What proportion of international students at Australian universities are studying for a computing qualification?

I am writing a paper on how Australia might do education better and I wanted to include a figure on the proportion of computer students. From the Australian Department of Education statistics I calculated that 9% of  international students in 2016 were in “Information Technology”. However, that appears far too low and I would expect 20% to 30%. Perhaps this is because it doesn't include "information systems" business students and "software engineering". Is there a better figure?

UN University Rector Visiting Canberra

Greetings from the Australian National University in Canberra, where Dr David Malone, Rector of the United Nations University is speaking on "Is the UN fit for purpose?".

Dr Malone characterized many international organizations as "aging", including NATO and regional organizations, not just the UN. He suggested that the UN member states tended to "micromanage" what the Secretary General  was trying to do. Also he suggested the UN was failing with communication to a young public. Dr Malone suggested that the UN was out communicated by the heads of the three major military powers of the world (which I assume are the USA, Russia and China).

Dr Malone singled out Nikki Haley, US diplomat to the UN for praise. He commented that Russia and China had high quality UN delegations, should they chose to make use of them.

ps: I didn't know the UN had a university, based in  Tokyo since 1973 (offering degrees and short courses). Some courses use the Australian developed Moodle LMS. So I asked Dr Malone if UNU ws planing to offer on-line programs for students who can't get to a campus. UNU has a sustainability Masters and it happens I designed an IT Sustainability course. Dr Malone replied that each par of UNU has the autonomy to run courses as they wish and some would be interested in e-learning. However, he pointed out the problems with supporting remote students and designing interactive courses (not just "talking at" students).

Training Tech Professionals to Teach: Part 8

In Part 7 I looked at how curriculum for Digital Education in the vocational sector is standardized and packaged. That was a year ago and I realize now the task of designing an entire qualification is perhaps a bit too much. But a one semester course is feasible.

No Australian legislation or support structures exist for universities to share courses, but there are some consortia and informal sharing of materials. As an example, my ICT Sustainability course is run in Canada (arranged by one of my former students). Free open access course materials on teaching for computer professionals may be similarly used. This is s much about promotion. as the quality of the content. As an example, what should such a course be called?

In Part 2 I looked at the Australian Computer Society's "specialisms" for computer professionals involved in education. These were derived Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA). Since then a new version 7 of SFIA has been released. The five education skills remain, with "Learning assessment and evaluation" (LEDA) renamed "Competency Assessment":

SFIA Category Skills and ACS Membership Level

Subcategory	Skill	Code	Levels
Skill management	Learning and development management	ETMG	--34567
	Competency assessment	LEDA	--3456-
	Learning design and development	TMCR	---456-
	Learning delivery	ETDL	--3456-
	Teaching and subject formation	TEAC	----56-

There is also the related people management skill of "Professional development" (PDSV). It is surprising that so many separate education skills survived in the version 7 revision of SFIA. In contrast, three sustainability skills were removed (Sustainability assessment SUAS, Sustainability engineering SUEN and
Sustainability management SUMI), leaving only Sustainability (SUST). A future revision ming have just two education skills: "learning design and delivery", plus "learning management".

 ACS Certified Professionals (CP) are required to be competent in at least one "specialism" at SFIA Level 5. This makes course design easier as all the the SFIA skills are defined at this level.

The words/phrases in these skills are:

Learning management, development management, Competency Assessment, Learning design, Learning development, Learning delivery, Teaching and subject formation, Professional development, Skill management,
People management.

Some of these words are problematic, when used for university education. The term "Competency" is usually used in the vocational sector, not universities. Similarly, academics generally don't like to think of themselves "Teaching". The terms "Management" and "People management" may be seen as something for the business faculty, not computing schools.

Removing the problematic terms and duplicates suggests the course title:

Learning design and delivery for computer professionals

I ave left out "assessment" to make this shorter (it is implicit in all formal education).

As web search found no occurrence of this title. There are several hundred thousand occurrences of "Learning design and delivery". The problem will to be prevent confusion with courses on how to teach computing. Perhaps "for" should be "by":

Learning design and delivery by computer professionals

The approach I have previously taken to structure a twelve week course is to divide it up into modules and the modules into weekly topics. In this case the modules might be: Delivery (Teaching), Design (Development), Assessment and Management. This is the order a teaching program would traditionally introduce the topics, but perhaps this should be: Design, Assessment, Delivery, and Management.

Are live lectures better than videos?

A study by Trenholm, Hajek, Robinson, Chinnappan, Albrecht, and Ashman (2018) found that students who watched videos, rather than attend live lectures, had a more surface approach to learning. However, I suggest this may be a correlation, not a causal relationship. It may be that the students who were less engaged with the material chose not to attend lectures and those lectures may not have helped them.

