Cyber Security Researchers Required in Canberra

The Australian National University in Canberra has advertised for Cyber Security Lecturer and Associate Professor positions: "The Research School of Computer Science invites applicants to be part of a team developing and delivering education and research programs in the area of cyber security.". Offered are Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, and Associate Professor positions, with salaries from $94,287 to to $145,576 (plus 17% superannuation). A new building is currently under construction at ANU for a joint Cyber Security Innovation Centre, with the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD).
 

m-Learning in Sydney

The 15th World Conference on Mobile and Contextual Learning (mLearn 2016), was held at the University of Technology in Sydney, 24 to 26 October. There were five parallel sessions in the MLearn2016 Program. The mLearn 2016 Proceedings are available as a PDF file. Here is a summary of my notes from the event:

UTS Bachelor of Technology and Innovation

Professor Shirley Alexander, UTS Deputy Vice-Chancellor, welcomed the delegates and talked about the UTS Bachelor of Technology and Innovation (BTI), being introduced next year. This is a general degree in technology, suitable for those going into business. I am skeptical of the idea of a BTI as the 21st Century replacement for the arts degree. BIT graduates may end up like arts graduates: well educated, but not qualified for any real job.

Mobile Learning and Indigenous People

Marguerite Koole Assistant Professor, Curriculum Studies at University of Saskatchewan described applying a frame model of learning (Koole & Ally, 2006).

Kevinwâsakâyâsiw Lewis, then talked about the teaching of teachers of indigenous languages in the University of Saskatchewan's Certificate in Indigenous Languages. Asked about the relevance of song in language learning, Kevin pointed out that chant and song enables the learner to stop worrying about how they pronounce. Also the repetition in the song helps learning, as well as being culturally significant. This reminded me of Dr McComas Taylor, at ANU's Teaching Sanskrit online with chanting.

mLearning for Aboriginal Pre-service Teachers in Remote Communities

Philip Townsend talked on "A Theory of Enhancement of Professional Learning for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Pre-service Teachers in Very Remote Communities through Mobile Learning". He pointed out that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have a much lower completion rate than the general population. The Community Based ITE program, specifically for students in remote areas, has an even lower completion rate than other forms of education. Philip has devoted his PHD research to finding if mobile devices can improve completion rates. Also he mentioned the Cooperative Research Centre for Remote Economic Participation. I suggest that addressing the needs of remote students can assist all students. If we make courses flexible enough for the remote students, these courses will also be better for city and campus based students. Philip was awarded top paper at the conference.

Mobiles for TEQSA Regulatory Course Compliance

Anthony Chung from mobileLearning gave one of the more practical and less academic (in a good way) sessions on "How does a Mobile Platform Address TEQSA and Other Regulatory Compliance for Online Courses?". Anthony went through some of the TEQSA requirements and how these could be facilitated with mobile devices. What was interesting about mobileLearning's approach is that they provide  mobile interface to the institution's native educational applications, rather than replace them. The idea is to make it easier for students and staff to do what is educationally useful. One example is to encourage the student to engage with the learning. This can be difficult where a Learning Management System (LMS) design for static desktop pages is used. The mobile interface can make it easier to access the materials and interact.

IamLearn AGM

The AGM of the International Association for Mobile Learning (IamLearn), was held in conjunction with the conference. Because I registered for the conference I received a year's membership. One initiative is that a new website will allow members to add content directly, rather than emailed to an officeholder who then puts it up. This is something other organizations might like to try

Telstra on Personalised mEducation

 Susi Steigler-Peters, from Telstra Corporation talked on "Personalised Learning, mEducation and Partnerships". Susi spent most of the time describing research on education Telstra has funded over the last few years. This research sounds well designed, but does not tell us, as educators, anything new. So I asked Susi how Telstra could help improve education. In response she cited something called "Telstra Smart Learning" and presented a use case of a student named "Ferris" having an "enriched learning experience". Susi also mentioned a center to be established in Sydney for education. It might be useful for Telstra to instead showcase some of the work in their muru-D startup accelerator.

Online Tutorials for Higher Education

Norman Wildberger and Joshua Capel presented an excellent live demonstration of "Higher Education Practice Online Tutorials and GeoGebra as Mobile Learning Tools" used for teaching mathematics at UNSW. However,what seemed to be missing was a business model to support the high up-front investment to produce such material.

