ANU University House Reopening

The Australian National University is having an open Community Day on Saturday 15 August, commemorating 80 years. Registering for the event comes with the chance to win a two-night stay at the restored historic ANU University House, with dinner for two. 

The reopening of University House, marks a revival of the institution's fortunes, academic & financial. The lack of a venue where staff at all levels could freely discuss issues across the institution, contributed to governance problems. At times a leader can only be told something is a bad idea in an informal setting. Equally there is the chance to tell them what will work.

Marghanita da Cruz & Tom Worthington
at the ANU Celebration of Giving, in the
Great Hall of University House.
Photo by Adam da Cruz, 24 November 2014

University House was extensively damaged in a hailstorm in January 2020. It was not so much the loss of the great hall, or other formal areas which impeded consultation with staff, as the Fellows Bar & Fellows Garden outside. Here in the twlight, staff and graduate students would meet after work. While each table tended to be devoted to a discipline, there was interaction between them. 

McCusker Institute on ‘Shared Prosperity

Greetings from the McCusker Institute at the Australian National University in Canberra. Dr Katherine Trebeck, Economic Change Program Director at The Next Economy, is speaking on ‘Shared Prosperity: the economy we have, the one we need and what we can do to make it better’. This is at a university, so there are slides with references. But the message about the distribution of wealth. At the same time business leaders are talking to government, a few I'm away l. 

Katherine brought the issue by pointing to University of Technology Sydney referring staff being made redundant to stress relief advice. 

The solutions to some intractable problems seem so simple. We can reverse global warming with a carbon tax. Poverty can be eliminated by removing tax breaks for the rich to fund welfare. The solutions are easy but how do we incentivise to do this? 

As a retirement age person who owns the home I live in, with imputed shares and a tax free super balance, I feel guilty. I understand previous governments bribed older voters, but this has reached absurdly generous levels. Couldn't we add "average" to the tax breaks? So the average home, share dividends and super balance would get tax breaks. 

Katherine is presenting examples of companies with a social conscious. However, are these companies funding lobbyists to go to government and demand to pay more tax. 

I suggest universities can help. However, they need to also address their internal inequalities. A meritocracy doesn't have to be winner-takes-all. Only one of Australia's universities is a foreign owned for-profit company. The rest don't need to be run like a caraciture of 19th century capitalism. There are other models which combine academic traditions and social enterprise enterpurship. 

I am a member of my professional body, which employs people to get our views in front of policymakers. Many groups can't afford this, but perhaps students of politics, business and related disciplines could do this for their work experience.

Change processes at an Australian university

Greetings from the lawn outside the maths building at the Australian National University, where the new Provost, social scientist, is taking about how to integrate tech and people. They are qualified to talk on this, being an engineer and social scientist. This is opportune with the ANU engineering just renamed "Systems and Society".

What do employers want?

Greetings from the final TechLauncher workshop at the Australian National University. This is a chance for students to not only listen to potential employers but also talk to them. Of course many computer students already have jobs, as they have in demand skills. There are some extra requirements for computer people, such as a Github account to show they can code. The workshop is held in "The Hive" which is an open plan area set up to look like a typical shared office environment. 

Bianca Sawyer,
Quantum Brilliance

Today we have Kevin Landale from Digital Atelier,  Bianca Sawyer from  Quantum Brilliance, and Jonathon Stapels from Overflow Solutions.

Kevin Landale,
Digital Atelier

These workshops are intended to help students, but a bonus for staff, such as myself, is to meet interesting people from interesting companies. The three company representatives (who are also company founders) talked about how they ended up where they are. 

Jonathon emphasised that applicants should be ready to talk about why they applied in everyday language. 

