UNE Bespoke Graduate Certificate

The University of New England, in regional NSW, is offering a new "Bespoke Graduate Certificate". Students can select from courses across the university to assemble their own qualification. However, UNE is not the first university to do this, and a more focused qualification may be a better option.

The UNE Bespoke Graduate Certificate looks similar to the ANU Graduate Certificate of Studies, and other universities general studies programs. These allow students to choose from courses across their institution (and between institutions).

With a general studies qualification there is a risk of ending up with a "Certificate of Nothing in Particular". The student may do the studies they want, but a prospective employer may not notice this detail. The student can instead consider undertaking a more focused qualification, and use the flexibility of including alternative courses to suit their interests. As an example, I undertook an ANU Graduate Certificate in Higher Education. After consultation with my supervisor, I substituted two courses from partner institution USQ, for two ANU courses.

My interest was in online education, and USQ was offering specialist courses in this. A bonus was that USQ offered courses outside ANU's semesters, allowing me to complete quicker. Having a qualification in education is far more useful than a general one made up of education courses.

UNE indicates their certificate can be completed in 1 year part-time. However this assumes the student undertakes two courses at a time. As a part-time student I found completing two courses at once to be very difficult. If the student is undertaking studies part-time, and particularly online, I suggest they should be encouraged to do only one course at a time. Where the institution offers three or four periods per year, the student can still complete in a reasonable time.

New Website for Finding Australian Postgraduate Courses

Richard McKeon,
Postgrad Australia

The company Postgrad Australia has launched a new website for students looking for postgraduate programs. As an example, the site lists 18 Graduate Certificates in Higher Education. I was able to sort the list by fee or by satisfaction. 

The most expensive certificate ($23,904) rated highest for student satisfaction, which is reassuring. But the lowest priced course ($3,980) did not rate far behind for satisfaction. At one sixth the price, this suggests value for money. This also applied to Masters of Education, with the cheapest being rated almost as highly by students as the most expensive. Perhaps the website could include a "value for money" rating for programs, which would be a ratio of fee to satisfaction.

One problem with the site is that there is no option to search by method of course delivery. Like many graduate students, I want to be able to study on-line in my own time. So I want to limit searches, at least initially, to on-line programs. This would also be of use to international students, who don't want the bother and expense of having to visit Australia.

Of course the other limitation with Postgrad Australia is that it only includes Australian based institutions. Students can study on-line anywhere in the world. I studied in Canada while on the other side of the world in Canberra.

Improving Professional IT Doctorate Completion Rates

Burmeister (2015) reports the results of  interviews with 44 students and staff involved in post-graduate IT education at Charles Sturt University (CSU). While focusing on professional IT doctorates, Burmeister points out that CSU has three exit points: Graduate Certificate, Masters and then the Doctorate. The program has coursework in the first two years, but students are also "guided to develop an article and
submit it to a conference or journal" in each of these two years. Other masters programs might benefit from this approach.

In the Masters of Education I have been undertaking I have been producing a conference paper each year, as a byproduct of assignments. However, I have not mentioned this to my tutors, for fear of it being seen as overly ambitious for a coursework student. This caused a problem when one conference paper was published before the assignment I had based it on had been marked and so was flagged as possible plagiarism.

Burmeister  suggests that flexible delivery can
improve work-life-study balance and so improve retention of students. However, this suggestion seems almost redundant.  Pye, Holt, Salzman, Bellucci and Lombardi (2015) found that students expect an on-line environment to be used. I suggest that it is time for Australian universities to assume their students, particularly post-graduate students, will be on-line and off-campus for most of their studies. Programs should be designed for on-line delivery, and then adaption made for on-campus components, rather than the reverse.

Burmeister  suggests that student engagement with
supervisors should be enhanced with weekly or fortnightly contact. This would result in a high workload for staff if done using conventional techniques, such as face-to-face meetings. I suggest it could be done using on-line asynchronous communication. Students don't need a supervisor taking at then for half an hour each week, then just need a couple of lines of pertinent text.

Reference

Burmeister, O. (2015). Improving professional IT doctorate completion rates. Australasian Journal Of Information Systems, 19. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.3127/ajis.v19i0.1073

Pye, G., Holt, D., Salzman, S., Bellucci, E., & Lombardi, L. (2015). Engaging diverse student audiences in contemporary blended learning environments in Australian higher business education: Implications for Design and Practice. Australasian Journal Of Information Systems, 19. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.3127/ajis.v19i0.1251