UNSW mLearning Physics

Elizabeth Angstmann talked on "Higher Education Practice Using a mobile Moodle app in an online physics course". This shows an approach to education which focuses on ensuring that e-quality education can provide quality education, backed up by solid research.

Identity and the Mobile Learner

Professor John Traxler, University of Wolverhampton gave the last keynote on "The Role of Education in Identity Transformation and Acculturation". Professor Traxler challenged the assumption that m-learning (and education in general) was a culturally neutral boon for developing nations. Rather than telling us a canned answer, this was a presentation asking questions, which was refreshing.

Professor Traxler is concerned about a Western European view of education and technology being culturally imposed on others. However, this might also be a product of that culture.

Online Education for Prisoners

Louise Patching, USQ, talked on "Using Offline Personal Devices to Enable Access to Higher Education in Prisons" for the Making the Connection Project. Louise pointed out that lack of Internet access is only one factor limiting e-learning in prisons; also there is limited access to hardware, limited prior education of the students. She explained that USQ had decades of experience in teaching prisoners. USQ has a special server for providing materials to prisons and a way for materials to be loaded to portable devices.

Some of what USQ has done would be useful, more generally for students. For example, a problem with webinars is where students have inadvertent left their microphones turned on. I suggest that the off-line features could be built into Moodle and the Linux operating system, allowing the approach taken by USQ to be made available world-wide at no cost.

Encouraging Faculty Development

 Lisa O’Neill, York University, talked on "Encouraging Faculty Development Through Micro-Credentialing". This presented a good overview of the mechanics of recognizing small units of learning with "badges". However, what is also needed is a way to motivate university academics to learn to teach and undertake activities which award such badges.

I suggest that university educators should follow the approach used by nurses and computer professionals in Australia to enhance their recognition of their profession. This could include draft policy for universities and government to require and recognize teaching qualifications of university academics. Also they could suggest changes to university ranking schemes to give teaching quality the same weighting as research output.

References

Koole, M., & Ally, M. (2006, April). Framework for the rational analysis of mobile education (FRAME) model: Revising the ABCs of educational practices. In International Conference on Networking, International Conference on Systems and International Conference on Mobile Communications and Learning Technologies (ICNICONSMCL'06) (pp. 216-216). IEEE. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICNICONSMCL.2006.103

Townsend, P., Halsey, J. R., & Guenther, J. (2016). Mobile Learning Congruencies with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cultural Philosophies. In Publishing Higher Degree Research (pp. 25-32). SensePublishers. Retrieved from http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-6300-672-9_3 

Encouraging Faculty Development

Yesterday at mLearn 2016 in Sydney, Lisa O’Neill, York University, talked on "Encouraging Faculty Development Through Micro-Credentialing". This presented a good overview of the mechanics of recognizing small units of learning with "badges". However, what is also needed is a way to motivate university academics to learn to teach and undertake activities which award such badges.

I suggest that university educators should follow the approach used by nurses and computer professionals in Australia to enhance their recognition of their profession. This could include draft policy for universities and government to require and recognize teaching qualifications of university academics. Also they could suggest changes to university ranking schemes to give teaching quality the same weighting as research output.

Australian universities commonly have a 40/40/20 expectation of academics: teaching 40%, research 40%, and engagement/administration 20%. So it would be reasonable to have teaching weighted equally with research, when ranking universities and university academics.

mLearn 2016 Top Paper to Australian Author

Greetings from the closing ceremony of mLearn 2016 in Sydney, where Philip Townsend was just awarded top paper at the conference for "A Theory of Enhancement of Professional Learning for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Pre-service Teachers in Very Remote Communities through Mobile Learning".

mLearn 2017 will be held in Cyprus.

Online Education for Prisoners

Greetings from mLearn 2016 in Sydney, where Louise Patching, USQ, is speaking on "Using Offline Personal Devices to Enable Access to Higher Education in Prisons" for the Making the Connection Project. Louise pointed out that lack of Internet access is only one factor limiting e-learning in prisons; also there is limited access to hardware, limited prior education of the students. She explained that USQ had decades of experience in teaching prisoners. USQ has a special server for providing materials to prisons and a way for materials to be loaded to portable devices.

