Curriculum innovation at the research-intensive university

Greetings from the last day of ASCILITE 2023 in Christchurch, where Dr Elisa Bone, Melbourne University is speakin on "More than the sum of its parts: reflections on a networked program supporting curriculum innovation at a research-intensive university". This is especially relevant to where I work at ANU. 

Dr Bone described how UOM planned a hub & spoke model, with instructional designers outposts. This brought central units and faculties together. Now they have triads of education fellows, developers & video production staff.

ps: At the break after I was in a discussion wil som of the ASCILITE MLSig of the influence of SC fi on mobile devices. This reminded me of the not quite real Milesham Organisation.

Masters and Doctorate of Education from Universities of Melbourne and Virginia

The University of Melbourne is offering a Masters of Education with one third of the time off a doctorate at the University of Virginia. Both programs are offered fully online. One claim made for this is less cost. However, Australians will not be able to obtain a government subsidy for a program at a US university.

Melbourne University VC on the Rising Tide of Hostility Towards Universities

Greetings from the Australian National University in Canberra, where Professor Glyn Davis, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne is speaking on "Irredeemable time: the rising tide of hostility towards universities".

Professor Davis began by recommending "The Making of The Australian National University" (Foster & Varghese, 2009). He then took us back to the dissolution of English monasteries as a pointer as to what governments may do to universities. While Australian universities are not as wealthy as Oxbridge, they still have significant assets.

Professor Davis pointed to US research that a majority of Republicans view universities as a negative influence. He suggested a divide where those with a degree vote left and for internationalism, those without will vote for Donald Trump. I suggest this does not apply to all.

I have noticed a tendency for some of our own Australian entrepreneurs to suggest a university degree is not needed for success (while basing their start-ups on the publicly funded research results from universities and staffed with publicly funded PHDs). In May I visited River City Labs in Brisbane, where founder Steve Baxter seemed a bit ambivalent about the role of universities in innovation.

Professor Davis then looked to the promises made by universities as a cause: students gained a degree, a large debt, but not necessarily a good job. Turning to Australia, he then looked at the current government's view of universities with over-paid VCs and a focus on research.

Professor Davis used the Victorian era railway as an example of technology which made some traders obsolete (such as river fishers in Oxford, despite opposition by the university). The 21st century railway is the Internet, with Silicon Vally setting up low-cost education online. He used the example of Udacity offering nano-qualifications. Professor Davis interpreted this as a development of the distance university. It was interesting he mentioned only US examples, not UK Open University which preceded them (and was in part based on Australia's University of New England).

Professor Davis suggested that universities need to better engage with the community, to show their worth. I suggest they also need to be able to deliver vocationally relevant, low cost sub-degree and nested degree qualifications, with an on-line delivery option.

At question time I admitted I had a degree from an overseas "open" university (which happens to be in the field of designing international education). I asked Professor Davis about the role of private for-profit universities, such as Adelaide's Torrens University of Australia. He pointed at that US based for-profit universities had not been able to displace conventional ones and that traditional institutions had proved adept at providing on-line education (in some cases taking over commercial on-line institutions).

Professor Davis was preaching to the converted, with the ANU VC and two past VCs present. This was an informative, scholarly, but also entertaining and vigorous defence of the university.

Australian Idea of the University

Professor Glyn Davis, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne, will speak on his new book The Australian Idea of the University, at the Australian National University, in Canberra, 6pm 31 October 2017.

"The lecture by Professor Davis will draw on his forthcoming MUP 2018 book, The Australian Idea of the University, which asks why a nation scattered across a continent, in a world with so many competing visions of the University, is content with a single type?
2017 has seen criticism of universities in Australia, the United States and United Kingdom, essentially around their perceived distance from community and national imperatives. Academic work is characterised as unconnected with the concerns of society, universities as wealthy and unresponsive.
Are we approaching a Henry VIII moment, when a future government decides to dissolve the familiar public university?"

I spent much of the last three years contemplating the Australian idea of the university, as a Masters of Education student (ironically studying on-line in Canada). Australian higher education was founded to provide both academic scholarship and vocational skills, which is something many academics choose to forget.

Attrition and Completion in Doctoral Education: A Wicked Problem?

Greetings from the Australian National University in Canberra, where Nigel Palmer, honorary research fellow with the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Melbourne is speaking on "Attrition and Completion in Doctoral Education: A Wicked Problem?". He has been researching completion rates for doctoral candidates by international/domestic status and gender (and produced papers on education). He is looking at how to better support candidates, to improve completion times and rates completion of their degree.

Nigel argued that even if universities are full fee paying, students dropping out is still a problem. He then discussed if it was a wicked problem. He suggests it is because of the difficulty of measuring attrition as well as the management of attrition itself.

One reason for worrying about attrition is equity of access to education.  Nigel showed a graph showed the increasing number of women commencing a doctoral program over time. However, he then had a second graph showing that women were over represented in educaiton and helath, but many fewer in IT and Engineering.  One interesting trend was that in education and health participation was higher in undergraduate degrees than postgraduate ones, while it was revered in IT and engineering.

