New Australian University Promoting On-line Degrees

University of Adelaide advertisement,
Parramatta Road, Sydney,
Photo by Tom Worthington, 9 August 2025

Adelaide University, formed from University South Australia and University of Adelaide, is promoting it's online education. The 'launch from anywhere" campaign appears on a bus shelter in a main street in Sydney, as well as on social media. This bus stop is on Parramatta Road, which fronts three universities (Sydney, UTS and Notre Dame). It is a daring move for one of Australia's leading universities to promote e-learning  and so close to major campuses. Would those a short bus ride from established universities choose to study online, at a university 1,000km away?

Adelaide is also home to Torrens University, the Australian arm of a multinational online learning provider. However, while Torrens has elearning as its core business (supplemented with campuses across Australia), Adelaide University was formed from two conventional campus based institutions. Australia's capital city research universities have tended to keep their online offerings low key, for fear of being seen as low quality. Universities run occasional weird e-learning TV advertisements, or provide e-learning at arms length though Open Universities Australia.

The campaign is aimed at Australians, with international students being excluded. Student visas ban fully online study. However a student who is in another country, and doesn't visit Australia doesn't need a visa. They could complete a degree online without leaving home. I did this 2013 to 2016, studying in Canada, from Canberra.

It may be that Adelaide University has judged offshore students would not be willing to pay full fees. In contrast domestic online students pay the same fees as on campus students. When studying online at an Australian university 1,000 km away I was a little annoyed I was paying for the upkeep of playing fields I never used, or saw. ;-)

ASCILITE 2025 at University of South Australia

Greetings from the closing session of ASCILITE 2024, where University of South Australia  have been announced at the hosts for the conference next year. This will be one of the last events hosted by the university before it formally merges with University of Adelaide. The theme is "Continuous Change" with is appropriate for higher education. Given the Australian Government's failure to have a coherent policy, a better theme might be "Bin Fire". 

Should Australia's universities merge across state borders?

The University of South Australia and University of Adelaide are merging. This will make an institution with about 60,000 students,  & one of the biggest in the country (after Monash). No doubt staff at both institutions have been crunching the numbers to see if the merged institution will go up in national and global university rankings. At present University of Adelaide is the bottom ranking of Australia's' Group of Eight top universities, and UniSA is not on the list at all. A bigger question is if a large geographically based university is a good model of the 21st century. 

Australia's capital city major universities are each a product of their state governments (apart from ANU, which was established by the national government). As a result each university operates mainly from the state capital, and within the state boarders. However, Australia is a nation, and education is now a global business. Should other smaller universities in Australia, which do not have the same state government patronage, seek to merge, but not restricted to state boundaries? In particular smaller regional universities could form larger geographic groupings, such as northern, eastern, southern, and western (the latter is of course, also a state boundary).

Survey Volunteers Needed for Study of Digital Communication and Work Stress in Universities:

E-stress Survey Link

The University of South Australia is leading a study into "Digital Communication and Work Stress in Universities". They are seeking volunteers who work in Australian universities to survey.

This is an excellent initiative, however, they are focusing on those who have a full time working week. Much of the university workforce is part time and casual. These people have been exploited by universities through systematic wage theft, and threatened with loss of work. So I suggest excluding them from studies of work stress will skew the results.

As for how to reduce stress, I suggest courses designed with an asynchronous core, supplemented with online and classroom synchronous events, can help, by lowering student stress and therefore staff stress. With this approach no special arrangements are needed for a campus lock-down, or individual student emergency. The same approach can also be taken to staff meetings, with it not assumed that everyone can turn up on campus at a particular time. I will be touching on this in the webinar "Keep Calm and Carry Online", 20 October from ANU (all welcome).  

Also work stress could be reduced by teaching staff good practices as to how to work online. In response to seeing people waste a lot of time on email, in 1997 I wrote "How to Read and Write E-mail Messages". 