It occurs to me that the same techniques would be applicable to military personnel, who have limited access to the Internet due to deployment and security restrictions. The same could apply to students in very remote regions. Additionally, students being examined need to have their access to external materials limited. Lastly, all students could benefit from learning off-line, away from the distractions of the Internet.

USQ selected an 11inch DELL Latitude 3160 notebook for the students. This is a good choice, being low cost, portable and reasonably robust. Work had to be done to disable the communication devices (such as cameras) of the device and also modify the educational software (Moodle).

Some of what USQ has done would be useful, more generally for students. For example, a problem with webinars is where students have inadvertent left their microphones turned on.

As well as the Technion platform, USQ worked on preparing prisoners, with limited education for university studies. One aspect is having to take into account the length of sentence if the prisoner and their cultural background. Also vocational courses have to be suitable, not requiring practical work which cannot be done in prison and not for a career which former prisoners are excluded from.

I suggest that the off-line features could be built into Moodle and the Linux operating system, allowing the approach taken by USQ to be made available world-wide at no cost.

Identity and the Mobile Learner

Greetings from mLearn 2016 at UTS in Sydney, where Professor John Traxler, University of Wolverhampton gave the last keynote on "The Role of Education in Identity Transformation and Acculturation". Professor Traxler challenged the assumption that m-learning (and education in general) was a culturally neutral boon for developing nations. Rather than telling us a canned answer, this was a presentation asking questions, which was refreshing.

Professor Traxler is concerned about a Western European view of education and technology being culturally imposed on others. However, this might also be a product of that culture.

Education and technologies such as mobile devices are not culturally neutral and I would find it surprising if anyone thought they did. These can be used by well meaning people to try to help others and have the intended and unintended consequences. The technology can also be used to impose a particular culture, to make money and to pursue political goals. It is easy to see something as exploitation, when what is is being pushed is an ideology you do not agree with. It is much harder to see when the ideology being inculcated via the education and technology is one you support.

UNSW mLearning Physics

Greetings from mLearn 2016 at UTS in Sydney, where Elizabeth Angstmann talked on "Higher Education Practice Using a mobile Moodle app in an online physics course". This was the best presentation from the conference so far (and a second good presentable from UNSW). This shows an approach to education which focuses on ensuring that e-quality education can provide quality education, backed up by solid research. This is more likely to provide benefits for Australian education (and for the Australian economy), than Telstra's unsubstianted promises of being able to help with education at some unspecified time in the future.

Online Tutorials for Higher Education

Greetings from mLearn 2016 where Norman Wildberger and Joshua Capel presented an excellent live demonstration of "Higher Education Practice Online Tutorials and GeoGebra as Mobile Learning Tools" used for teaching mathematics at UNSW. However,what seemed to be missing was a business model to support the high up-front investment to produce such materials. The Open University (OUUK) pioneered the use of video and preprepared materials decades ago. What OUUK also did was work out the costing of preparation of such materials and tradeoffs between production values of video and teaching effectiveness. Many educators appear to be reluctant to address cost and consider this is not their role. However, if these forms of education are not cost effective, then they will be no more than one off experiments. Before carrying out research in this area, I suggest reading the excellent series of books produce by OUUK, some decades ago on how to produce education. This work is as applicable today to the MOOC.

Telstra on Personalised mEducation

Greetings from mLearn 2016 where Susi Steigler-Peters, from Telstra Corporation talked on "Personalised Learning, mEducation and Partnerships". Susi spent most of the time describing research on education Telstra has funded over the last few years. This research sounds well designed, but does not tell us, as educators, anything new. So I asked Susi how Telstra could help improve education. In response she cited something called "Telstra Smart Learning" and presented a use case of a student named "Ferris" having an "enriched learning experience". Susi also mentioned a center to be established in Sydney for education.

Unfortunately I could not find any of the materials, or initiatives mentioned on the Telstra website. It appears that Telstra does not currently have products or services to offer specifically for education. It will be worthwhile to hear what Telstra has to offer in about five years time, which is how long it takes to design, develop, test and pilot an edutech product. In the interim, it might be useful for Telstra to showcase some of the work in their muru-D startup accelerator.

