Future of Teaching in Australian Universities

Last week, Professor Genevieve Bell, the Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University announced an ANU realignment: Renew ANU, to address budget pressures. Many Australian universities, and those in other countries, are experiencing similar pressures. This is to suggest some ways changes could be implemented to improve the education delivery by universities generally. This follows the broad approach I suggested in a submission to the Review of Higher Education. As with that submission, these suggestions are are my own, and may not represent the views of any organisation I am associated with.

Teach Students How to Learn, Work and Not Cheat

Universities could reduce costs and improve the quality of learning by teaching students study, teamwork, writing, assessment techniques (of the type which ANU offers in professional practice courses, such as Responsible Innovation and Leadership;  and Holistic Thinking and Communication. This could be enhanced to identify students with specific learning difficulties. Rather than wasting staff resources investigating cheating, student can learn techniques to avoid charges of plagiarism, which will also be useful in their career to protect their own intellectual property. 

New Courses on Technology and Society

ANU plans for consolidation are more modest that those in South Australia, where two universities are merging: University of Adelaide and the University of South Australia (I dropped in to visit them a few weeks ago).  The ANU has proposed to include the Fenner School of Environment and Society, the Mathematical Sciences Institute, and Centre for Public Awareness of Science in the ANU College of Engineering, Computing and Cybernetics to create the ANU College of Systems and Society. Such mergers creates the opportunity for new cross fertilization between academics. Universities, I suggest, could and should be offering  courses on the technical and social aspects of the major challenges Australia and the world are facing, including global warming.

Courses on technology and society can be offered by universities as part of conventional degree programs, as well as for microcredentials, and in service professional development. The University of New South Wales is building a new Canberra campus with an emphasis on courses for Australian Public Service (APS) staff, including using stackable microcredentials. This could be done using the format of courses such as COMP7310 ICT Sustainability. The Australian Computer Society commissioned me to design this course for in service professional development, to be delivered online. I then modified the course for ANU computer science graduate students, then again with an on campus option (Worthington, 2012). The same approach was applied for delivery of part of the ANU Techlauncher program (Worthington, 2019). This blended/online option was fortuitously added a few months before COVID-19 struck, allowing a switch from campus based to online delivery, with no changes in content or assessment (and a switch back to on campus).

Such courses can set context, and pose questions for students to address, rather than provide large quantities of technical content, which require constant revision. These courses can also use small regular assessment items to keep students working between major project tasks. 

 Role in Teacher Tech Education

The ANU Centre for Public Awareness of Science is respected for its education of science communicators. Such centers at universities could help with the teaching of science and the use of technology in teaching and training. This could avoid duplicating programs offered in training in the vocational sector and university school teaching programs, addressing advanced requirements. This could be in cooperation with the centers most universities have for learning & teaching.

An example of the incorporation of an existing center in teaching is the way the ANU Careers & Employability unit teaches students about careers. Rather than wait for students to go to the unit for extra curricula advice, several schools of the ANU welcome the careers staff into the classroom to teach the students. Academic staff then set assessment to ensure students focus on the topic. This could be done with topic of teaching, which is part of many disciplines. This can be aligned with professional requirements for areas such as engineering and computing, using standards such as the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA).

New Teaching Methods

Immersive Reality

Immersive Reality (XR): that is Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and other forms of technology based simulation, offer ways to enhance the teaching of technical disciplines. Until recently this was prohibitively expensive for most teaching, due to the need for specialised devices, and teaching spaces. However, IR can now use student provided equipment (smart phones and low cost glasses), in standard teaching rooms (Cochrane, et Al., 2022).

The ANU School of Computing's Escape Room provides an example of low cost IR, being essentially a room dressed up with colored lights, but using very advanced pedagogy (Pereira Nunes, et.Al, 2024). The Escape Room is colocated with "The Hive" a simulation of a computer project workspace for Techlauncher Project students (Browne, et Al, 2020). 

Hackerthons and simulations could also be used for education in addressing problems facing society. As an example the Australian Crisis Simulation Summit rprovides a format for a learning activity which just needs assessment added. 

Other Support for Experiential Learning

The ANU provides experiential learning in computing with the award winning Techlauncher program. Other ANU schools and other institutions have similar group projects as a capstone activity. While valuable for the student, and an essential part of professional accreditation, such programs are difficult to deliver and can be expensive without the right tools and pedagogy. The lessons learned from the Techlauncher program could be passed to others. As an example, the use of a reflective e-portfolio in the form of a job application (Worthington, 2019). 

