New Australian University Promoting On-line Degrees

University of Adelaide advertisement,
Parramatta Road, Sydney,
Photo by Tom Worthington, 9 August 2025

Adelaide University, formed from University South Australia and University of Adelaide, is promoting it's online education. The 'launch from anywhere" campaign appears on a bus shelter in a main street in Sydney, as well as on social media. This bus stop is on Parramatta Road, which fronts three universities (Sydney, UTS and Notre Dame). It is a daring move for one of Australia's leading universities to promote e-learning  and so close to major campuses. Would those a short bus ride from established universities choose to study online, at a university 1,000km away?

Adelaide is also home to Torrens University, the Australian arm of a multinational online learning provider. However, while Torrens has elearning as its core business (supplemented with campuses across Australia), Adelaide University was formed from two conventional campus based institutions. Australia's capital city research universities have tended to keep their online offerings low key, for fear of being seen as low quality. Universities run occasional weird e-learning TV advertisements, or provide e-learning at arms length though Open Universities Australia.

The campaign is aimed at Australians, with international students being excluded. Student visas ban fully online study. However a student who is in another country, and doesn't visit Australia doesn't need a visa. They could complete a degree online without leaving home. I did this 2013 to 2016, studying in Canada, from Canberra.

It may be that Adelaide University has judged offshore students would not be willing to pay full fees. In contrast domestic online students pay the same fees as on campus students. When studying online at an Australian university 1,000 km away I was a little annoyed I was paying for the upkeep of playing fields I never used, or saw. ;-)

VitiVoltaics: Vineyards with Photovoltaics

Greetings from the University of Adelaide where I am attending the Sustainability spotlight series (seminar 1) on VitiVoltaics, with Professors Cassandra Collins, Armando Corsi and their students. Professor Collins defined VitiVoltaics as being about optimizing solar power generation and wine quality. In retrospect, the idea seems obvious, and deceptively simple: use solar panels to shade grape vines, providing power while improving growing conditions.

AgrVolatics (Agriculture under PhotoVoltaics) have considerable potential in Australia. As well as the practical aspects, this could be politically useful, by allowing large solar farms which do not stop agricultural production and provide additional income for farmers. This approach is applicable to berries, fruit and leafy vegetables, as well as smaller livestock, but not grains.

An amusing aside in the seminar was that most of the carbon footprint of winemaking comes from packaging, so drink casks wine! ;-) More seriously, the temperature in winemaking regions is increasing, which PV could address. 

It would be interesting to see if the same pre-wired folded panels to be used on the large scale project to export power to Singapore could be used for agriculture. It would also be interesting to see if AgrVoltaics are viable in Northern Australia, at a large scale. Interestingly the students have designed an approach to attaching lightweight flexible solar panels to a framework using common off the shelf hardware (steel from local hardware store and electronics from the local hobbyist store). This allows manual installation, compared to the machinery required for heavier rigid panels and the steel mountings used by the solar industry. 

One issue is the aesthetics of large expanses of solar panels across traditional wine growing regions. This seems a little odd, as shade cloth and plastic sheets are already used on a large scale for protecting grapes. However, renewable energy can be triggering for some, so requires research.

Interestingly University of Adelaide is not just researching the engineering and viticulture of PV panels over grape vines, but how to market this to wine drinkers. The idea is to sell the resulting wine using a positive environmental message about carbon emissions. 

At question time I asked if green colored solar panels would be more acceptable. This is possible using colored film over conventional blue cells, without a large loss in efficiency. It would make the panels much less visible.

Should Australia's universities merge across state borders?

The University of South Australia and University of Adelaide are merging. This will make an institution with about 60,000 students,  & one of the biggest in the country (after Monash). No doubt staff at both institutions have been crunching the numbers to see if the merged institution will go up in national and global university rankings. At present University of Adelaide is the bottom ranking of Australia's' Group of Eight top universities, and UniSA is not on the list at all. A bigger question is if a large geographically based university is a good model of the 21st century. 

Australia's capital city major universities are each a product of their state governments (apart from ANU, which was established by the national government). As a result each university operates mainly from the state capital, and within the state boarders. However, Australia is a nation, and education is now a global business. Should other smaller universities in Australia, which do not have the same state government patronage, seek to merge, but not restricted to state boundaries? In particular smaller regional universities could form larger geographic groupings, such as northern, eastern, southern, and western (the latter is of course, also a state boundary).

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.