Jonathon Stapels,
Overflow Solutions

Bianca emphasised the importance of a cover letter focused on relevant qualifications, skills and experience, not just "sixteen pages of CV" and no "Spam CVs". Kevin said he uses behavioural pre-screening questions, unrelated to technical skills. Jonathon asked if job ads should give the specifics upfront, or talk about the learning opportunities in the job and he was surprised that students preferred the upfront version. The students then talked about what they studied and what they aspired to work on. One student said they wanted to work at a large company, at which point the employers discussed the pros and cons. 

ANU DVC on the Future of Learning

Professor Maryanne Dever, ANU Pro Vice-Chancellor (Education & Digital), delivered the keynote at the opening of EdTechPosium 2021 in Canberra this morning, with a gentle dig at the Australian Government: "We are not helped by the revolving door around the Minister for Education".

But the PVC started on the tech side about providing suitable leaning management systems, then the need to help staff to use them effectively. She moved the broader topics of offering international students to option of studying online at first before comping to Australia to work and study. As someone who has spent the last ten years teaching online and three years as an international online student, much of what the DVC envisaged has been my daily life for all that time. So I suggest aiming for even more flexibility. Australian universities can offer all students, not just international ones, the option of studying wherever they happen to be for must of their study. In practice students will still want to come to campus, and my rule of thumb is this will be about 20% of the time.

"Massive digital disruption of the pace and scale we have seen was not on the agenda for our higher education system. While Australian universities have managed with varying degrees of success to deliver emergency online learning in the wake of COVID19, most of us are still processing what the last 18 months mean for the future of university learning and teaching. In this presentation I will draw on my experience managing change across this period to explore some of the opportunities offered by this new normal, reflect on the comfortable assumptions that have been shattered, and question what it might take if we are to emerge from this moment in better shape than we went in."

Designing Micro-credentials for an Australian University

Greetings from the Designing Micro-credentials and Professional Short Courses at the Marie Reay Teaching Centre at the Australian National University. This is my first time in a classroom since March, either as a teacher or student, due to COVID-19. 

It was exciting to be in a room with colleagues (a very large room with a lot of space and other COVID precautions). The instructor took some time to get used to teaching in a classroom, using online terminology and techniques (which was amusing).

The ANU introduced a Micro-credentials Procedure (5 October 2019). The term has no set definition so ANU has defined the specific way it sees these short qualifications being used, for postgraduate studies which offer credit to a degree, over days or weeks, not months. ANU will be using the same Moodle platform as used for courses, by customized for micro-credentials.

A micro-credential could be delivered in a classroom, blended, or fully online. However, the assumption is that most will be at least partly, if not entirely online. The coursers will use a mix of synchronous and asynchronous approaches (that is some in real time with the students in the room or a video conference online at the same time, but mostly the student studying materials in their own time).

The key issue I see for success with micro-credentials is avoiding attempting to duplicate a traditional university campus academic experience. This is because, in part, that experience is a myth and much of that which is real is not suitable for mature students who would undertake a micro-credential. Traditional university teaching has lectures and tutorials, where the teaching staff do most of the talking and students spend their time listening (or in fact not listening). In reality most students did not attend the lectures and if required to attend tutorials do not actively participate. What a micro-credential, or any good university course, needs to do is get students working. 

At the workshop we were shown several online tools designed to get studnts active and communicating with each other. Examples were a simulated posit note wall using mural.co , a quiz using kahoot.it,  and voting using menti.com. I did not find any of these particularly useful or engaging. These will be particularly unappealing to more mature learners, assuming they can get the interface to work, and their poor accessibility features do not prevent use. One of the participants at my table mentioned the use of Slack.com, and I suggest that is more the type of application which will be of value for advanced learners. The emphasis should be on students interacting with each other on substantial projects over time, not quick exercises driven by an instructor.

The particular micro-credentials I have in mind are tech-teaching. This would provide an introduction to teaching for those in technology fields, such as computing. These could be university tutors, or those doing small amounts of training in a workplace. This would be aligned with the Skills Framework for the Information Age SFIA, such as Learning delivery ETDL.

