ANU Needs a Team Leader for Staff Education

The Australian National University is looking for a "Team Leader, Staff Education", to plan and deliver professional development for teaching staff, including tutors and lecturers. It is an interesting time to be involved in Australian Higher Education, with the COVID-19 Coronavirus challenging assumptions about how education can be provided.

"Role Statement ...

1. Lead the Staff Education team in the design, facilitation and evaluation of transformative educational development programs and resources for staff that have teaching responsibilities or who support teaching, ensuring alignment with the ANU Education Fellowship Scheme.
2. Build and cultivate collaborative relationships and foster communication between College- and centrally-based staff in the University Education community to ensure programs meet current needs and strategy.
3. Inform the creation, development and management of high-quality educational materials and resources, including web and/or multimedia-based online courseware, in collaboration with team members across the CLT and with academic staff.
4. Lead the organisation and administration of activities such as staff education, training, workshops and information sessions in support of educational development initiatives and new or revised programs, in consultation with team members across the CLT and with academic staff.
5. Remain current with and potentially contribute to the latest educational research and good practices, including engagement with informed discussion on innovative teaching and learning approaches, pedagogy, technologies, software and learning environments locally, campus wide and externally. ..."

From: "Team Leader, Staff Education, Position Description", ANU 05/02/2020. 

Teaching Better Judgement

Greetings from the Australian National University in Canberra, where I am taking part in Professor Lambert Schuwirth's  Better Judgement Workshop. This is part of a Flinders University, funded by the Office for Learning and Teaching (OLT). This is about how to better train assessors for professions such as medicine.

This is about assessment of skills in the workplace. But something which struck me was that I feel very comfortable sitting in a classroom. I have been teaching and doing only  on-line courses for the last year and there is something familiar about being back in a classroom, with rows of desks, a lectern at the front and fellow students around me.

The next thing which struck me was that the workshop seemed to be about workplace assessment for competence, an area I was trained in as part of a Certificate IV in Training and Assessment. With this you first decide what the job requires, then what behavior you can observe of the student to asses if they can do what is required. This could be the student actually doing the job,or doing a simulation of the job. Only if that is not feasible would you give them an "examination" as such, as that is not a very good way to assess what some can do.

Also the Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector, unlike universities, requires formal training and assessment of assessors. Having been trained in how to design and administer assessment makes me more confident in what to do and, hopefully, better at it.

This brings up a problem with the OLT's strategy for improving the quality of terracing at Australian universities. OLT funds research on teaching and learning issues. The researchers are required to not only produce the usual academic papers, but also disseminate their results to academics. The usual way is to present results at workshops on campuses across Australia. The problem with this is that, by its nature, research has to be on something new. However, the day to day problems with teaching in Australian universities already have known solutions. The need is not for research, but for training of staff in how to teach.

Doctoral Education for the Global Research Enterprise

Margot Pearson will speak on "Enhancing the experienced environment for doctoral candidates in a diverse array of settings and arrangements" at the Australian National University in Canberra, 12:30pm 20 August 2015.

"A significant feature of contemporary doctoral education is the continuing trend for research and research education to migrate beyond discipline-based institutional teaching and research structures.  As stated in a government consultation paper DIIRS 2011.

Although the majority of formal training is undertaken within a university environment, research training can also take place in a wide variety of settings. Besides university environments, research training occurs in medical research institutes and hospitals, in the CSIRO, Cooperative Research Centres (CRC) and in office and industrial settings.
The result is a diverse array of settings and arrangements for doctoral education linked to an increasingly global research enterprise.

Opportunities for funding and access to other resources including expertise can vary across doctoral programs and within them. The resulting experienced environment of doctoral candidates is one that that can afford them opportunities and challenges for completing their candidacy. Drawing on recent research it is argued that in this fluid and distributed environment attention needs to be on the individual candidate and how they negotiate their candidacy within a framework for exploring the doctoral experience that is candidate-centred; a framework that includes a focus on candidate agency, personal-academic connections, and networks."