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.