References

Browne, C., Boast, L. J., Blackmore, K., & Flint, S. (2020). Capstone design projects, the project value map and the many eyes process: balancing process and product to deliver measurable value to student and client. The International journal of engineering education, 36(2), 586-599. https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7342405

Cochrane, T. D., Narayan, V., Aiello, S., Alizadeh, M., Birt, J., Bone, E., ... & Worthington, T. (2022). Analysing mobile learning designs: A framework for transforming learning post-COVID. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 38(4), 1-21. https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.7997

Pereira Nunes, B., Kaur, G., Chan, A., Sharpe, S., & Soto Ruidias, R. R. (2024). Exploring Educational Escape Room as an Assessment Tool for Computer Science Courses. In Proceedings of the 2024 on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 2 (pp. 803-803). https://doi.org/10.1145/3649405.3659494

Worthington, T. (2012, July). A Green computing professional education course online: Designing and delivering a course in ICT sustainability using Internet and eBooks. In 2012 7th International Conference on Computer Science & Education (ICCSE) (pp. 263-266). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCSE.2012.6295070

Worthington, T. (2019, December). Blend and flip for teaching communication skills to final year international computer science students. In 2019 IEEE International Conference on Engineering, Technology and Education (TALE) (pp. 1-5). IEEE. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9225921/

Climate Update 2024: Extraordinarily Hot Globally

Greetings from the Climate Update 2024 at the Australian National University (ANU) where Genevieve Bell, the new Vice-Chancellor reflected on Nugget Coombs, who took her ten pin bowling. Dr Coombs is better know as one of the founders and early VCs of the ANU. Dr Bell pointed out that her predecessor had envisaged the University not just carrying out scholarship for its own sake, but addressing social issues.

Professor Mark Howden, Director of ANU Institute for Climate, Energy & Disaster Solutions and Vice-Chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change then gave us the bad news on how the planet is heating faster than expected "Extraordinarily Hot Globally". There is much for those working on mitigation and adaptation.

Cybernetic Leadership.

Professor Genevieve Bell,
Director of the School of Cybernetics 
at the Leadership Launch.

Greetings from the Australian National University where the new School of Cybernetics is launching a program in Cybernetic Leadership, funded by the Menzies Foundation. There is a whitepaper available: "Redefining Leadership in the 21st Century: the View from Cybernetics". Cybernetics started as a engineering concept, where feedback lops are used to control the operation of s system. But this has been broadened to investigate complex systems, and the human aspects of them. As a computer professional interested in the human aspects, I often bump up against these issues. 

3Ai Masters 2020 Program Open

Applications are open for the 3Ai Masters 2020 program. This is at the  Autonomy, Agency and Assurance Innovation Institute (3Ai), set up by Professor Genevieve Bell, at the Australian National University in Canberra. Exactly what the Institute does it a bit hard to explain. They say "... we are building the knowledge and tools needed to ensure that as technology advances, humanity advances with it ...".

I have had the pleasure of sitting in the ANU Computer Science and Information Technology common room with the first cohort of students. They are a diverse and interesting collection of people. Some are hard core computer nerds, but with a wide range of interests.

New Applied Science of Cyber-physical Systems

Greetings from the opening of the new Autonomy, Agency and Assurance Innovation Institute (3Ai) at the Australian National University in Canberra. Professor Genevieve Bell, aims to create a new applied science to address the challenge of cyber-physical systems.

The institute has started with sixteen masters students, who will help work out what this new discipline is. The emphasis is on "cross disciplinary" work. For 2019, there are courses, starting with "Fundamentals of a New Applied Science I" (CECS6001).

Inventing a new discipline, while teaching it, is something rarely attempted, and even more rarely succeeds. I suggest the new Institute would benefit from studying past attempts and having the students research these. 

One example is Environmental Studies at Griffith University:

"Australian Environmental Studies was so near the academic cutting edge in the early seventies that the primary challenge for the first Chairman, Professor Calvin Rose, was to determine what actually constituted the field of environmental studies." From: Preparing for the Future: A History of Griffith University, Noel Quirke, 1996, p. 11 

Environmental Studies continue today at Griffith University. A better known international example is the Bauhaus, a German art and design school of the early 20th Century. The organization suffered internal conflict and external pressure. I was invited to talk to the Bauhaus Dessau", but while this occupies the original premises, it has a limited and less radical outlook.

ps: I first came across Professor Bell, in 2009 with the Realising Our Broadband Future forum. Then in 2010, speaking at the NLA in Canberra on The Future is Messy, the next week I bumped into her at the SA Library in Adelaide cafe. She was cited in the 2011Regional Telecommunications Review. Then in 2017, it was announced she was joining us at ANU.