The study appears to have used face-to-face courses, to which recorded lectures were added. The researchers did not offer the students a purpose designed online course.

The question the researchers asked, if recorded lectures are better than face-to-face ones, shows the unhealthy fixation with "lectures" which many academics have. Video recordings of lectures are the least useful part of online education, but then "lectures" are the least useful part of an on-campus education.

Reference

Trenholm, S., Hajek, B., Robinson, C. L., Chinnappan, M., Albrecht, A., & Ashman, H. (2018). Investigating undergraduate mathematics learners’ cognitive engagement with recorded lecture videos. International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science and Technology, 1-22. URL https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0020739X.2018.1458339

China’s Education Boom: A Golden Opportunity?

Greetings from Haymarket HQ in Sydney's Chinatown. This is a start-up center for entrepreneurs looking at the Asian market. This evening has a presentation on "Eureka! The golden opportunity of China’s Education Boom" with Maria Spies and Patrick Brothers from HolonIQ.

Patrick commented that currently there is a heavy weighting of postgraduate students attending Australia's Group of Eight universities. To keep this in perspective he commented that China is out investing the USA in education three to one and noted that international investors are underrepresented compared to other industries.  Patrick noted that the Chinese government recently shut down two hundred international educational partnerships, however he did not explain why.

Maria commented that the issues in Chinese education are much the same as in Australia: including new flexible classrooms, STEM and STEAM curriculum, and edtech. One difference she noted was an openness to technology by parents and teachers. Much of the investment is in private after-school tuition.

Keeping in mind my proposal for Australian to provide blended learning online, I asked if Australian institutions could sell into China. Maria answered that inflows of students into China are increasing and there are likely to be increasing regional flows. She suggested that Australian universities should not assume the current model of Chinese students coming to Australia will continue. Students are willing to use online learning from quality institutions, along with local partnership campuses.where facial expression recognition was used to 

Canberra Plan 2029: Blended Learning for the Indo-Pacific

This is to propose that over the next ten years Australia develop accessible, low cost post-secondary education for the Indo-Pacific region, using blended techniques. Students would study online using their mobile device at home and then come to Australia for more advanced classes. This would complement, rather than compete with, China's Belt and Road Education Plan (China Ministry of Education, 2016).

I am scheduled to speak at the National IT Conference in Sri Lanka (NITC 2018), in Colombo 2 to 4 October 2018, organized by the Computer Society of Sri Lanka (CSSL) and at EduTech Asia 2018 in Singapore 8 to 11 October 2018. So need something to talk about. So I thought I would develop ideas I explored in previous conferences.

Chinese universities are forming join ventures with institutions in the region and providing scholarships for citizens of the region to study in China (Australian Department of Education. (2017). However, these are based on the use of conventional campus based education. Australia could complement these initiatives using new forms of blended learning, which merge campus with online learning (Worthington & Wu, 2015). This would allow students of the region to work together online (Worthington, 2014).

References

Australian Department of Education. (2017, 27 November). China's Belt and Road Initiative - Education, Department of Education, Australian Government. URL https://internationaleducation.gov.au/International-network/china/PolicyUpdates-China/Pages/Chinas-Belt-and-Road-Initiative-.aspx

China Ministry of Education. (2016, July). Education Action Plan for the Belt and Road Initiative, Ministry of Education, People’s Republic of China. URL https://eng.yidaiyilu.gov.cn/zchj/qwfb/30277.htm

Worthington, T. (2014, August). Chinese and Australian students learning to work together online proposal to expand the New Colombo Plan to the online environment. In Computer Science & Education (ICCSE), 2014 9th International Conference on (pp. 164-168). IEEE. URL https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCSE.2014.6926448

Worthington, T., & Wu, H. (2015, July). Time-shifted learning: Merging synchronous and asynchronous techniques for e-learning. In Computer Science & Education (ICCSE), 2015 10th International Conference on (pp. 434-437). IEEE. URL https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCSE.2015.7250285

The Top Five Things I Hate About People Complaining About Learning Management Systems

Nipun Sharma wrote about the "Top 5 Things People Hate About Learning Management Systems" (eLearning Industry, 8 March 2018). In response, here are my top five problems with people complaining about LMS:

1. Design As An Afterthought

Rather than designing their course to be easy to use, in a logical, sequential manner, course designers (or academics who think they are courses designers), just load up a mishmash of stuff and blame the LMS when the students can't make sense of it. When designing a course you have to carefully curate and sequence the experience.