One point is that with this type of educational offering meeting other course participants is as important as the content. This may require more than the usual icebreaker activities. 

The ANU staff introduced aspects of the micro-credentials policy, as well as how to go about designing a course, with leaning objectives for a target audience. How to design a course I am familiar with, having been formally trained to do this. However, micro-credentials have their own requirements, being short and for a very specific audience. It occurs to me that the ideation process used in product development could be of use. 

Micro-credentials introduce restrictions on the educational design and delivery process, beyond those of conventional courses. My practice has been to design pure online courses, and then add face to face elements. I will try adding a third step: first designing a set of microcredentials, which can be combined to create a conventional course, run in blended, or online mode. This should be easier than starting with a conventional course and then trying to modify it to be a set of microcredentials.

One area where I suggest more guidance is needed on micro-credentials is timing and structure. A typical Australian university student would be expected to do about 40 hours study a week for 12 weeks. Microcredentials are meant to be short, however, university lecturers have a tendency to try to cram too much into a course.

It may take several attempts for any organisation to come up with a workable strategy for micro-credential. I suggest treating the first version as a pilot.

Report on Breech of Australian National University Systems

The Australian National University has released a 20 page "Incident Report on the Breech of the Australian National University's Administrative Systems". The supporting materials may also be of interest.

Contents of the report

• Vice-Chancellor’s Foreword
• Executive summary
• Detailed timeline of the data breach
• Figure 1: Simplified overview of actor   
• Figure 2: Attack timeline
• Post notification events 
• Malware and tradecraft analysis
• Lessons from the attack and follow-up actions
• Personally identifiable information
• Phishing awareness
• Table One: Issues and Remediation
• Appendix
• Appendix A: “invitation” phishing email    
• Appendix B: “meeting” phishing email    
• Appendix C: “planning” phishing email   

From the Executive Summary:

"In early November 2018, a sophisticated actor gained unauthorised access to the ANU network. This attack resulted in the breach of part of the network known as the Enterprise Systems Domain (ESD), which houses our human resources, financial management, student administration and enterprise e-forms systems.

By gaining access to ESD, the actor was able to copy and steal an unknown quantity of data contained in the above systems. There is some evidence to suggest the same actor attempted to regain access to ESD during February 2019, but this second attack was ultimately unsuccessful. ...

Technical gaps aside, ANU ultimately views this breach and cybersecurity more broadly as an organisational issue, one which requires a change to the University’s security culture to adequately mitigate. It is through this lens we will undertake the next phase of our cybersecurity work – a strategic information security program. This program encompasses the modernisation of IT and security infrastructure and, more importantly, an emphasis on culture and security awareness among students, staff and researchers; and the protection of the data they entrust to ANU.

The investigation following the breach, which contributed to the contents of this report, was conducted in close cooperation with Australian Government security agencies and Northrop Grumman. ANU is grateful for their continued support."

Online Courses Offered by Australian Universities

In thinking about how Australian higher education might offer blended courses to the region, I decided to look at what is already available. One interesting option is the edX "micromasters" offered by four Australian universities:

1. Australian National University: Evidence-Based Management 
2. Curtin University: Human Rights,Marketing in a Digital World, Internet of Things (IoT), 
3. UQ: Business Leadership, Corporate Innovation, Sustainable Energy, Leadership in Global Development
4. University of Adelaide: Big Data

Students undertake a series of online courses and then may undertake some form of capstone project. Students are offered 25% credit (one semester full time study) towards a Masters, subject to an additional test. This makes the micromasters similar in level and length to an Australian university graduate certificate. However, the micromasters, despite the name, is not itself a qualification under the Australian Qualifications Framework.

Australian universities also offer some online degrees and online versions of campus courses, to their own students and those of other institutions. As an example, the ANU offers twelve undergraduate language subjects through Open Universities Australia. In total ANU offers 116  online courses, of these 30 are undergraduate.