Reference

Launch of the ANU 3Ai Masters Program 15 February

The Australian National University's new Autonomy, Agency and Assurance Innovation Institute (3Ai) will be launching its first masters program 15 February 2019 in Canberra. Founded by Professor Genevieve Bell, 3Ai aims to create a new applied science to address the challenge of cyber-physical systems. Exactly what that is, I am not sure, but it will make for some interesting discussions. The Institute just a few steps from my office at ANU. ;-)

Trust and cyber physical systems

Greetings from the "Trust and cyber physical systems

Dr Philippa Ryan

workshop" at the Australian National University in Canberra. This is run by the ANU's new Autonomy, Agency and Assurance (3A) Institute. Dr. Genevieve Bell, 3A Director did an introduction and Dr Philippa Ryan is running the exercises (author of the forthcoming book "Trust and Distrust in Digital Economies"). We have a lot of post-it notes, colored pens and string.

As someone from STEM I am a little lost with the discussion of law and language. This is one of those exercises where you have to play a little. It might be interesting to use Lego Serious Play as conducted by Dr Stephen Dann.

Teaching Computer Professionals to Teach

Professor Elanor Huntington, Dean of the ANU College of Engineering and Computer Science is leading a project to reimagine the disciplines for the future. Part of this is the 3A Institute headed by Professor Genevieve Bell. Another part is the ANU Cyber Institute. In addition, I suggest Australian universities need to expand their capabilities in education and people skills: teaching technical people to teach, lead, communicate and work in groups, as well as the application of IT to education. This is too important a task to be left to the Faculty of Education and should be part of the role of university's computing department.

STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) disciplines have traditionally seen people skills as "soft". Computing and engineering students I teach, and many researchers, think that doing the science is the hard part and communicating the results is something easy you do afterwards. However, when they come to write up or present, these students and researchers soon discover how hard soft skills are. Those how go on to supervise staff and teach students discover that this is harder still.

The solution, I suggest, is to treat teaching, communicating and cooperating as core skills. These should be something you learn at the start of your university education and refine throughout your studies and professional life.

A change is now taking place in university, with the Facebook Generation, who have not known a time before pervasive social media, progressing through the university system. To this generation using the Internet for communication is normal and natural. This is not to say they can use it well for academic or professional purposes: most will need training. But this generation will first turn to the Internet, the web, or a video for instruction, not a teacher or a classroom. If they want advice and assistance they will turn to social media.

Teaching this generation requires skills in using the Internet for education, not because it is cheaper and more efficient than classrooms (it may not be), but because this is how the students expect to learn. This is not to say this generation does not value face-to-face interaction, but that is an expensive and rare commodity, supplemented by social media.

As part of my Master of Education studies I did a quick analysis of education skills for IT professionals.  The Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA) is used for defining the type and level of skills needed for IT jobs and by the Australian Computer Society for accrediting degree courses at Australian universities. The SFIA Foundation have identified education skills as being relevant to an IT professional.

Australian universities should Train Tech Professionals to Teach. This teaching should be undertaken primarily on-line, and use techniques such as e-portfolios.

Join Genevieve Bell's 3A Institute of AI at ANU to Change the World

The new Autonomy, Agency and Assurance Innovation Institute (3A Institute) at the Australian National University is seeking two Associate Professors and three postdoctoral/research fellows. The new staff will work with Professor Genevieve Bell at the 3A Institute "... to build a new applied science around the management of artificial intelligence, data and technology and of their impact on humanity". It is not every day you are invited to change the world. ;-)

ps: Dr Bell's is down the corridor from mine at the

ANU College of Engineering & Computer Science in Canberra. It will be interesting to see what develops.

Genevieve Bell Heads ANU 3A Institute of AI

Greeting from the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra, where Professor Genevieve Bell is speaking on "Managing the Machines: building a new applied science for the 21st century". This is also live streaming on Facebook and YouTube

Dr. Bell will be presenting the ABC 2017 Boyer Lectures and has been appointed the inaugural McKenzie Chair at the Australian National University College of Engineering and Computer Science. She will also head the new "Three A" institute (although I am not sure what that is).

I first came across Dr. Bell, at the Realising Our Broadband Future forum, in Sydney, 2009, where it was refreshing to hear ideas about broadband for people to use. She talked at the Innovative Ideas Forum 2010 at the National Library of Australia, where she noted English was not longer the dominant language of the Internet. The next week I bumped into Dr Bell at the State Library of South Australia, where she had been the state's Thinker in Residence on South Australia’s Digital Futures.