2. Expectations Of Social Interactivity

Social learning is something which has to be designed into a course and students have to be trained how to work together, be it online or in a classroom. Social learning is not something you can delegate to the LMS to do for you.

Even under the best conditions, learning is a hard, mostly solitary, frustrating experience. Giving students the expectation it will be easy, fun and social, is doing them a disservice and may be dangerous to their mental wellbeing.

3. Expectations of a Fun User Experience

Learning is not fun, it is hard work. Courses which have a false send of jollity are intensely frustrating for the student.

4. Expectations Of Accessibility

The best LMS can't make up for a lack of accessibility of educational content. Most LMS will now reflow content for mobile devices. But course designers need to ensure their content fits on devices and networks students use.

5. Inadequate or Excessive Use of Tracking And Reporting Features

Most LMS now have features to allow students to track how they are doing. However, learning designers needs to switch on these features. Also this doesn't remove responsibility from the instructor to keeping track of how their students are doing and provide feedback.

Some instructors go to the other extreme and closely monitor how and when the students use the LMS. Use, or lack of use, of the LMS should not be used as a proxy form of assessment.

Who reads the Higher Education Whisperer?

Readers of the Higher Education Whisperer

The Research Whisperer published some statistics on their readership, so here are some for this blog, the Higher Education Whisperer. Since it started in June 2013, there have been 343,292 page views, with the highest number from the USA (163,036), followed by Australia (35,463) and, surprisingly, France (21,050). The most popular post was "Speed Dating for University Students and Employers..." Mar 27, 2017 (4,131), followed by "Teaching in a Digital Age", Jan 18, 2017 (3,509) and "Australian Cyber Security Courses" Jun 27, 2016 (2,077).

How did we let the Digital Surveillance Economy come into existence?

Dr Roger Clarke

Dr Roger Clarke will speak on "How did we let the Digital Surveillance Economy come into existence? And what can we do about it?" at the Australian National University in Canberra, 5.15pm 18 July 2018. Abstract and presentation available.

From a technical point of view the answer is straightforward. There is a large body of research on how to mine records of consumer's online activities to find out what products they might like to buy. This research extended into suggesting product to buy based on their social media "friends" profiles. This then extended to influencing behavior. The problem seems to be that the tech people did this research without input from policy makers or researchers.

At the moment I am taking part in the "Assessing Deliberation: Methods Workshop" at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance , University of Canberra. There appears to be a disconnect between what these researcher do to look at how decisions are made and the work by tech researchers.

Morris J. Wosk
Centre for Dialogue

Those who look at decision making and policy seem to still think in terms of people face-to-face, in debating chamber. In 2014 I stopped off for a look at the SFU Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue. This is a circular parliamentary style chamber, purpose built for involving the public in decision making. However, this is something from the steam age of decision making.

Google IT Support Professional Certificate

Google is offering a "GoogleIT Support Professional Certificate". This is similar to other IT industry certificates offered by Microsoft, Cisco, and Red Hat. However, rather than producing a book and leaving it to government and commercial education institutions offer the program, Google is offering it through Coursera. This has implications for the future of post-secondary education in Australia and elsewhere.

The program consists of five courses, each of six weeks, 8 to 10 hours a week and a series of projects. The cost of the entire program is not given, but courses cost AU $64 per month, putting the total cost at AU$480. However, this assumes the student completes everything on time, which is rarely the case and the real-world cost is likely to be significantly higher.

Media reports indicate Google will also partner with US community colleges. However, it is not clear if this will be directly with Google, or if the colleges will be supporting students studying on-line via Coursera. The latter approach could have implications for post-secondary education. In Australia this could see non-government VET institutions and government TAFEs reduced to the role of providers of tutors to assist the on-line students and invigilate assessment. This could also effect some universities which offer industry certifications as part of degree programs.

New educational startups, and more traditional VET providers, have been attempting to come up with a credible alternative to a traditional university degree. However, these have failed to gain widespread adoption. In the IT sector vendor certifications are widely accepted and some traditional degree programs incorporate these. Google's endorsement of online courses may be the step needed to make this approach widely adopted. Students may study a series of on-line certifications which are accepted by industry and based on these a formal educational qualification.

Cyber Storm Conference in Canberra

UNSW Canberra has invited papers for  “Cyber Storm”, 18-20 February 2019. The conference will focus on training for cyber warfare.

"Australia’s former Minister of Cyber Security, Hon. Dan Tehan, warned in November 2016, of the need for the country to prepare for a cyber storm, even if it was an unlikely contingency. One view of the Cyber Storm sees it as the contingencies arising from protracted and complex, multi-vector, multi-wave, multi-theatre attacks against cyber assets. Such assets can include critical civil infrastructure, military C4ISTAR, computerised systems in weapons platforms, and even other civilian targets of military or national security significance.