UTS Engineering and IT Building

Today I have been attending the 15th World Conference on Mobile and Contextual Learning (mLearn 2016) at the UTS Engineering and IT Building, University of Technology Sydney. The building is only two years old and is a good example of a modern, large scale higher education building.

Each teaching room has a display screen outside showing what sessions are booked. This is useful, but one problem is that the small teaching rooms have heavily frosted glass panels onto the corridor, so it is not possible to see if there is anyone actually in the room (the large lecture theaters have clear panels).

The large lecture theaters provide mains power points for each student. These are hidden under the desk and a bit hard to find, but work well. The student desks are fixed with chairs on wheels and a generous amount of space. On problem is that the ceiling lighting extends down the walls on each side, creating glare.

The small teaching rooms have flip up tables on wheels, for flexibility. All the rooms have the same standard teaching station, with computer and document camera.

My laptop switched to HDMI output and I needed an external monitor to switch back. Wandering around the building looking for a screen I found a student study room with two technical support staff. They found me a spare screen and I was able to get my laptop going.

There is also an excellent cafe in the building, which is used for informal teaching as well as socializing.

However, this building is not perfect. There are no large flexible teaching spaces in the building (at least none I could find). That is rooms with flat floors, for one hundred, or more, students. The building has many teaching spaces, but these are either small, or have stepped floors (and so are fixed in use).

IamLearn AGM

Greetings from the AGM of the International Association for Mobile Learning (IamLearn), held in conjunction with their annual conference mLearn 2016  at UTS in Sydney. Because I registered for the conference I received a year's membership. This is a relatively small academic association. One initiative is that a new website will allow members to add content directly, rather than emailed to an officeholder who then puts it up. This is something other organizations might like to try. IamLearn is also creating an eBook on mLearning.

Mobiles for TEQSA Regulatory Course Compliance

Greetings from mLearn 2016  at UTS in Sydney, where Anthony Chung from mobileLearning gave one of the more practical and less academic (in a good way) sessions on "How does a Mobile Platform Address TEQSA and Other Regulatory Compliance for Online Courses?". Anthony went through some of the TEQSA requirements and how these could be facilitated with mobile devices. What was interesting about mobileLearning's approach is that they provide  mobile interface to the institution's native educational applications, rather than replace them. The idea is to make it easier for students and staff to do what is educationally useful. One example is to encourage the student to engage with the learning. This can be difficult where a Learning Management System (LMS) design for static desktop pages is used. The mobile interface can make it easier to access the materials and interact.

Other sessions at the conference took a different approach, arguing that students spend their time in social media websites so the learning needs to happen in those social media applications. I have concerns as to the privacy and distractions for the student, as well as the difficulty to continually adapting the learning materials for whatever is the current social media platform. It would be possible to build a LMS interface to social media, and a default mobile interface outside the platform, but there would still be a very high privacy risk due to the social media interface.

mLearning for Aboriginal Pre-service Teachers in Remote Communities

Greetings from mLearn 2016  at UTS in Sydney, where Philip Townsend is speaking on "A Theory of Enhancement of Professional Learning for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Pre-service Teachers in Very Remote Communities through Mobile Learning". He pointed out that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have a much lower completion rate than the general population. The Community Based ITE program, specifically for students in remote areas, has an even lower completion rate than other forms of education. Philip has devoted his PHD research to finding if mobile devices can improve completion rates.

Philip pointed out that indigenous students have cultural obligations which can take them away from their studies for extended periods. A mobile device may assist, but who pays for the device and network access? In a remote indigenous communities prepaid access is typically used and the account may be shared with others. Also the institution has to offer an on-line strategy as part of the education. One important points was that Philip asserted that mobile devices are compatible with indigenous communities: this is not a technology which will be abandoned after the novelty wears off. Also he mentioned the Cooperative Research Centre for Remote Economic Participation.

I suggest that addressing the needs of remote students can assist all students. If we make courses flexible enough for the remote students, these courses will also be better for city and campus based students. For the last four years I have been an on-line distance education student and have been teaching this way for seven years. To me this is just normal education, which can be enhanced, where possible, with supplementary face-to-face classes.

