging debate about the ethics of forcing students to turn their cameras on. Dr Katie Freund, the TELT manager at the ANU medical school, will discuss some of these issues and offer some useful strategies in a webinar this Thursday for the ASCILITE TELedvisors Network.
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Catching AI generated assessments from Brenton Krenkel (Twitter). Brenton Kenkel is a political scientist at Vanderbilt University. He recently fed some of his essay questions into GPT-3, an AI text generation tool from Open AI to see what it might create. He shares the surprisingly high quality responses that he got back in this tweet, which leads into a fascinating discussion about the future of assessment and academic integrity.
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CC4 Collaborate22 – Collaboration in Higher Education videos from Vimeo The tendency for teams, departments and disciplines to exist in silos has long been recognised as a weakness of Higher Education, with institutional efforts to foster interdisciplinarity achieving varied levels of success. The University of Calgary recently worked with London Metropolitan University to run a symposium on the matter and these 17 videos (~15 mins each) capture some of the rich discussion about work in the field.
Why Wordle Works, According to Desmos Lesson Developers from Mathworlds. By now, many of us have played Wordle and the many variants (Quordle/Octordle/Sedecordle/etc) and possibly even moved on. This piece offers some nice insights into the ludological principles that make games like these so successful and the elements to consider (e.g. many paths to success, freedom to fail) in wider learning and teaching activities.
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
A message from India
Resignations of fellows of Uni Melbourne’s Australia-India Institute have nothing to do with the Indian Government, says the Indian Government.
Researchers from a range of Australian universities expressed unhappiness with the Indian Government’s interest in the Institute and Uni Melbourne’s response back in 2020. Disquiet continues, with talk of 12-16 resignations (CMM April 5).
It came up on Thursday at a media briefing by India’s Ministry of External Affairs. Spokesperson Shri Arindam Bagchi pointed out that the Institute is funded by Australian governments and Uni Melbourne and academic freedom there is nothing to do with India. “The University of Melbourne has and in fact, the officials of the Institute also have made their position clear on this. I don’t have anything to add on that,” he said.
Perhaps Institute CEO Lisa Singh addressed the issue on her working visit to India last week.
Achievements
Sally McArthur (Swinburne U) and Andrea O’Connor (Uni Melbourne) win Research Excellence Awards from the Australasian Society for Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering.