Indonesia’s EV Policy an Opportunity for Australian Higher Education

Greetings from "Indonesia’s industrial policy: downstreaming and EV supply chain" seminar at the Australian National University in Canberra. Hilman Palaon from the Lowy Institute pointed out that while the Indonesian government has a policy to encourage local processing of nickle for electric vehicle batteries, there is a lack of expertise at local universities to train workers. China is looking to meet this demand for education, but I suggest Australian universities and vocational educators could have a role. Also both nickle and aluminum refining requires large amounts of electricity. This could be a use, I suggest, for renewable energy exported by cable from northern Australia.

What is on in Sydney 11 to 12 June?

I booked for EduTech Asia 2025 in Singapore 5 to 6 November, but then realised there is another conference much closer to home: EduTech_Au in Sydney 11 & 12 June. Last year at the Singapore event Professor Angela Lee from Sunway University Malaysia, and I talked about AI and education in a "silent disco" fireside chat. I don't know if Sydney is having equivalent activities. Any suggestions as which speakers?

With Vocational Degrees is there Much Left for Universities to Do?

Vocational Degrees were added to the Australian Qualifications Framework on 17 February 2025. These are at the same level as a university bachelor's degree (AQF Level 7), but deliver by Vocational Education institutions and with an emphasis on work skills, including those gained via an apprenticeship.  It is not clear if this signals a Dedawkinsation of Australian higher education. In 2024 I visited two of Singapore's Polytechnics and was impressed with their work. 

In my discipline of computing it would be difficult to see the difference with a vocational degree. Students are required to do practical training, through a project, group work or internship, for their qualification to be accredited, regardless of what type of institution is delivering it.

In the late 1980s Education Minister John Dawkins reformed Australian higher education. This "Dawkins Revolution" resulted in degree awarding colleges merging and becoming universities. Having VET sector institutions awarding degrees could be seen as a partial undoing of this revolution, although they will not have the autonomy universities have to define their own degrees.

Australian universities only need a few students undertaking undergraduate training oriented to research in order to provide candidates for advanced research in academia and industry. The majority of undergraduates are undertaking vocational training for a job. If the VET sector can now provide Vocational Degrees for these students, will university education need to be scaled back?

Vocational degrees are being introduced at the same time AI is developing. New degrees could be AI enabled, providing each student with a synthetic personal tutor.

ps: I happened to bump into John Dawkins a few years ago at the ANU campus and was delighted to be able to point out the new buildings to him.

What is on in Singapore 4 to 7 November?

I just booked for EduTech Asia 2025 in Singapore 5 to 6 November. Last year at the event Professor Angela Lee from Sunway University Malaysia, and I talked about AI and education in a "silent disco" fireside chat. Usually I give some talks and attend some extra conferences. Any suggestions? Anyone like a a presentation on something?

Study or starve? Financial challenges of students studying in Australian and New Zealand Universities.

Greetings from "Study or starve? Financial challenges of students studying in Australian and New Zealand Universities" online from the Australian Centre for Student Equity and Success (ACSES). Professor Karen Charlton from the University of Wollongong, discussed a salutogenic approach, looking at what helped students, rather than just what the problems were. Research shows that disabled, international and indigenous students were at higher risk of financial insecuirty, which interfered with their study. This is of interest, as I was one of those students from a low SES background, who struggled at university.

A difficult issue is unpaid placements. Some professions, such as nursing, have a tradition of long placements being required. These placements are typically unpaid. In effect, universities are complicit in forcing students to work for free. Should universities ban free placements, in the expectation that employers would then be forced to pay the students.

I am on the Australian Computer Society board which sets accreditation requirements for computing degrees. The students can do project work, as an alternative to placements. This helps with international students in Canberra, who have difficulty getting a placement, paid or unpaid, due to security constraints. Perhaps other professions should be doing this.

One option which could help students would be to encourage them to commence their studies at TAFE. They could undertake a short qualification to get an entry level job, before considering university. Also making part time online the default option for university study. Students should not be made to feel bad if it happens they can't get to campus. 

Belief Data for Recommendation Systems

Greetings from the weekly AI, ML and Friends Seminar at the Australian National University School of Computing, where Prof. Guy Aridor from Northwestern Kellogg School of Management is speaking on "The Value of Belief Data in Online Recommendation Systems". These are the systems which online stores use to recommend a product or post, based on what your friends like. Prof. Aridor's approach is to extract what each person likes. Such systems are worth billions of dollars and can also influence the outcome of elections. 

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.