Decreasing Campus Energy Use With Flexible Classrooms and e-Learning

The Australian National University is preparing an Energy Master Plan. The aim is "... to create an Australian world class energy efficient, low-carbon, least-cost campus ...". One target in the existing ANU Environmental Management Plan 2017-2021 is to "Reduce energy use per person by 20 per cent by 2021". New forms of education can help, by using the buildings more efficiently and moving some education online. I suggest these techniques can be used to reduce energy use per person. In particular, teaching staff can be trained to teach in flexible and online mods. Also, a system can be used for students to book a seat.

Use Classrooms More Intensively

One way to reduce energy use per person is by increasing the intensity of use of the buildings. Empty rooms use almost as much energy as full ones, so the more use of each room in each building, the lower per person energy use.

New ANU Buildings
(artists' impression).

One way to increase the use of classrooms is to make them more flexible. The ANU Union Court redevelopment is a prime example of this. Two new buildings will allow forms of education beyond conventional lectures and tutorials.

ANU Culture and Events Building

The ANU Culture and Events Building will have rooms with retractable seating. At the press of a button, the room can be changed from a flat floor for a conference, to theater format, with tiered seating for a lecture.

ANU Collaborative Learning Building

The ANU Collaborative Learning Building will have flat floor rooms with movable furniture and walls. This enables the same space to be used for different size and format classes. Walls can be folded back for a large class or moved in form more smaller ones. Desks can be in straight rows for a more conventional eyes-front classroom, or in circles for a more collaborative approach.

Flat floor classrooms are conventionally used for small groups of up to a few dozen students. However, with technology and new teaching techniques, such rooms can accommodate hundreds of students. 

Training to help make use of classrooms

Training can help make flexible classrooms more efficient, in terms of teaching and energy use. Academics familiar only with conventional lectures and tutorials will tend to use the new flexible teaching spaces only for old fixed teaching formats. To use the rooms flexibly requires the staff to be training in flexible formats.

As an example, an instructor used to conventional lecture driven teaching will find the idea of hundreds of students in a room working in teams a recipe for chaos. The instructor needs to be taken through the theory and practice of how this works, and ideally act as an assistant in such a class before being required to be the lead instructor.

 The ANU TechLauncher events for Team Formation and Bootcamp run in the ANU's large flat floor teaching rooms, at 7-11 Barry Drive, have demonstrated that group exercises with 300 students can work. By introducing academics to these techniques, they will be more confident to use them in courses.

Use e-Learning to Supplement Campus

E-learning can also be used to increase the intensity of campus use. Most courses at Australian universities are now, to some extent, "blended", with part of the tuition on-line. However, to make the best use of the technology course designers and instructors need to be trained in on-line techniques.

Academics who have only training and experience in face-to-face lectures and tutorials will tend to continue to rely on those techniques and be reluctant to try e-learning. There will be concern the students will not do the work, or will cheat, which can be the case if materials are not well designed and trained staff are not available to run on-line courses.

As an example, the ANU course COMP7310 "ICT Sustainability" is run entirely on-line, with no lectures and no examinations. This course runs alongside ANU's face-to-face courses, with the same status and meeting the same quality standards. However, design of this award winning course required the assistance of specialist e-leaning professionals. It also helped to have undertaken graduate education training at ANU and other institutions, focused on in e-learning.


With the appropriate level of training it is feasible to aim for the typical university program to be a 20/80 blend: 20% in a formal classroom setting and 80% on-line outside the classroom. An example of this approach is the ANU Techlauncher program, where students undertake a group project building software for a real client, in government or industry. Students are expected to undertake 10 hours of study per week, but are only required to attend a 2 hour formal session in a typical week.

Ideally students should be on campus no more than the equivalent of one day a week. Students should be out in the real world learning and practicing their skills.

