ASCILITE 2025 at University of South Australia

Greetings from the closing session of ASCILITE 2024, where University of South Australia  have been announced at the hosts for the conference next year. This will be one of the last events hosted by the university before it formally merges with University of Adelaide. The theme is "Continuous Change" with is appropriate for higher education. Given the Australian Government's failure to have a coherent policy, a better theme might be "Bin Fire". 

Building the Australia Tech Industry in Adelaide

Tom Worthington with the student team:
Ethan Teber-Rossi & Steven Nguyen at Deloitte

Greetings from Deloitte in Adelaide, where a team of ANU Techlauncher students is competing in the national AIIA iAwards. It was only yesterday the students were told that I am not doing the presentation, they are. That required changing the outlook of the presentation to a student perspective, which made it much better. It is is difficult as the students have to talk about their own project, as well as the university's way to deliver experiential education. Ethan Teber-Rossi and Steven Nguyen, from the "FireApp" team in Techlauncher are presenting.

Australian University City

Richard Evans suggests "Adelaide has everything to become Australia’s first university city", emulating Cambridge, UK (The Advertiser, 22 March 2017). However, that title may have already gone to Canberra. Speaking at the opening of a "speed dating" event for students to meet employers, yesterday, Australian National University Vice-Chancellor, Professor Brian Schmidt noted that Canberra had a higher proportion of students than any other Australian city. 

The Defence Department is to establish a naval engineering college in Adelaide. Perhaps Silicon Valley, would make a better model for Adelaide. While now best known for civilian technology, it started out providing high tech products to the US military.

Adelaide's Offshore Higher Education Experiment Continues

/>

University College London (UCL) may be closing down its Adelaide campus, but two other universities remain in the same building in Adelaide: Torrens University Australia and Carnegie Mellon University Australia.

Torrens may well prove to be the success story of the three in Adelaide, as it uses a different business model to a typical Australian university. Torrens is part of Laureate International Universities, which provides education on-line to 800,000 students.

Torrens presents a challenge to Australian universities as it can teach students using its world wide on-line resources. This could serve as a useful wake-up call for Australian institutions to learn to compete, before offshore educational institutions take away their market. At the moment I am a student of a North American on-line master of education, to learn how to design such on-line programs for Australia.

SA Teachers Require Masters Degree

Media reports indicate that new teachers in South Australian schools will require a Masters degree from 2020. This seems particularly good timing for Torrens University Australia which has just started offering a Master of Education. While it has a campus in Adelaide, most of the study appears to be on-line, which would suit working teachers. Another program which looks interesting is the new CSU Master of Education in Knowledge Networks and Digital Innovation. I looked at some of the other Education Programs available in Australia, but as I was interested in university teaching, I had to look outside Australia.

Australian University Students Allegedly Cheating with iPads

I was interviewed briefly by Caroline Winter at ABC Radio's The World Today, about university students allegedly using tablet computers to cheat in examinations: "University investigates allegations of cheating" (19 Nov 2013, 2:44pm AEDT). This was a follow-up to the item "Medical students allegedly cheated on Adelaide University exam about human reproductive health" (19 November 2013, 8:01am AEDT).

Students are alleged to have screen captured from an examination paper and left them for the next group of students. Apparently the iPads were supplied by the university and not reset between examination candidates. This seems a curious way to administer a computer based examination and such an examination seems an odd way to do assessment.

For the last year I have been assisting another university to convert a paper based clinical assessment process from paper to computer. In that case the doctors supervising students in hospital use the system to report on student progress. This uses HTML 5 based web forms so that it will function with any type of tablet computer (Google Android, Apple iPad, Microsoft Surface or any web browser).

There are also ways to administer examinations on a computer, but you obviously need to restrict the student's access to material not permitted in the examination and have a real, or virtual, invigilator. You can't simply give the student any old computer (or their own) and let them sit the examination unsupervised. The exception would be "take home" examinations which make up a small proportion of the assessment, or none at all and are formative to help with learning, rather than summative.

There are ways to make cheating harder with screen based tests, such as choosing questions at random from bank and altering quantities in numerical ones.

Torrens University Australia Marketing Courses On-line

Torrens University Australia appears to be running an extensive on-line advertising campaign. Many of the web pages (including my own blog) have advertisements for the university's programs, placed through Google Ad Worlds. It would be interesting to see how this compares with the event, TV and print campaigns of traditional universities. Torrens is offering on-line programs, so the web is a natural place to advertise. However, Open Universities Australia and USQ use TV advertisements for their on-line courses. Interestingly Torrens are advertising postgraduate degrees and PHDs, rather than first degrees (or perhaps that is just the target market I am in). Another instution which has been advertising is the "London School of Business & Finance" (which I am not familiar with).

Here are some of the Torrens ads:

• Connect with a New Perspective: Earn Your Graduate Degree Online.
• Torrens Uni Scholarships: 50% Scholarships Available Now For 2014 Enrolment. Enquire Today!
• Torrens Uni Scholarships - Inaugural Scholarships Available‎ - Enrol by January 2014 to Qualify.MEd in Reading & Literacy - MEd in Early Childhood - Master of Public Health
• PhD in Education: Further Your Career & Earn a PhD Online at Torrens Uni Australia.

Torrens University Australia for the Mobile Generation

Torrens University Australia is a new for-profit institution which is offering courses from its Adelaide campus from 2014. It is part of the Laureate International Universities network. The university appears to have designed its website for mobile devices and then adapted it for desktop devices. Similarly the course delivery seems to be primarily on-line using their international resources, with some on-campus services added. This global on-line plus local approach is one which older Australia universities may need to follow, to remain competitive.

Torrens Website

The university website as a very simple design, with only one column of text on the home page. There are no animations, or photo transitions and few hypertext links in the text. The program pages have two columns, one with the main text and the other contact information. The two columns re-flow to be one on a small screen. Clearly this has been designed for mobile devices (using HTML5), but also works well on a desktop computer.

The web design is not perfect with seven errors detected by the W3C Markup Validation Service, had two critical failures on the W3C mobileOK Checker, and 6 known accessibility problems (WCAG 2.0 Level AA) with AChecker. However, these are less than the problems I have found with other Australian university websites.

As with the web design, the information provided appears to have been simplified compared to other Australian universities. As an example, there is no mention of international students, but international style English language proficiency requirements are specified. Universities normally have a special section where these requirements are specified with an explanation this is only for international students.

Torrens Initial Course Offerings

The university is starting with a limited range of courses in business, education and health. I checked to see what education courses the university would be offering.

Torrens is offering a Graduate Certificate and Master in Early Childhood Education, or Reading and Literacy, as well as masters and PHD by research. The coursework programs are only available on-line and are aimed at trained teachers, professional educators, administrators and policy makers.

The entry requirement for the Graduate Certificate of Education is a bachelor degree in any discipline, plus two years of teaching and an IELTS 6.5. The Master of Education requires four years of teacher training, or a bachelor degree and Graduate Certificate in Education. These programs appear intended for school teachers, not vocational or university educators.

The Torrens Graduate Certificate of Education requires completion of four courses. But unlike other such certificates in Australia there is no course choice, with only four courses offered, all core:

1. Pedagogy and Learning
2. Assessment and Evaluation
3. Diverse Learnings Needs
4. Education Policy and Law

It would be interesting to see how much adaption for Australia has been made to the standard Laureate International on-line courses. The course "Education Policy and Law" would presumably need the most changes for Australia. The other courses may need little if any changes.