Just filed to the Rhetorical Question for the Ages desk; ANU headlines a research story, “are you smarter than a Neanderthal?” Certainly not – very difficult it is to paint Wordle answers on a cave wall.
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Making Andrew Giles Minister for Skills and Training could be a win for higher education lobbies. Mr Giles is not in cabinet and as such does not have the standing to stick up for his patch in the room where it happens. This will be useful indeed for universities if Accord ideas for combining VET and HE in a single secondary system ever happen.
But his appointment is a big loss for supporters of a national VET system. The structural reforms to qualifications and the new Jobs and Skills councils are only just getting going – and both will be exposed to nupathons by State Ministers who do not rate Mr Giles’ capacity to stop them claiming their State is different to whatever the national government proposes .
It is also a loss for the VET community in general – the Government has talked up skills and training for years but now demonstrates it is so politically expendable that it does not rate a Cabinet seat.
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Uni Adelaide launches “Classroom Management,” a new micro-credential for school teachers across the country. “Investigate strategies for creating safe, predictable, productive and orderly learning environments that foster routines, build trust, cultivate a sense of community and support more engaged and productive learning,” is the pitch.
Produced by the university’s Professional and Continuing Education team, the course takes 48 self-paced hours and is free to users. It is a response to a proposal from the Quality Initial Teacher Education Review
For years the hack formerly known as Campus Morning Mail banged on about the potential for government to use micro-credentials for professional training and community support campaigns. While there is nil chance that anybody in the Department of Education knew or cared, it is very good indeed that the feds are funding Uni Adelaide teacher ed m-cs with $3m to design and deliver courses. Two more; “Explicit Teaching” and “Teaching Phonics” will follow in coming months.
Hang on, you ask, are not these all fundamental skills that Initial Teacher Education courses should cover? Quite.
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Uni Tasmania announces another completion off Sandy Bay campus. It’s the refurb of the Philip Smith Centre, on the Domain – the location of the university’s original campus. Yet another irritation for opponents of the university plan to move from Sandy Bay and sell most of the site for housing.
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Trigger alert for research lobbyists who want more funding for members and less (or better still none) for industry–news from the Productivity Commission may make heads explode. The PC reports that the Research and Development Tax Incentive is the Commonwealth’s largest industry assistance spend, accounting for 16 per cent ($2.5bn) of the 2022-23 total. Three of the other five programs are for small business. CSIRO is the fourth with 7 per cent. Apart from CSIRO, they are all uncapped, “meaning spending and tax relief provided by these programs is likely to be ongoing.”
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It was business as usual this week at the Australian Research Council with Future Fellow awards. The success rate was 17 per cent, with two-thirds of the 100 grants going to STEM projects. The Group of Eight accounted for 61; it was the standard stand-out performance by Uni Queensland, with 15 awards.
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The message for International Open Access Week (October 21-27) is “community over commercialisation” – same as ’23, because there are on-going questions, including;
“what are the consequences when a small number of corporations control knowledge production rather than researchers themselves and what are the hidden costs of business models that entrench extreme levels of profit while exacerbating inequity.”
FC has a question for the organisers – what do you propose to do about the global research model that relies on the vast resources of publishers that produce journals and manage research data when there is no OA alternative at scale.
Perhaps Mark Sutherland, the new director of OA Australasia can explain how to make incremental improvements. As ED of the Council of Australian University Librarians he led negotiations with dozens of scholarly publishers, including the for-profit big five, John Wiley, Springer-Nature, Taylor & Francis, Sage and Elsevier. The essence of the deals done is papers by academics at CAUL members are OA on publication funded by a single price for all a publisher’s products.
Such agreements are not popular with OA activists. The European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities warns read and publish big deals, “effectively consolidate and enhance their already dominant position in the field of scholarly publishing, solidifying their role as the gatekeepers of publicly funded research.”
They do – but for now does anybody have some ready-to-go better ideas?
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The Budget included funds for the Australian Skills Authority to pilot delegating VET course accreditation to “selected TAFEs in areas of emerging industry needs.” And ASQA is inching towards being on to it, announcing it will consult with the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations, state training agencies and likely “a broader reference group.” As to what happens next, ASQA adds it will let us know as details are developed. And so begins the elevation of TAFE to having the fundamental autonomy to accredit its own courses.
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The University of Sydney announces an external review of policies and processes to “safeguard the wellbeing of our community, academic freedom and freedom of speech.”
The University has already announced a new policy on protests, including a 72 hours-notice requirement which the NSW Council of Civil Liberties says shuts-down free speech and encroaches on the right of public assembly. There was a campus protest about it yesterday.
The university initiatives come as a Senate committee considers a Bill from Education Shadow Minister Sarah Henderson for a Commission to inquire into antisemitism at Australian universities. Given her trenchant criticism of Uni Sydney VC Mark Scott over his management of pro-Palestinian protests on campus, it is a fair bet Senator Henderson will want him to give evidence.
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In the worst timing since Future Campus last danced, the Tuition Protecting Service announces consultations on the levy it charges to protect international students whose providers default. Just now the industry is focused on how many internationals the Commonwealth will allow them to enrol.