You have to listen carefully to a speech from Dr. Bell, not just because she talks fast  and with enthusiasm (reminds me of Pia Waugh).

Dr. Bell stared with a history lesson, on the start of the engineering as a profession at the time of the French Revolution in Paris, then Constantinople and the UK. She characterized engineers as managing systems and being certified and licensed by the state. She then jumped to the USA and the creation of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. I lost the thread at this point, but we ended up in the creation of Artificial Intelligence as a discipline. 

The story then jumped to Australia, with the building of SILLIAC, an Australian 1950s computer (built after  CSIRAC Australia's first computer, around 1949). But the story was really about how to combine theory and practice, plus what exactly is it that we want to research and do? 


Dr Bell had three questions on Autonomy, Agency and Assurance. She suggested we need to think about in what sense machines are "autonomous". I am not sure this is such a new issue. We have had machines which can act on their own for decades and also have such legal structures as companies as persons. A non-trivial case is in the law of war, where autonomous weapons have existed for more than a hundred years.

The next question was how much Agency, machines should have. This seems to be the same question as the first, being how much autonomy there should be.  A current example of this is the Commonwealth Bank, accused of 54,000 cases of money laundering. The Bank is not a person and it was automated teller machines which processed the cash, so who is responsible?

The third question is assurance: how we can be sure these machines are safe? This is also no a new question.  Engineers and more recently software engineers, have had to consider how safe sould be and how to work out if it is. This is made more difficult by AI, but it is something I routinely as of students when I am teaching professional ethics.

At this point I finally worked out what the 3A Institute was to be: the Autonomy, Agency and Assurance Institute.

Genevieve Bell at ANU Exploring Australia’s Digital Futures

Dr Genevieve Bell has announced she will be joining us at the Australian National University as a Professor in the College of Engineering and Computer Science, while retaining a role at Intel.

I first came across Dr. Bell, at the Realising Our Broadband Future forum, in Sydney, 2009:

"For me the event ended on a positive note with Genevieve Bell, on e-Community. It was refreshing to hear ideas about broadband for people to use, rather than as something done to them."

Dr. Bell, was the first speaker at the Innovative Ideas Forum 2010 at the National Library of Australia in Canberra, April 2010, where I wrote:

"One insight was that the people in the growth areas for Internet use in Asia live much more densely and that English was not longer the dominant language of the Internet. Western, and particularly American, ideas of how information is organised, meaning is expressed will not necessarily continue to dominate the Internet.

Genevieve argued that old forms of media, such as television, will live on. Rather than television being subsumed as a VOD service, TV is influencing the design of computers and the Internet."

The next week I bumped into Dr Bell at the State Library of South Australia. What I had not realized was she had been the state's Thinker in Residence on South Australia’s Digital Futures (I was there to talk about open source for South Australasian defence industry).

Re-engineering Education

Greetings from the Australian National University in Canberra, where a panel of academics and a student are discussing "Blow up the lecture?". The event is being streamed live. It happens today in a web search I found "Re-engineering IT Education" a seminar from 1998, where I outlined Recommendations for Improving Education. Then I wrote "Information technology and telecommunications will profoundly alter social interaction, work and education over the next 20 years.". What I did not realise was that I would then spend the next 15 years working out how to implement ICT for education. Having done that, I now hope to teach how to do this to my academic colleagues and do it internationally).

Professor Sarma,  used the term "magic time" for informal discussion, but perhaps "organised serendipity" would be better. He also estimated the cost of developing an online course to be about twice the cost of delivering a conventional face to face course. Using the ANU Academic casual sessional rates, I estimate the cost of a course with
100 students works out to about $100,000 (or about $1,000 per student). This sounds far too low for the cost of creating a MOOC. One of the others on the panel estimated a MOOC costs about four times as much as running a face-to-face course, which would be about $400,000. This sound more reasonable, but perhaps a little high.

What if the traditional lecture became a thing of the past? Are there some forms of learning that are better suited to computers than the classroom?

Do students want to be talked at or talked to?
Technology is opening up new ways to teach and learn and we want your opinion on what the classrooms of the future might look like.

Featuring panellists:
Professor Sanjay Sarma, Director of Digital Learning, MIT
Dr Joe Hope,  Physics Education Centre, ANU
Ms Laura Wey, Education Officer, ANUSA
Chaired by ABC 666 Mornings Presenter Ms Genevieve Jacobs