AIIA iAwards

Dr Catherine Galvin & Tom Worthington 
at iAwards in Adelaide. 

Greetings from Adelaide where I am attending the AIIA iAwards. Dr Catherine Galvin has a team competing for an award and I am mentoring a team of ANU Techlauncher students competing in another category. 

The Deputy Premier of DA is giving the keynote. In this she mentioned the merger of Uni SA and Adelaide Uni. It will be interesting to see what effect the Australian Government's decision to limit international enrollments will have on the merged entity.

So far nothing strange in Adelaide

Greetings from the State Library of South Australia cafe. In Adelaide for the AIIA iAwards. So far nothing odd has happened. Last time I bumped into the now Vice Chancellor of ANU writing a report for the SA government. On a previous visit I bumped into another professor writing a report on tech development for government. 

On the last occasion I was giving a talk on open source software for submarines and before that inspecting a defence company at a tech park. This time I am mentoring students competing in the iAwards.

Adelaide's Offshore Higher Education Experiment Continues

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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.

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.