References

Townsend, P., Halsey, J. R., & Guenther, J. (2016). Mobile Learning Congruencies with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cultural Philosophies. In Publishing Higher Degree Research (pp. 25-32). SensePublishers. Retrieved from http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-6300-672-9_3

Mobile Learning and Indigenous People

Greetings from the UTS in Sydney, where the first session of  mLearn 2016  is on Indigenous People and Mobile Learning. Marguerite Koole Assistant Professor, Curriculum Studies at University of Saskatchewan is describing applying a frame model of learning (Koole & Ally, 2006).

Kevinwâsakâyâsiw Lewis, then talked about the teaching of teachers of indigenous languages in the University of Saskatchewan's Certificate in Indigenous Languages. He commented there was limited access to dictionaries and where most existing educational materials are from the point of view of English speakers. An additional problem is to negotiate access to information by "pipe holders" (tribal elders).

Kevin demonstrated color coding of text with animation to show tenses, or "moving morphemes". Currently this is not available as an app for the students at Saskatchewan. He is mixing students at different levels of language literacy in the one class to aid their learning.

Asked about the relevance of song in language learning, Kevin pointed out that chant and song enables the learner to stop worrying about how they pronounce. Also the repetition in the song helps learning, as well as being culturally significant. This reminded me of Dr McComas Taylor, at ANU's Teaching Sanskrit online with chanting.

References

Koole, M., & Ally, M. (2006, April). Framework for the rational analysis of mobile education (FRAME) model: Revising the ABCs of educational practices. In International Conference on Networking, International Conference on Systems and International Conference on Mobile Communications and Learning Technologies (ICNICONSMCL'06) (pp. 216-216). IEEE. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICNICONSMCL.2006.103

UTS Bachelor of Technology and Innovation

Greetings from the University of Technology Sydney, where the 15th World Conference on Mobile and Contextual Learning (mLearn 2016), just opened. Professor Shirley Alexander, UTS Deputy Vice-Chancellor, welcomed the delegates and talked about the UTS Bachelor of Technology and Innovation (BTI), being introduced next year. This is a general degree in technology, intended for those going into business: the 21st Century replacement for the arts degree.

UTS are still working out the details of their BIT, but it is positioned for everything from Technology Policy Analysts and Creative Technologists to Project Managers. One interesting aspect is that students will undertake a capstone project, to "... integrate the skills and knowledge learnt and mastered ...". It will be interesting o see how UTS cope with guiding students through the capstone and how they assess it.

At present I am undertaking a capstone for an Master of Education, in the form of an e-portfolio and also tutoring ANU students who have to prepare a project portfolio. For technology students, who are used to delving into technical details, a capstone is a very different, very difficult task. This is also challenging for instructors with a technical background to teach how to do this and to assess.

Another aspect of the BTI which will be challenging is how to have a broad, but still relevant, technical degree. As an example, UTS are claiming the degree will be suitable for future "Project Managers". However, project managers would normally be first qualified in a discipline and then in how to mange projects in that disciple. Software engineers learn how to create software first and then how to mange software projects. Ideally, software engineering students go through stages, where they first learn the basics of software, then work as a team member on a project, then as a team leader. In addition, students could work on their own innovation startup, however most work in conventional companies and government agencies.

Do BIT students undertake their disciplinary studies concurrently as a double degree, or as a masters afterwards (the Melbourne model)? Otherwise BIT graduates may end up like arts graduates: well educated, but not qualified for any specific job.

World Mobile Learning Conference in Sydney Monday

The 15th World Conference on Mobile and Contextual Learning (mLearn 2016), starts at University of Technology in Sydney, this Monday 24 October. There are five parallel sessions, so I have selected from the MLearn2016 Program those which look most interesting to me:

Monday 24 October

• 9:02-9:15 Acknowledgement of Country and Welcome to mLearn2016: Associate Professor Wan Ng (Conference Chair) & Welcome to UTS: Professor Shirley Alexander (Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Vice-President (Education and Students))
• 9:15-10:15 KEYNOTE: Constructing Experience, Mark Pesce. Chair: Associate Professor Wan Ng
• Session 1 10:45-11:25 (40 mins) Mobile Learning as a Tool for Indigenous Language Revitalization and Sustainability in Canada: Who will the pipe holders be? Marguerite Koole & Kevin wâsakâyâsiw Lewis
• Session 2 11:30-12:10 (40 mins) A Theory of Enhancement of Professional Learning for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Pre-service Teachers in Very Remote Communities through Mobile Learning, Philip Townsend
• Session 3 12:15-12:40 (25 mins) PANEL: Indigenous People & Mobile Learning. Laurel Evelyn Dyson, Marguerite Koole, Kevin wâsakâyâsiw Lewis, Suzaan Le Roux & Philip Townsend 
• Session 4 1:30-2:10 (40 mins) Enterprise-Wide Systems, Chair: Matthew Burle. Building a Campus-Wide Mobile Platform that Focuses on Enhancing Student Effectiveness and Learning, Alexander Roche, Anthony Chung & John Reddin
• Session 5 2:15-2:55 (40 mins) How does a Mobile Platform Address TEQSA and Other Regulatory Compliance for Online Courses? Alexander Roche, Josephine Chan, Anthony Chung & Matthew Burley
• Session 6 3:00-3:25 (25 mins) WORKSHOP: The Handbook of Mobile Teaching and Learning & Future Possibilities, Aimee Zhang & Dean Cristol
• Session 7 3:55-4:20 (25 mins)  WORKSHOP (Continued)
• Session 8 4:25-4:50 (25 mins) WORKSHOP (Continued)
• 5:00-6:30 IAmLearn AGM
• 6:30-7:30 Reception

Tuesday 25 October

• 9:00-10:00 KEYNOTE: Personalised Learning, mEducation and Partnerships, Susi Steigler-Peters (Telstra Corporation), Chair: Associate Professor Matthew Kearney
• 10:30-12:30 Session 1 & 2 (Practitioner Presentations) (40 mins each): Negotiating Cultural Spaces in an International Mobile and Blended Learning Project. Charlotte N: Gunawardena, Agnieszka Palalas, Nicole Berezin, Caitlin Legere, Gretchen Kramer & Godwin Amo-Kwao
• Landscape and Literacy on Aboriginal Country: Teaching Indigenous Australian Studies in a Cross-Cultural M-Learning Context, Olivia Guntarik & Aramiha Harwood
  Mobile Learning in Practical-Based Subjects: A Developing, Country Perspective, Suzaan Le Roux
• 1:00-2:00 POSTER PRESENTATIONS
• Session 3 2:00-3:00 (Practitioner Presentations). Higher Education Practice
  Using a mobile Moodle app in an online physics course, Elizabeth Angstmann
• Session 4 3:20-4:20 (Practitioner Presentations) (60 mins). Teacher Education
  Sustaining Mobile Learning Pedagogies with High Possibility Classrooms: A Vision for Teacher Education in Australian Universities, Jane Hunter & Ariane Skapetis
• Session 5 4:20-5:20 (Practitioner Presentations) (60 mins). Professional Development Accepting the Challenge of Adapting Traditional Faculty Development to Online and Mobile Environments, Lisa O’Neill
• CONFERENCE DINNER CRUISE, Boarding: 19:00, Departure: 19:30; Returns: 22:00

Wednesday 26 October

• 9:00-10:00 KEYNOTE: The Role of Education in Identity Transformation and Acculturation, Professor John Traxler (University of Wolverhampton), Chair: Dr Laurel Evelyn Dyson
• Session 1 10:35-11:00 (25 mins) Workplace Learning Chair: Lisa O’Neill: Learning Official Crisis Communication through Decentralized Simulations enabled by Mobile ICTs, Hanna Vuojärvi & Tuulikki Keskitalo
• Session 2 11:05-11:45 (40 mins) Encouraging Faculty Development Through Micro-Credentialing, Lisa O’Neill
• Session 3 11:50-12:30 (40 mins) Flipped Learning Approach for a University EFL Course: Utilizing an Online Communication System, Yasushige Ishikawa, Yasushi Tsubota, Craig Smith, Masayuki Murakami, Mutsumi Kondo, Ayako Suto, Koichi Nishiyama & Motoki
  Tsuda
• Session 4 1:15-1:55 (40 mins) Digital Citizenship, Chair: Boris Handal: Teaching Digital Citizenship in Higher Education, Boris Handal, Sandra Lynch, Kevin Watson, Marguerite Maher & Grace Hellyer
• Session 5 2:00-2:40 (40 mins) Using Offline Personal Devices to Enable Access to Higher Education in Prisons, Helen Farley, Louise Patching, John Macdonald, Kyle Murphy, Jared Wright, Christopher Lee, Stephen Seymour
• 2:45-3:15 Closing Ceremony: Chairs: Dr Laurel Evelyn Dyson (Program Chair) and Dr Agnieska Palalas (IAmLearn President), Best Full Paper Award and Best Poster Award