This conference will concentrate on the role universities and professional education institutions, such as military colleges, can play to address the unique challenges of workforce formation for the Cyber Storm.

For middle powers like Australia, immense challenges exist in framing education and training solutions for these contingencies, as the research foundations on which these policy responses depend, are very weakly developed, or even non-existent. This is especially case in the sub-field of simulations. The conventional wisdom, or at least the dominant practice, has been that the knowledge, skills and abilities needed would be acquired “on the job” in highly classified environments. There has been little space for open-source research and therefore minimal open-source education and teaching. This scholarly conference will discuss research papers on these subjects by leading specialists from universities, professional colleges, think tanks, government, and industry. The academic portion of the conference will not have any special national focus, but papers that can address the U.S. experience or that of middle powers like Australia will be highly regarded. The academic portion will be followed by a one-day invitation-only policy workshop to give strategic planners in government, the armed forces and business the opportunity to reflect on practical recommendations arising from the scholarly research."

The Future of the Canberra Workforce

Professor Phil Lewis, from University of Canberra, talked last night at the Australian Computer Society/ISACA Canberra joint meeting on "The Future of the workforce: Drivers and Challenges".

Phil pointed out that in the seventies many people worked in manual labor, but now more than 80% are in the service sector. Also less than 4% of the workforce are in mining and agriculture. Most of the mining jobs are in the city, with most mine-site work done by remotely monitored machinery.

Phil pointed out that it now takes longer for university graduates to get a job, but "Don't worry, you will still get a job". However, the biggest indicator of employability is school leaving: those who did not complete grade 12 have difficulty getting any job. A TAFE diploma, university degree or higher degree results in better job prospects. An investment in a degree is still worthwhile, unless, Phil mischievously suggested, you do creative arts.;-)

Phil suggested that Australian employers, unlike those in Germany, expect university graduates to be "job ready". In contrast German employers expect to have to train their employees, after their general eduction.
One question from the audience was about small businesses empowered by the Internet. This was a good question and I have one of these businesses. However, Phil pointed out that the statistics show that the proportion of people employed in small business has decreased. He pointed out that the opportunity cost of running a business in Australia is high. There are ways around some of the costs. As an example, I get low cost indemnity insurance through the ACS.

One interesting question from the audience was what do recent international graduates of Australian universities do to get a job. The graduates get a visa to work in Australia but companies in Canberra are reluctant to hire them as they do not have permanent residency. One solution, I suggest, is to take advantage of the help provided by the ACT Government to set up a company and contract yourself out.

ps: On 27 June, the Australian Computer Society released its Digital Pulse Report, on jobs and education in the IT sector. On 4 June I talked to an Australian Senate Committee on the Future of Work and Workers.

Will open plan buildings reduce research collaboration?

Bernstein and Turban (p. 6, 2018) found that moving staff to an open plan office reduced face to face interaction by 70% and increased email traffic by 20% to 50%. The assumption has been that open plan increases informal face to face interaction between staff. However, the authors claim this to be the first study to actually measure the effect directly, rather than just relying on surveys.

Staff in an office building wore Sociometric badges (Bernstein & Turban, p. 3, 2018). The badges had IR transceivers and microphones to detect when two wearers were conversing. Staff were tracked in an office layout with walls and then after moving to open plan.

This study was conducted in a Fortune 500 company and it would be interesting to replicate it at a university. New university buildings, such as that at ANU for Maths, Computing and Cyber security, have an open plan for most staff and graduate students. Even the few enclosed offices in new buildings tend to be located adjacent to the open plan areas, on the assumption this improves collaboration. This may be incorrect and the layout might reduce collaboration.

Professor Andy Hopper,
wearing an active badge,
Cambridge, UK, 1996

However, some limitations should be noted with Bernstein and Turban's experiment (2018). In 1996 I visited Professor Andy Hopper, Head of the Olivetti and Oracle Research Laboratory in Cambridge, UK. The lab had developed an Active Badge System.  The badges had IR beacons for tracking staff and visitors (in the photo I took, Professor Hopper's badge is just visible behind his hand). 

The badges also provided access control. However, I simply walked into the building following someone wearing a badge and surprised the counter staff who said "How did you get in?". I was then issued with a badge which I wore during the visit, but found that staff tended to leave them covered, so they could not be tracked, and just bring them out for access. There may have been some of this behavior with Bernstein and Turban's badges, which would skew the results.

