Australian Universities Need to be Ready with an Online Learning Option

NUS eLearning Week Video, 2014

This is to suggest Australian universities test they have an online learning option ready for use in an emergency. There is no specific threat at this at this time, but it would be prudent to be ready. Two developing situations are Avian influenza being tracked by the World Health Organisation, and military tension in the Yellow Sea.

Universities were forced to implement adhoc online teaching in 2020, due to the SARS-COVID-2 virus. This was ad-hoc, because university academics and administrators failed to learn from the experience of universities in our region, which a decade before were shut down due to the SARS-COVID-1 (Chandran, 2010). After that experience some Singapore campuses implemented annual e-learning emergency drills. Unfortunately the experience with COVID-2 at Australian campuses is now fading from memory, without the staff training, and procedures, in place.

A natural disaster could close down a campus at any time. A disease outbreak could happen without warning. Regional tensions could cause international students to leave Australian within days, as well as forcing all Australian staff to evacuate overseas campuses.

References

Chandran, R. (2010, May). National University of Singapore's Campus-Wide ELearning Week. In Global Learn (pp. 2062-3302). Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). URL https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/blog.nus.edu.sg/dist/0/119/files/2011/03/national-university-of-singapores-campus-wide-elearning-week.pdf

Available to Help with Distance Educaiton from Sydney During Bushfire Emergency

Preparing web pages
for Defence Exercise K95

I was in Sydney when the smoke hit Canberra, and will be working from here until conditions improve. As I have some experience in distance and e-learning, I would be happy to help out any Canberra educational institutions needing to provide remote access for their students (although most are well equipped for this already). If staff or students in Sydney needed face-to-face support, I expect one of the local institutions would loan us a room. As a member of the Australian Computer Society I can also make use of the ACS Hub at Barangaroo.

If any emergency or relief organizations need extra help with just-in-time online training of staff and volunteers, I would be happy to help.

My skills in design of military and emergency websites are a little rusty, but if anyone needs help with that I would be happy to do so.

ps: The photo is from when I was at Mallacoota in 1995, preparing web pages for a military exercise.

Emergency Communications Plans for Educational Institutions

What procedures does your institution have in place for emergency communications? A search of Australian educational websites produced more than six thousand results. The University of Newcastle Emergency Communications Plan is particularly useful as it has templates for SMS and email messages for a range of scenarios and standardized terminology to be used.