Nigel then showed a series of graphs showing international versus domestic students for the group of eight universities. Unfortunately all the colored likes look blue to me, so I could not see what the graphs were showing.

Nigel suggested that some measures to lessen attrition, such as research methods courses,  will also improve the graduate outcomes (courses for doctoral students is a hot topic at ANU at present). 

Nigel described a "crude" research doctoral degree completion rates, stupid statistic. This is calculated from the number of students completing in one year divided by the number there were the year before. This is not a very useful statistic because students normally take longer than a year to complete a degree. There have been attempts to come up with better measures, using longer periods and techniques such as a three year moving average (three years being more typical for degree completion). Unfortunately as Nigel points out such calculations are skewed by recent growth of international enrolments in Australia, which makes the relative competion rate look low.

The US PHD  Completion project found completion rates of 49% for humanities to 65% for engineering. Similar studies for ANU showed a completion rate of about 80% for full time students. Niegl's research is showing a similar high completion rate, but it is too early to report definitive results. The figures show an interesting S curve, with the rate of completions increasing rapidly for about the first five years and then tapering off. Nigel pointed out that there were a significant number of completions from five to ten years.

It is surprising how difficult it is to get an agreed measure and then actual statistics for completion rates for degrees. Universities are in the business of producing graduates (and this is a very large export industry for Australia). It would seem reasonable to have agreed measures for university output.

If there were more reliable statistics, it would be possible to consider measures to aid completion rates. But will this really have a useful effect on measures. As an example, if domestic male students complete at a lower rate than international female students, would it be appropriate to set a higher entry standard, or resources provided, on the basis of gender?

Nigel concluded that doctoral attrition was not a wicked problem and this this might engender a sense of helplessness.

I suggest some easy measures to address attrition would be to provide more flexible programs. As an example, Australian postgraduate students could be offered programs which allow for a mix of coursework and research. As is usual in North America, students would start with coursework and then, depending on their interests and aptitudes, focus on coursework or research. Also the option of the student completing a qualification lower than a doctorate, without feeling they have in some way failed, would be useful. In addition it would be useful to have accessible support services, which are available on and off campus, would be useful. Also services for monitoring supervisors in the way teachers are, would be useful.

Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills

The "Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills" (ATC21STM) is a project between Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, Singapore, the Netherlands, Finland, USA, Costa Rica and, in Australia, the University of Melbourne (Care, 2014). The ATC21S website says they are "... developing methods to assess skills that will form the basis for 21st-century curricula". That sounded interesting, but I could not find details of how this was being done.

In terms of assessing skills, I found the approach used for Australian Computer Society's postgraduate students most useful. With this you get the student to do whatever it is you are assessing, preferably in their workplace. This is much the same as the approach which I was trained in for assessment in the VET sector. I have applied this approach with masters students and it would seem applicable to fixing a light switch or developing a corporate strategy.

As an example, the assessment for my ICT Sustainability course, includes: "Write a report on the carbon footprint and materials use of the ICT operations of your organisation (or an organisation you are familiar with)".

Reference

Care, E., (21 January 2014), Assessing 21st century skills. Perspective Paper for the Centre for Education Research and Practice. Retrieved from https://cerp.aqa.org.uk/perspectives/assessing-21st-century-skills

New Australian Higher Education and Research Buildings

Australia appears to have faith in the financial viability of higher education, judging by the new buildings featured in Architecture Australia (AA) and Architectural Review Asia Pacific (ARAP). AA March/April 2014 features the Science and Engineering Building by Sinclair Knight Merz at Federation University Australia (previously University of Ballarat), the Cairns Institute by Woods Bagot at James Cook University and the Doherty Institute, University of Melbourne, UTS Broadway by Denton Corker Marshall for University of Technology Sydney, the Braggs Building by BVN Donivin Hill for University of Adelaide and the Translational Research Institute by Wilson Architects and Donovin Hill for University of Queensland and Queensland University of Technology.

While impressive looking buildings from the outside, they don't appear that innovative on the inside. Perhaps constrained by the conservative ideas of the clients, the building have traditional looking labs and teaching rooms. The Cairns Institute has what is called an "Interactive Lecture Theatre", but this turns out to just have fixed benches and ordinary chairs, much like the ANU Design Unit style of lecture theatre for the Australian National University fifty years ago.

How these buildings will adapt to the new research and educational environment, where most activities will be carried out online, is not clear. Within five to ten years the typical student will never need to visit a campus. A few students using specialised equipment may need to visit a campus for a few days a year. If the Australian economy is to prosper, researchers will similarly need to be pushed out into industry, corporations and government (the so-called Cambridge Phenomenon). There is little value in researchers sitting in an ivory tower, no matter how prettily these are now clad in shimmering steel. There will still be a need for administration and support staff to run universities, but as with the students and researchers, there will be no compelling reason for them to be in a big building at a campus.

Perhaps the best view of the future of the university campus is QUT Science and Engineering Centre. This has a gym, swimming pool, food court and children's educational centre. Less obvious are places for groups of students to study, tutorial rooms, lecture theatres and administrative offices.