Large Scale Desktop Wireless Charging

Greetings from the Australian Academy of Science Shine Dome in Canberra, where the finalists in the Innovation ACT competition are giving their pitches to a panel of judges. One team which stood out was Pixelated Induction (PI) with large scale inductive charging.

PI claim to be able to deliver standard wireless charging for mobile devices, but on a scale suitable for airport lounges and cafes.

It occurred to me that one launch customer could be the military and other safety and security organizations, who need to have charged devices ready at all times. In 1996 I took a helicopter ride into the Coral Sea where USS Blue Ridge, was coordinating a joint US-Australian exercise. Personnel arrived on-board, like me, put their portable devices on long benches and then tried to get power so they could run the exercise. The result was a tangle of wires. Wireless charging would make this a bit easier.

Another IACT project with military and security application is Wildlife Drones. These are small robot helicopters (UAVs), with directional radio antennas. The drones automatically track radio tags attached to wildlife. The same technology could be used by the military to search for terrorists, improvised explosive devices and locating friendly forces. Drones could be launched from the ground, ship or aircraft. Wildlife Drones also need to consider how their technology could be misused: equipped with explosive and programmed with a mobile phone ID, the drone becomes an autonomous flying bomb, which will search for the phone and then detonate.

Innovations in Digital Learning from Canada

There are two new publications on e-learning from Canada. The first, Learning in the Digital Age, a report by Michael Grant for the Conference Board of Canada (October 2016) is about why use e-learning and also why it is not happening as much as it should. The second is "Emergence and Innovation in Digital Learning: Foundations and Applications", a book edited by George Veletsianos, available free on-line from Athabasca University Press (May 2016), about how to get e-learning to happen.

Regulating Unpaid Work for Education

Greetings from the Australian National University where Professor Rosemary Owens, from the University of Adelaide, is speaking on "Young people and the future of work: The Regulatory Challenges of Unpaid Work at the Intersection of Education and Work". Professor Owens is part of an ARC funded research project on internships. There is a recent paper "Regulating for Decent Work Experience: Meeting the Challenge of the Rise of the Intern" (Owens & Stewart, 2015).

Professor Owens suggested that in the past people would be educated when young. In times past, I suggest that an apprentice would have to pay the master to be taken on, that is the apprentice would pay for their work-place training.

One area which might be usefully research is the area of start-ups. Unviersites are now setting up their own innovaiton programs and having

This is very topical. I am tutoring university IT students who have to do a project, preferably for a real company. It can be difficult to find enough projects for the students. One way this can be supplemented is with start-ups by the students themselves or other students.

It seems reasonably clear that if an employer is offering educationally useful experience to a student, that should be permitted by the law. To prevent the students being exploited, they should be enrolled in a formal course which has an internship as a formal part of the course.

I had the good fortune to be trained in IT in the Australian Public Service. It was understood that I would spend a considerable part of my time at training courses, paid for by my employer and on full pay. Such schemes still exist in the APS ICT Cadetship Programme.

 Professor Owens expressed concern abut unpaid internships which did not necessarily lead to a job. However, before criticizing companies, universities need to look to their own practices. Graduate research students get used as cheap, or free, labor by universities to conduct research, do teaching and administrative functions. On graduation the student finds there are very few permanent jobs in academia.

Reference

Owens, R., & Stewart, A. (2015, July). Regulating for Decent Work Experience: Meeting the Challenge of the Rise of the Intern. In Regulating for Decent Work Network Conference, Geneva.