Double University Per Person Intensity of Use

Less than half of students attend a typical university class. A survey at ANU found "... attendance declines over semester to around 30% of original signup ...". This is not confined to ANU and is not a new feature of universities. However, universities still tend to allocate teaching space based on the number of students enrolled in the class at the beginning of semester. As a result the classrooms tend to be less than half full after the first few weeks. This is a waste of space and also a waste of energy needed to maintain these spaces.

One way to engage students, and thus attract them to class, is with group activities, as is done with ANU Techlauncher. This ensures almost full attendance at interactive group activities. Blends of on-line and face to face activities (so called flipped classrooms) can keep students coming to class. However, not all students need to attend every class and many classes will have one third to one half attendance. This can be incorporated into space use planning.

Students can be given the opportunity to book a seat in class a few days in advance. Classrooms can then be allocated, making use of different size rooms and flexible walls and formats, to suit. A reasonable aim would be to double the intensity of use of classrooms, thus halving the per person energy use.

Reduce Staff Campus Use

Persons use of the campus includes staff as well as students. Most teaching undertaken at a university is not by full time, permanent academics, but by graduate students and part time staff from industry. E-learning is a particularly useful way to make use of part time staff skills. Industry professionals can teach students without having to leave their workplace. Researchers in the field can teach students. However, this will require the staff to be trained in techniques for e-learning. The ideal way to conduct this training is on-line.

More on:

1. Classroom design 
2. Digital Teaching 

Online Course for Fostering Student Wellbeing

A free online short course in "Fostering student wellbeing in your teaching practice" is being offered by the Australian National University. The course is lead by Alexandra Culloden, Wellbeing Project Coordinator . The course from 22 to 24 January taking only 15 minutes per day (reading, videos and on-line discussion). This is one of a series of "Coffee Courses" intended to take the student as much time as to drink a coffee each day.

Student Information Sessions in India by Australian National University

The Australian National University (ANU) is running Student Information Sessions in India, 14 to 19 November 2017: Tuesday 14  Bangalore;  Wednesday 15 Chenna, Thursday 16 Pune, Saturday 18 New Delhi, Sunday 19  Mumbai. Hope to see you in my ICT Sustainability class, next year.

Lego Play for Higher Education Academy Recognition

My teaching philosophy,
expressed in Lego.

Today I took part in a Lego Serious Play session run for staff at the Australian National University in Canberra. This was conducted by Dr Stephen Dann, who customized the session to help those working on their Higher Education Academy Professional Recognition.

We were each provided with a pack of Lego bricks and taken through a sequence of quick exercises, where we each built something and then discussed what we had built. This was a very carefully structured process, starting with concrete exercises to get us used to working with the bricks, through increasingly abstract discussing of our teaching and supervision practices.



This may sound like a frivolous exercise of adults playing with children's blocks. However, it was a way for us to reflect and discuss what we do with teaching and research. It turned out to be a very intense and at times emotional process. In a few hours of "play" I discovered aspects of how I think about teaching which I had not realized in my previous three and a half years of formal graduate education. I am tempted to submit a Lego stop-motion movie as my HEA application, in place of the usual text document. ;-)


There is a 22 page "Introduction to LEGO ® SERIOUS PLAY ®". No fee needs to be paid to Lego to use the "Method", but obviously they would like you to buy their Starter Kits of Blocks. In addition there are are books on the method and scholarly papers. 

Graduation Day Pomp and Circumstance

Tom Worthington MEd DE (Athabasca),
GCertHE (ANU), CertIVT&A (CIT),
FACS CP

University graduations are slightly silly, but worthwhile events. However, international distance education students tend to miss out on all the pomp and circumstance. Perhaps embassies could put on a ceremony for graduates of that country's institutions.

Here I am in full academic regalia for my Master of Education in Distance Education, awarded by Athabasca University (Canada), 18 January 2017. I was not able to attend the ceremony in Canada, but wore my new master's hood on stage as a member of faculty at the Australian National University graduation last Wednesday in Canberra (last time on this stage was to receive an ANU qualification).

