Can Canadian Graduate Education Be Redesigned Around Jobs?

In "Arts graduate education in Canada should be redesigned around students’ and society’s needs" Malloy, Young, and Berdahl (2024) suggest focusing on public good. The authors argue not mimicking STEM degrees for arts and social science. As it happens a decade ago I enrolled in a Canadian social science graduate program which does what the authors call for.

The authors make the point that course-based professional masters degrees tend to be focused on careers, research degrees are less so. This is no accident, but by design. Research degrees are for training researchers, professional degrees for professionals. Australia has formalized this at the doctorate level with separate definitions for research and professional doctorates. The professional doctorates have a smaller research component and are more focused on industry needs. However, this requires finding a needed bundle of skills, in specific jobs, which students want, which are currley not met by other forms of education, and which university academics are capable of providing. Teaching professional skills requires teachers with professional experience, not just researchers. It also requires skills in educational design.

Malloy, Young, and Berdah criticise arts graduate student training for being linked to academic career skills, when their are few such jobs for them. However, do current academics have the skills and knowledge to train students for other careers? I teach computer project students using my decades of experience in the computer industry. However, when it comes to teaching them how to apply for a job, I hand the task to staff in the university's careers unit, who are specialists in the field (I then just manage the classes and assessment). 

If university arts academics are to redesign courses to fit new needs, they will need skills in program design. They will also need to get the real world requirements from somewhere. As a computer professional who started teaching at university I had had to learn how to teach. I then learned about how to design courses. Also tough my professional body I helped define the skills which professionals in my field need. The skills definitions are used by universities to design courses and by government to decide who is professionally qualified. This requires careful application of design and testing skills. While academics in STEM disciplines, as well as medicine, law and business are used to having to comply with these forms of external guideice, it may be challenging for arts academics.

It might be asked why, as an Australia, I am writing about Canadian graduate education. As it happens I have a Canadian graduate degree. I had intended to follow the research path, but ended up a coursework student. My degree is a Master of Education in Open, Digital and Distance Education. This is far from the author's view of Canadian degrees being unrelated to careers or society's needs. In my degree I studied how to teach students, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds who otherwise miss out on education. I also looked at how to teach students if an emergency kept them from campus. During the COVID-19 pandemic, these skills became vital. Not only was I able to teach my own students, but train tutors and advise colleagues on how to rapidly switch to online learning. 

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.

Combating the loneliness of learning

In "The loneliness of the long distance learner" (The Guardian, 8 December 2018), Judith Vonberg writes that there are an "... invisible group of distance learners ... studying on standard postgraduate courses, but they live ... at a distance from their university ...". I suggest the solution is for universities to remove the distinction between distance and on-campus, part-time and full time students. Programs should be designed on the assumption that students will be, for all or part of their studies, away from the campus.
Rather than making special arrangements for distance students, programs should be designed by default for them. Then additional on-campus options can be added, as required and as resources allow

I have been a postgraduate student for two years, studying by distance education for part of this time, while also designing and tutoring on-line courses on-campus and on-line myself. The most important lesson I have learned is how hard it is to be a student and how a well designed course, with well trained tutor can help. This is most important in the on-line environment, but the same teaching techniques apply on campus.

As an example, tutors are trained to first introduce themselves to the class. In the on-line case, this is done by providing a photo, a bio and a welcome message. The next routine step is to have the class introduce themselves to each other. Isolation can be further broken down by using group exercises.

While being an on-line student can be isolating, it is better than when I was (briefly) an on-campus, part time, night student. This was a bleak form of education. I would arrive on a cold, dark campus after work, go into a depressing uncomfortable tutorial room with a group of people I did not know and listen to a tutor who never introduced themselves who would simply read out what was on the slides. At the end of the class we would all leave. There was no-where on campus to go, as everything was shut and everyone had homes to go to. I lasted a couple of weeks. In contrast on-line asynchronous education is a much more social experience.

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

Masters Level Teaching, Learning and Assessment: Issues in Design and Delivery

This week I received a copy of the "Masters Level Teaching, Learning and Assessment: Issues in Design and Delivery" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). There was a thank-you note from the editor,  Pauline Kneale on the back of a postcard of Cornwall. After a bit of head-scratching, I remembered that I had answered some questions about my masters teaching experience for the book. The postcard was explained by Pauline being PVC at Plymouth University. 

As the introduction to the book points out, there has been considerable research undertaken into undergraduate degrees and postgraduate research programs, but taught masters tend to get forgotten somewhere in the middle. Coursework masters (as they tend to be known in Australia) have been seen by universities as a way to expand the market for their undergraduate courses, with minimal extra investment put into making the assessment slightly more challenging.

As Kneale's book points out, masters students are different to undergraduates and have different requirements. The benefit for the university in considering the needs of masters students will be less complaints and a group of students who are very much easier to teach. 

I am quoted in the book in Chapter 2 "The Diversity of Master's Provisions" (p. 22) and at the beginning of Part 5 "Curriculum Design" (p. 201). But I was a little annoyed to find that these were not formally cited or listed in the references.