Room-based Video and Web Conferencing Merging

Yesterday I had a call from an e-learning support unit, asking if they should install the latest version of Echo 360 with audience response "clicker" functionality. Echo 360 was installed primarily for recording lectures for students to play back later. But it now can provide students with quizzes they can do on their mobile device, live in the classroom (or later at home). So what was a room-based videoconferencing system is offering features of web conferencing (synchronous quizzes) and of an LMS (asynchronous quizzes). The problem then is we have overlapping features from different products.

In this instance I suggested not implementing the quiz function, if it compromised lecture recording. Students are rightly annoyed when a lecture recording fails. Using clickers is not just a matter of enabling software, it requires the "lecturer" to be trained in a new teaching technique.

In the longer term it might be interesting to consider using Webinars for lectures, in place of lecture recording software. Students in the room can then use the quizzes and text chat functions of the Webinar, as can remote students. This can be recorded and made available to students for later replay. This involves flipping the thinking about the form of education, from it being a "lecture" which is broadcast for some who can't attend, to an on-line event which has some participants in the same room (a "lecture theater").

Teaching Students to Peer Assess On-line

A few days ago I was making a coffee in the Computer Science and IT common room at ANU*. I fell into conversation with PHD researcher Dr. Sabrina Caldwell on the topic of education and IT. While she is researching digital imaging, Sabrina and her supervisor, Professor Tom Gedeon, have been working on how to teach web design on-line. In a recent paper they found that simple formative tasks can be used to train students in how to peer assess (Caldwell & Gedeon, 2015). They suggest this could be used in large on-line courses (so called "MOOCs").

The idea is you use small quizzes and tasks to train the students, so they can then assess deeper learning in larger assessment tasks by other students.If this effect can be confirmed by refuter research, it could point the way to low cost on-line cruses which provide high quality leaning, equal to, or superior to conventional face-to-face university programs.

In my "ICT Sustainability" course I gave the students small tasks and use peer assessment. This worked well, but it did not occur to me that the students would be learning peer assessment as part of the process.

References

Caldwell, S., and Gedeon, T.D., (2015). Optimising Peer Marking with Explicit Training: from Superficial to Deep Learning, 1st International Conference on Higher Education Advances. Valencia, Spain, paper DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4995/HEAd15.2015.441. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/300487262_Optimising_Peer_Marking_with_Explicit_Training_from_Superficial_to_Deep_Learning


* The CSIT common room is a little like Star Trek Captain's Table. It was designed with two doors: one for ANU Research School of Computer Science staff and one for CSIRO IT Researchers (now Data 61). This was designed for bureaucratic requirements that each organization have its own common room. But the dividing wall was omitted, so once through either door, people freely mingle. As well as current ANU and CSIRO staff, there could be people from anywhere in the world, researching just about anything.

Australian Government Abandons Market Based Fees for Vocational Education

Senator Simon Birmingham, Minister for Education and Training, has announced changes to the VET FEE-HELP student loan scheme. Loans will only be available for courses for which there is a job demand. Loans will be capped at $5000, $10,000 and $15,000, depending on the course level. Also there will be "rigorous standards" applied to private training providers, but curiously, the same standards will not apply to TAFEs and other government institutions.

It will be interesting to see if the government moves to implement similar controls on the other part of Higher Education: universities. Currently there are few limits on what universities can offer and what they deliver, relative to what is charged, for both private for-profit universities and public ones. Currently the government effectively caps student university fees, but this has little relationship to the cost of providing a course. Also universities are not required to show a demand for graduates in order to offer a program. The government was intending to free up university fees, but was unable to get the changes through Parliament, which is fortunate, in the light of the blowout in VET fees.

A useful next step would be for the Government to introduce measures to encourage students to undertake lower cost, shorter VET courses, before university. Ideally, most students should do a VET qualification and get work experience in their intended field, before enrolling in university. This could be encouraged by providing incentives for universities to provide credit for VET studies. Unfortunately the new VET measures may have the opposite effect: institutions will be encouraged to enroll more university students as they can charge higher fees than for their VET students. The result may be a less well trained workforce, at a higher cost to the Government.