You can see me in the procession onto the stage, 2 min 50 seconds into the video of the ANU ceremony. Athabasca doesn't have headgear  for Masters, so I was the only one on stage without a hat. The photographer asked if I had the hood on the right way up, but I didn't know (nor did anyone else), as they had never see one from Athabasca in Canberra before.

Digital Infrastructure in ANU Strategic Plan 2017-2021

The ANU Strategic Plan 2017-2021, has been released by Professor Brian Schmidt, Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University. While most attention will be focused on upgrades to the physical infrastructure of the campus, the plan includes digital infrastructure:

 "ANU should be known for the quality of its research and digital infrastructure, for its collections, its contemporary educational facilities and campus amenity that befits its status as the national university." (Pages 12 to 13) 

Two of the key initiatives include digital aspects:

"1.8 Evidence of learning and satisfaction will drive a regeneration of our approaches to curriculum, teaching and digital and physical learning space design."

"1.11 We will revitalise our learning and teaching infrastructure, beginning with state-of-the-art facilities at Union Court and a major refresh of digital infrastructure."

In February 2007 a severe hailstorm damaged many of the buildings at ANU, causing closure of the campus for several days. However, this did not stop the university functioning. Like many other staff (and students) I was still able to work on-line from home.

The ANU will still benefit from having a campus in 2021, as will most of the world's great universities. However, a campus should be seen as a supplement to the primary way universities already carry out their mission: in the digital realm. This allows greater equity, with those of limited means able to work, research and study at university without having to leave their community. This also allows those with a disability, and work, family or cultural commitments to participate in university life, where the requirement for physical attendance would have previously excluded them.

The last century university, where students had to travel to a campus, is being transformed into one where the students learn primarily on-line, in the workplace, wherever they are in the world. This e-learning can be supplemented, when required and where convenient for the student, with campus based education.

By 2021, I suggest the typical Australian university student will still attend classes, but for only 20% of their program, with the other 80% on-line. These classes may not be at the campus of a university, but in a local community facility, wherever in the world the students are.

Some Australian universities have invested heavily in satellite campuses with conventional teaching rooms, in Australian cities and in Asia. ANU has not pursued this strategy and so does not have as large a stock of now obsolete lecture and tutorial rooms. ANU will be able to use modern teaching techniques to provide access to students on-line wherever they happen to be.

Marketing Universities

Universities are all selling the same products (research and education), so it is not surprising if their marketing is similar. Prestige institutions use their research reputation to market education ("We have a Nobel Prize winner!"), while those without a research record use vocational relevance ("We will get you a job!"). Australian universities seem to be going through a spate of re-branding at the present.

The University of Western Sydney (UWS), a vocationally orientated institution with a good reputation, is re-branding itself "Western Sydney University" (WSU or "W" for short). This seems a reasonable change to make, but there has been some criticism that a large part of the $20M marketing budget will be spent on this. See "University of Western Sydney to get new name and logo", by Melanie Kembrey, Sydney Morning Herald, August 7, 2015.

 A more questionable case of re-branding is that Central Queensland University (CQU), a modest university (in, as the name suggests, central Queensland), is reported to be changing to "Australian National Regional University" (ANRU"). CQU is a regional university in Australia, but the problem is that the new name would be very close to that of the "Australian National University" (ANU), one of the country's leading research universities (where I am an Adjunct Lecturer). See "University games: protect ANU from CQU's rebranding overreach" by Ross Fitzgerald, The Age, 6 August 2015.

Digital Technologies Job Available Teaching Governance for Melanesia

Recently I was asked if there were any jobs available in higher education at ANU. So I looked at the Current Vacancies at The Australian National University web page. There are currently sixteen positions available: eleven Academic Vacancies and five General Vacancies. One which caught my attention is a Digital Technologies Research Fellow in the State, Society and Governance in Melanesia Program (SSGM). This involves the use of social media and new technology for teaching.