Australian French Research Collaboration

 

Greetings from the Australian-French Association for Research and Innovation (AFRAN) meeting at the Canberra Innovation Network. Dr Charles Gretton and,l Dr Nian (Jenny) Jiang are talking about how research can have real world impact. Charles talked about both AI research improving industrial processes and Jenny development of new instruments. Charles pointed out 5% of ANU Techlauncher students go on to found companies. Jenny talked about joining Cambridge University just as COVID-19 lockdowns started.

Charles said "There are a lot of batshit stupid ideas being funded, so get your better idea out there!".

The 2024 AFRAN Forum on the  role of research and innovation in industry, policy and public dialogue is at ANU 4 to 6 Nov 2024, and is free.

Use Recorded Videos and Small Online Tutorials

It is time for lecturers to swallow our pride and accept the "sage on the stage" is not that important to student learning. In place of large live events, I suggest the flipped approach. Provide videos and other materials for students to study in advance (you can provide quizzes to help). Then have online tutorials for small groups. The lecturer can record some short videos for them to use during the tutorials (I suggest around 60 seconds each).

Video conference systems, such as Zoom, allow for hundreds of students to take part in an online interactive events (Webinar). During the event the class can be divided into smaller groups, to work on a task for a few minutes, then the class brought back togehter. This is an excellent teaching method, however, it places demands on the technology, and staff which may be too much due to the COVID-19 Coronavirus. There is likely to be very high utilization of videoconferencing, straining resources. Also large complex real-time events are harder to organize.

University Researchers Need to Implement COVID19 Measures NOW

Staff of universities and research organizations should have by now been issued guidelines for them to limit face to face meetings, and move activities on-line, due to the COVID-19 Coronavirus. University teachers have needed to make changes to accommodate students, but there has perhaps been less pressure on researchers to change their work habits.

Stop Gathering in the Common Room

One of the delights of being on the academic staff of a university has been gathering in the common room for regular morning tea. This is a very good way to find out what is going on, and to sound out colleagues about ideas. However, this must now stop.

Move Seminars On-line

Over the last few weeks I have been asking each organizer of a meeting, seminar, or conference I have been invited to attend or speak at to provide an online option. This started happening gradually, with notices from organizers saying they have either moved events entirely online, or at least added an online option. However, it is now time to drop the in-person option for events, and focus on providing good online alternatives.

Online events need to start on time, with someone to welcome arrivals, and assure them the audio is working. Also the number of people together running the event needs to be limited. There is no need for all the presenters to be together in the one room.

The Research Project You Save May Be Your Own

For those who are unconcerned about their own safety, I urge them to consider their colleagues and their families. If for no other reason, they need to change their behavior to protect their research, which will suffer if their research team is the center of a COVID-19 outbreak.

Australia Research Information Network

Greetings from an Australia Open Data Teleconference about the
the Australia Research Information Network (AURIN). The meeting was called by Steven Adler from IBM in NY. AURIN provides access to research data about the urban environment, such as demography, housing, transport, energy and water.

Massive Open Online Course Experiments

I signed up to try out the free online computing course "Creative Coding" provided by Monash University through
from Future Learn (the consortium set up by UK Open University). I was presented with Updated Terms and Conditions. These are to make it clear that research can be carried out using anonymous student data, as per the Future Learn Research Ethics Framework.

The massive open online courses provide an excellent supply of data for research and experimentation. The courses are entirely online, have large numbers of students and, at least in the case of FutureLearn, the participants have already agreed to provide their data. It would be interesting to see if any of the universities are carrying out experiments where they divide the students into groups, present each group with a different version of the course and see which works best. Also it would be interesting to see if this is covered by FutureLearn's research ethics framework.

Of course there is a danger that such experiments will only answer a limited range of questions. For example, students who are unable or unwilling to take part in such a course will not have their views considered.

Innovation at Australian Unviersites

Greetings from the Australian National University in Canberra, where I am attending a workshop for Early Career Academics (ECAs) on innovation. It was pointed out that as well as measures of academic output in terms of appears produced, the reputation of the university is also important as Australian universities earn a significant proportion of their funding from international full-fee paying students.

One problem for ECAs is that more and more PHDs are being produced and so there are proportionally fewer jobs in research, particularly in universities. Most new PHDs will not go on to research, but have to do teaching or work in industry, even if they come back to research later. What this suggests to me is that PHDs will need extra skills, in particular teaching skills and it would be better if they got those skills while doing their PHD, rather than later.

