Shifting educational practice through technology

Greetings from the ASCILITE MLSIG weekly online meeting, where convenor Thomas Cochrane (University of Melbourne) just reminded us about the "SoTEL 2025—Call for Participation" for 9th of May. This will use the rapid-fire Pecha Kucha presentation technique. Topics are Scholarly Practice, learning innovations, professional development innovations, and outcomes of communities of practice: if it is using a gadget for teaching, it is on topic. 

Governance at Australian Higher Education Providers

The Senate Education and Employment Legislation Committee is holding an inquiry into the "Quality of governance at Australian higher education providers". I made a submission on 3 March. The Committee has not approved the publication of my submission yet, but it was along the following lines:

1. TEQSA Powers Adequate: The Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) can investigate corporate governance issues at Australian higher education providers, where relevant to the quality of education provided. Compliance with workplace, employment practices, executive remuneration, and the use of consultants are covered by other agencies.  
2. Introduce Real Time Monitoring: TEQSA could use real-time analytical techniques to detect unusual behavior in an organization in days, rather than having to wait for an annual report.
3. Focus on more important issues: Australian universities face challenges adapting to online education and competition from offshore providers. These are more pressing issues than governance.

Open Source AI and Cybersecurity?

Greetings from 'Open Source Evolution: Where AI Meets Cybersecurity - Navigating the New Security Paradigm" at the University of Canberra. Open and secure are normally thought of as opposite ends of the spectrum. But Red Hay, OpenSI and others would argue otherwise, with collaboration on code and standards. An example is vLLM open source code for data private AI.

University Efficiency Through Better Trained Academics

The Senate Education and Employment Legislation Committee is inquiring into the "Quality of governance at Australian higher education providers". However a more important question, I suggest, is the skills which academics need. Rather than worrying how much Vice Chancellors are paid, I suggest more attention and resources be put into ensuring academic staff, at all levels, have the skills needed to work efficiently, in administration, project management, and education. This could be done by offering courses and qualifications which can be undertaken by staff and students. This would also address the demand for quick up-skilling in industry and government. It will reduce costs through more efficient academic work and improve revenue through more course fees.

When I accepted an invitation to join ta university as a Visiting Fellow 25 years ago, I expected to be mostly conducting research, and thinking great thoughts. What I had not realized was the importance of administration, project management and teaching to a university. The Australian Public Service had trained me in administration & project management, however teaching was new to me.

I was reluctantly talked into undertaking the free basic teacher training provided by the university. To my surprise, I found it reduced the stress of teaching and assessment, as well as made the process much more efficient. Also, I discovered that lectures and examinations were not the only way to teach and assess, and were some of the least useful. I went on to further education studies, first at my own university, then at an affiliated one, and then on the other side of the world in North America (Worthington, 2018). This education made teaching easier, particularly when COVID-19 struck, as I had trained for that contingency (Worthington, 2020).

Universities could introduce teaching techniques that provide better, more efficient, and more realistic learning for students. Examples of this are the Australian Crisis Simulation Summit run from ANU by Professor Barrie (ANU, 2025), project work in the ANU Techlauncher program (Awasthyet al., 2017) and internships of the ANU School of Computing (Sweetser, King, & DeWan, 2020). Such intensive programs have typically required large teaching staffs, but with technology, this can be reduced (Birt et al., 2024).

Rather than grade sounding large-scale initiatives, I suggest introducing better administration, project management, research management, and teaching, by teaching these to the students as part of formal assessed courses. Staff can undertake modules from the same courses as offered for students, take the same tests, and be awarded qualifications as a form of "dogfooding" (Worthington, 2018). These modules can also be offered to industry and public service staff.

References

Awasthy, Richa, Shayne Flint, and Ramesh Sankaranarayana. "Lifting the constraints—closing the skills gap with authentic student projects." 2017 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON). IEEE, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1109/EDUCON.2017.7942964

ANU, "Australian Crisis Simulation Summit",2025, https://australiancrisissimulationsummit.com/

Birt, James R., Thomas Cochrane, Elisa Bone, Mehrasa Alizadeh, Paul Goldacre, Vickel Narayan, Todd Stretton, Robert Vanderburg, and Tom Worthington. "(Re) defining Mobile Learning in the Post COVID-19 and GenAI Era." In 2024 ASCILITE Conference: Navigating the Terrain: Emerging frontiers in learning spaces, pedagogies, and technologies, pp. 551-555. Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education, 2024. https://doi.org/10.14742/apubs.2024.1336

Sweetser, P., King, A., & DeWan, T. (2020, February). Setting students up to succeed in computing internships. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Australasian Computing Education Conference (pp. 114-121). https://doi.org/10.1145/3373165.3373178

T. Worthington, "Blended Learning for the Indo-Pacific," 2018 IEEE International Conference on Teaching, Assessment, and Learning for Engineering (TALE), Wollongong, NSW, Australia, 2018, pp. 861-865, https://doi.org/10.1109/TALE.2018.8615183

T. Worthington, "Being a Mature Age University Student: 2011 to 2017", Higher Education Whisperer (Blog), January 2, 2018 https://blog.highereducationwhisperer.com/2018/01/learning-university-teaching-2011-to.html

T. Worthington, "Responding to the Coronavirus Emergency with e-Learning", Athabasca University, April 17, 2020. https://web.archive.org/web/20200811064635/https://news.athabascau.ca/beyond-50/responding-to-the-coronavirus-emergency-with-e-learning

The Senate Education and Employment Legislation Committee is holding an inquiry into the "Quality of governance at Australian higher education providers". Submissions are invited by 3 March 2025, with a report due 4 April 2025. 

Accelerating and Democratizing Scientific Research Lifecycle

Greetings from the ANU School of Computing, where Qingyun Wang from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is speaking on Accelerating and Democratizing Scientific Research Lifecycle. Much has been written about more research of lower quality being published. Rather than bemoaning the role of AI in making this worse, here the idea is to use "AI for Scientists" (AI4Scientist) to address it. The first part of this is to automatically analyze papers to provide structured data. This can be used to explain the paper to the reader and also fact check it.

This can be taken further to expand the generation of hypotheses, but so far in very restricted well defined fields, such as biomedical. AI could also be used to seek out "hidden treasures" in the scientific literature. This would be a boon, as there is a lot of papers which simply repeat previous research, with slight variations. 

What I find most interesting is the possibility to use this to teach students to write better papers. It could also be used to help working researchers write more readable papers, with fewer errors. It would be interesting to see how well this would work for non-STEM disciplines where the format of papers is not so constrained. A particular problem for human readers, and likely for AI, are interdisciplinary research. 

Kuan Yew Global Business Plan Competition

Greetings from the Canberra Innovation Network First Wednesday pitches. An unusual one was Pranav Krishna from the Lee Kuan Yew Global Business Plan Competition (LKYGBPC). Australians can enter the competition.

Energy Innovation in the Vault

Greetings from the Vault in Canberra, where an Energy Innovation Exhibition is being held. I was here a few weeks ago for an ACT Government Apartment Complex Electrification launch. This time there is about $20M in energy grants on offer from the ACT.

Some of the start-ups displayed seem readymade for the market. Examples are ways to repair old solar panels and an app which identifies where community batteries are needed. Others are a little more futuristic, such as a hydrogen powered speedboat (which looks like a USV from the Black Sea).

PS: * The technology does have defence application. At present there is concern over Australia's ability to patrol it's shores. One way is with small autonomous vessels. But these need more power than a battery can provide. This could be from hydrogen made on board, allowing the vessel to patrol for months.

Senate Inquiry into the Quality of Governance at Australian Higher Education Providers

The Senate Education and Employment Legislation Committee is holding an inquiry into the "Quality of governance at Australian higher education providers". Submissions are invited by 3 March 2025, with a report due 4 April 2025. 

 The terms of reference of the inquiry are:

"The adequacy of the powers available to the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency to perform its role in identifying and addressing corporate governance issues at Australian higher education providers, with particular reference to:

a. The composition of providers' governing bodies and the transparency, accountability and effectiveness of their functions and processes, including in relation to expenditure, risk management and conflicts of interest;

b. The standard and accuracy of providers' financial reporting, and the effectiveness of financial safeguards and controls;

c. Providers' compliance with legislative requirements, including compliance with workplace laws and regulations;

d. The impact of providers' employment practices, executive remuneration, and the use of external consultants, on staff, students and the quality of higher education offered; and

e. Any related matters."

Some points in the submissions so far

So far five submissions have been published:

1	Dr Fiona Martin (PDF 60 KB)
2	Mr Ian Gray (PDF 1310 KB)
3	Mr Robert Heron (PDF 56 KB)
4	Dr Raffaele Ciriello (PDF 93 KB)
5	Emeritus Professor William Maley (PDF 328 KB)

Dr Martin expressed concern about universities being more about business than education and research and high Vice Chancellor salaries. Mr Gray is concerned about TEQSA's powers to do their job, lower entry and pass standards at universities & a lack of reporting & auditing of research grants. Mr Heron proposes public reporting on accredited courses & is concerned about conflicts of interest where academics require students to purchase the books they wrote. Dr  Ciriello is concerned by "a managerial elite that prioritises profits over academic integrity".  and proposes adopting the European model, where university executive are elected by faculty. Dr Maley expresses concern about the decay of ‘faculty governance’, with decision making concentrated in Deputy and Pro-Vice-Chancellors, and Chief Officers. 

Change processes at an Australian university

Greetings from the lawn outside the maths building at the Australian National University, where the new Provost, social scientist, is taking about how to integrate tech and people. They are qualified to talk on this, being an engineer and social scientist. This is opportune with the ANU engineering just renamed "Systems and Society".

Apartment Complex Electrification in a Vault With a Chef

Greetings from the "Vault" in Fishwick, Canberra, for the "Apartment Complex Electrification - Information Session". The vault is a windowless concrete structure, on a secured industrial site, looming like something from an action movie. Inside the Vault is an industrial kitchen, complete with a chef. As I walked in someone said "High Tom good to hear you on radio". 

This all distracted me from the public servants presenting on the Apartment Complex Electrification project. Some time ago I was on a working group advising the Chief Minister how to reduce energy use in the ACT. We focused on apartments as there were already programs for houses. But it turns out this is difficult for technical, legal and social reasons, thus the pilot program. 

After a few minutes it was explained the chef is demonstrating cooking on a low energy induction cooktop. The food was excellent.

The call for applications from apartment buildings to participate in the pilot will be released Monday.

Film screening - EveryOne, EveryWhere, EveryWhen

Greetings from the world premier of "EveryOne, EveryWhere, EveryWhen". This film discusses the environmental and social effects of water use in Australian rivers. As it happens, I took part in a tour of the Baaka, one of the rivers featured, & met Dobby, who is now on the panel discussion.

Calibrating AI For Saftey

Greetings from the Australian National University, where I attended the weekly AI, ML and Friends seminar. Jiawei Liu was speaking on "Uncertainty Calibration for Deep Neural Networks". I didn't understand the equations, but the idea, as I understand it, is to have a measure of how well AI is doing.

What got my attention was an example of recognising a speedboat. From the original photo it was clear to a human what this was. But the black and white outline, as used by some algorithms, looked to me like a USV (Uncrewed  Surface Vessel). These are being used, right now, in the Black and Read Seas, laden with explosives, to attack ships. The crews of warships have to maintain a lookout 24 hours a day, for weeks, trying to spot drone attacks. The USVs are modified speedboats so it is difficult to tell them from fishing boats. This type of AI analysis can help ensure mistakes are not made which could result in the loss of a ship, or the sinking of an innocent fishing boat.

Addressing Aging with AgeTech

Greetings from the IEEE AgeTech Aging and Longevity Webinar. This is early in the morning for me in Australia, so I was reluctant to attend. But being an IEEE Life Member I am in the age bracket for the topic. I am of an age where I have to deal with an increasing number of health, financial, and other issues, so Interest in how tech can help me. In recent weeks I have been to clinics, hospitals, transported by ambulance, scanned by CT & MRI devices, hooked to computer monitors, struggled to use health apps.

The webinar has good speakers, but is a little frustrating by being very US-centric & also having limited feedback. One speaker described the coming presenters as "pinch hitters", which I assume is a baseball term, so lost on Australian participants brought up on cricket. ;-) In the Q&A I asked about this, but did not get a reply. The chat forum is turned off, which limits the ability of participants to have a discussion. 

Speakers have covered some of the issues to do with the need for agetech to address the interfaces needed for people aging, the potential for technology in the home to provide more independence (and lower costs). 

I suggest we also should look at the positives. Smart phone offer the opportunity for better interfaces for those with a disability. These applications also help others, via the "Curb-Cut Effect": an accessibility feature introduced for one group can help other people. 

From purely self interest, AgeTech also has a group of increasinly wealthy & powerful customers. Older users represent a group whom many have disposable income & will vote for government funding to be spent on services for. 

One problem with this webinar is that it is taking a long time (44 minutes so far) to get to the call to action. So far none of the speakers has said what I can do, as a technologist, educator & IEEE member. Eventually I found a form to express interest for IEEE SA Industry Connection: IC24-010: Technology Standards for Aging (Age Tech). 

Australian Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency Proposed

An Australian Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, modeled on the US DoD's DARPA, has been proposed in a paper published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). I support the proposal, and not just because I suggested it myself in 1999. My proposal got some positive press at the time. I also had the honor of being pilloried in a public statement from DSTO, now Defence Science and Technology Group (DSTG). ;-)

Robert Clark and Peter Jennings propose a partnership between the Defence Department, industry and universities for research & development. This would be extended internationally to instutions in Australia's closet allies (the so called "Five-Eyes"). 

Jack Dalton's comments on ASPI's proposal are curious in that he expresses a grudging admiration for the Chinese political system. He notes the benefits of a centralized one party state in terms of economic development. However, I suggest centralized five-year plans are not necessarily a good way to become a world leader in a technical field. Japan tried this approach with the Fifth Generation Computer Systems project and found that throwing money at something does't necessarily work. Australia needs something more decentralized, fluid and flexible. Even in the case of China, their central plans are not as centralized as they appear.

University course ad written by AI

In its latest social media promotion Torrens University has boasted "Think this ad was written by an AI expert? You'd be right. Apply now to graduate with a Graduate Certificate of Software Engineering". It is a bold move, but a little confusing as there is a lot more to software engineering than AI. Also a graduate certificate is only six months full time study. That would make a good start, but a lot more training & study is needed to be a software engineer.

At this time of year universities promote alternate forms of education and entry, for those students unable to enter via high school results. UNSW is promoting their diploma entry: "Missed the ATAR for your dream UNSW degree? Don’t let that stand in your way. A UNSW College Diploma is your seamless pathway to your preferred degree – without losing time".