Scaffolded learning, where students do their assignments a bit at a time helps, as do more flexible assessment schemes. One example I have used is "best X out of X+2" assessment in a "Green computing professional education course online". The idea is that students are assessed on their best work, so do not have to worry about doing badly in, or missing, a couple of assessments. This reduces the need for students to ask for special consideration, extra time, and remarking. It also encourages students to work steadily through a course, not leaving everything to the end.

Usable and accessible online courses

Greetings from the seminar room of Australian Centre on China in the World (CIW)at the Australian National University where I am taking part in "How usable and accessible are your on-line courses?" by Professor Denise Wood, Central Queensland University, and Dr Sheila Scutter, University of South Australia. We were first introduced to the principles of accessible web design and the more general Universal Design for Learning. They are designing a MOOC for teaching this. Jeremy Smith from ANU received an acknowledgement for his contribution.

The project is not just about making course materials readable for people with a disability, it is also  about accessibility more broadly. Also it is about making course accessible on-line for completely remote delivery, or in blended mode.

Some of these are issues of basic course design, which will benefit all students. For example, how to how to contact the instructor and what course materials are available are issues which are not well addressed in traditional classroom based courses and can be improved with on-line support.

One tool mentioned was the Student Usability Scale (SUS). Also the use of software installed on the user's computer to record a test session for the usability of a course was discussed. The Flexible Learning for Open Eduction (FLOE)  tool was demonstrated.

I am familiar with some of these accessibility issues having been an expert witness in the Sydney Olympics 2000 Accessibility case and invited to advise the Beijing Olympics.

Wood and Scutter gave an excellent seminar on well run research into teaching. Unfortunately, this appears to be another of the Office of Learning and Teaching (OLT) funded research projects which is addressing the wrong question. There are decades of research on on-line course design and accessibility. There are tools and training courses based on this research in routine use in the vocational education and training (VET) sector for developing accessible courses. The question is why Australian universities do not implement what has been shown to work in the VET sector.

For anyone teaching across the vocational and university sectors (as I do), the differences are obvious. In the vocational sector (and in distance/open universities) the courses are designed by a team and then delivered by instructors. All the courses for a program use the same template, with course components laid out in the same way. The instructor has limited, or no, ability to change the template or the course materials (even to correct spelling errors or broken links). As a result, accessibility is designed in to the program, at the cost of flexibility.

Universities, particularly research orientated universities, allow their academics more freedom in course design and delivery than the vocational sector. The academic can teach what they want, how they want. But researchers are trained to conduct research and are understandably reluctant to take the extra time needed to learn how to design courses and teach. This problem is not unique to Australia. Last year I talked to staff at Cambridge University about how to help the graduate students with on-line courses. One option would be to incorporate basic teaching skills in postgraduate research programs, bringing early career academics up to the standard of VET teachers. Bryant and Richardson (2015) found that university lecturers with teacher training tended to have fewer failing students.

Academics producing a course content need to only work on the content, using the skills of specialists to worry about how it is presented. As an example text can be written using the default formatting features of a word-processor, so that it will inherent the style set up for the institution's template. I have used this approach for the course "ICT Sustainability", enabling the course content to restyle automatically when the institution's template is updated. This has also allowed the course to be ported between three very different higher education institutions (vocational, open and research orientated) and also adapted for mobile devices with minimal additional work required.

Scriven describes how from the 1970s he became increasingly disenchanted with evaluating US education programs based on the goals of the programs, leading to Goal-Free Evaluation (GFE)  (p. 56, 1991). A program designed to improve the usability and accessibility of courses is likely to be successful by its own internal logic: those academics who are motivated to take part are likely to produce better courses. However, using GFE, the bigger question becomes apparent: how do we motivate Australian university academics to improve courses? I suggest this is the area needing research.

References

Bryant, D., & Richardson, A. (2015). To be, or not to be, trained. Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 37(6), 682-688. DOI: 10.1080/1360080X.2015.1102818

Scriven, M. (1991). Prose and cons about goal-free evaluation. Evaluation Practice, 12(1), 55-63. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0886-1633(91)90024-R