The workshop was told that there was little scope for growth in international student numbers. It was suggested that the area for growth was industry involvement. However, I suggest another area is retraining of the current workforce for new jobs.This is in addition to redesigning university degrees so they provide job-ready skills.

The workshop was told about the difference between creativity and innovation: creativity being about novelty and usefulness and innovation and implementation, which goes a step beyond.

The workshop heard from the ANU Research Services, Academy of Sciences Early Career Research Forum and ANU Edge.

It was interesting to see how innovation being done at ANU compared to other universities and countries, in particular Cambridge University and the UK. I see something I wrote on this in 1997, got a mention in a Cambridge University study: "A pilot study on the emergence of university-level innovation policy in the UK".

ps: A surprise last speaker at the innovation workshop was Pia Waugh,  on data.gov.au and GovHack. She mentioned that next years GovHack may be a "follow the sun" event, held at sites around the world in different time zones.

Web Social Science Applied to e-Learning

I found Robert Ackland's "Web Social Science: Concepts, Data and Tools for Social Scientists in the Digital Age" (SAGE Publications, 2013), on the new books stand at the ANU Library. This is very relevant to the pedagogy of e-learning, as the techniques for carrying out social research can be applied to research into the effectiveness of on-line learning. The introductory chapter includes a potted history of the Internet and the web, but more importantly discusses what virtual communities and on-line social networks are. This could be useful for illuminating a discussion of what on-line education is.

What is on-line education?

Ackland discusses how a "community" develops  "common beliefs, norms and shared understandings. Ackland sees an on-line group of being less cohesive than a community being "... a group of people who conduct personal computer-mediated interactions, where the interaction is focused on a topic that reflects the community of interests of the group ...". Therefore I suggest the students in an on-line course could be considered an on-line group, with the aim of a vocational educators being to have the students become part of community. Social science research techniques could therefore be used to evaluate the effectiveness of education, by seeing how cohesive the group is and how well those students become part of the community.

Crowd Sourced Funding for University Research and Development

Greetings from the University of Canberra, where Scott Chamberlain, Chamberlains Law Firm is talking on "Is crowd funding an option in a university setting?". Crowdfunding uses the web to collect small donations from the public for projects, which usually have a social benefit. Scott pointed out that under Australian law is it very difficult to offer people equity participation. The USA is going to change its law to allow for this, but not Australia. So a share of the business can't be offered with crowd source funding in Australia. Also whatever might be offered in return for a contribution is subject to consumer protection law. Also if something is offered in return for money, then this might be considered the sale of goods, with tax due.

Scott also pointed out that as it is necessary to provide details of the project with the crowd-source appeal, it will be difficult to protect the intellectual property. This then suits requests for straight donations, appealing to the public to help with projects in the public interest. This can therefore be applied to research projects. The project can still offer those donating small gifts, such as an invitation to a preview, or a copy of a report.

An example from University of Canberra is postdoctoral fellow Clare Holleley, raising funding for marsupial research. Clare pointed out that the campaign needed daily attention while it was running. But she also mentioned a bonus in terms of a higher professional profile through the process.



It might be interesting to see if the cost of creating the video and quizzes for a MOOC could be funded with Crowdfunding. At a previous presentation, Matthew Benetti at Pozible.com expressed interest in hearing from universities interested in Crowdfunding a MOOC.

Conceptually crowd-funding is not much different from a university asking the community for donations to fund research and education, and then invite the donors to thank-you drinks. The crowd-funding services take a commission (of around 5%). It would be interesting to compare this overhead with the cost of running the philanthropic activities (such as ANU Alumni Relations and Philanthropy). Obviously where donations of millions of dollars are made by individuals, the university can afford to have considerable staff support. Also where there is an existing relationship with the university, such as alumni, then an internal on-line system can be used. ANU has a "Donate online" facility, which allows money for general purpose, or a specific project. An advantage of using the university system is that the donations are tax deductible for the donor.

What might be interesting is if the universities were to create their own crowd-funding functionality, rather than use a commercial service. This could be run on the university computer system, or outsourced to an external provider. The external provider could be a not-for-profit provider, rather than a commercial one.

If universities are mainly interested in  donations from alumni, then it might be worth using a social networking type system, rather than a crowd-funding system. The university is likely to want to offer the alumni an ongoing experience, rather than one off donation requests.

One way to get participation by alumni might be crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding of post-graduate coruses. The idea being that graduates would be asked to suggest what further education they feel they need. Then the alumni would be asked to help fund the development of such courses. The donors would be invited to contribute case studies to be used as part of the course and to be be beta-testers of the on-line version of the course.