In addition, the assumption that people talking to each other indicates work relevant collaboration perhaps also needs to be tested. For privacy reasons, Bernstein and Turban's badges only recoded that people were conversing, not what was being said. Many water cooler conversations are not work related. However,
Bernstein and Turban did report anecdotally that the company's own productively measures had shown a drop with the move to open plan.

Reference

Bernstein ES, Turban S. (2018, July 2). The impact of the ‘open’ workspace on human collaboration. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 373: 20170239. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2017.0239

Learning to Use University Spaces

Dr Jacqueline Ashby

Libraries have become "learning centers" and university buildings have cafes and bright comfy furniture in common areas, but has how students and staff use informal spaces at universities for changed? In her 2013 PhD thesis Jacqueline Grace Pizzuti-Ashby examined the use of the Peter Jones Learning Centre at the at University of the Fraser Valley (UFV) in British Columbia (Pizzuti-Ashby, 2013). The Australian national University (ANU) is about to enter into a grand experiment in space use with multiple new buildings across the Canberra campus and may benefit from such research.

Pizzuti-Ashby looked at the effects the change of a typical university library into a "Learning Centre" had on use of the space. One observation was "... electrical outlets behaved like black holes attracting students and furniture to them ..." (Pizzuti-Ashby, p. 154, 2013). I found this surprising, as I had assumed studnets would be using mobile devices with high capacity batteries. But then I remembered hunting around the UBC Irving K Barber Learning Centre at UBC looking for a power point.

Another counter intuitive observation is "... students inclination to want to work around one another even in silent spaces" (Pizzuti-Ashby, p. 154, 2013). Of course keeping the noise down has been an age old problem for librarians, although it seems to be the noisiest people in a modem university library are the librarians. ;-)

One interesting finding was gender preferences in learning spaces. It may be that the physical design of such spaces is turning female students away (Pizzuti-Ashby, p. 162, 2013):

"It was observed during this study that gender may also influence the type of learning space desired. This study found that males utilized learning space primarily designed for individual use. These areas also were noted for their fixed furnishings, access to windows and natural light, and elevation and views of the surrounding campus milieu. Females were observed utilizing areas of the PJLC that were supportive of social and collaborative learning activities. These spaces were also described as providing a flexible furniture arrangement, accommodating for both individual and group study. Investigating the factors that influence male and female students in their selection and usage of learning environments is an area worthy of further inquiry."

New ANU Maths &
Computer Science Building

The Australian National University is opening its new Mathematics and Computer Science building today. In addition to accommodating the ANU Mathematical Sciences Institute (MSI) and Research School of Computer Science, there is also and area for staff of the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD). One way the building design aims for collaboration is by having shared kitchens in a common area between wings adjacent to the stairs. Those going up and down stairs and into the wings will see whoever is getting a coffee and sitting in the common area. Another feature which attracted comment from the media is that as well as high-tech flat screen displays, the building has old fashioned chalkboards for the mathematicians. It will be interesting to see if these features encourage collaboration and perhaps may be worthy of a space use study similar to that of Pizzuti-Ashby.

The old ANU Computer Science and Information Technology Building has  an interesting approach to collaboration. One wing of the building was designed for the CSIRO IT researchers and the other for ANU. The architect intended a shared common room between the two wings. However, government rules required the CSIRO staff to have their own staff room. So two mirror image rooms were built side by side, each with a kitchen and with doors marked for ANU and CSIRO staff. However, the wall between the two rooms was omitted, creating one large shared space. For decades two doors side by side were marked for ANU and CSIRO staff, but entering into the same room. Recently the doors were more usefully relabeled "In" and "Out".

Reference

Pizzuti-Ashby, J. G. (2013). Designing for the future: a post-occupancy evaluation of the Peter Jones Learning Centre (Doctoral dissertation, Education: Faculty of Education). URL http://summit.sfu.ca/system/files/iritems1/12772/etd7785_JPizzuti-Ashby.pdf

Trust and cyber physical systems

Greetings from the "Trust and cyber physical systems

Dr Philippa Ryan

workshop" at the Australian National University in Canberra. This is run by the ANU's new Autonomy, Agency and Assurance (3A) Institute. Dr. Genevieve Bell, 3A Director did an introduction and Dr Philippa Ryan is running the exercises (author of the forthcoming book "Trust and Distrust in Digital Economies"). We have a lot of post-it notes, colored pens and string.

As someone from STEM I am a little lost with the discussion of law and language. This is one of those exercises where you have to play a little. It might be interesting to use Lego Serious Play as conducted by Dr Stephen Dann.