higher education

Ditch the widgets. Start investing in their amazing futures

higher education funding, higher education policy, Participation in higher education, , , , ,

The cost of teaching a student from a low SES background is significantly higher than for more advantaged students. The reasons for these costs include the ‘obvious’ assumptions, such as bursaries, but are likely driven more substantially by infrastructure investment by a number of universities specifically supporting campuses in areas and regions as part of their mission to provide a university pathway as an option to a diverse range of our population.

We believe this investment (a better way of thinking about it than ‘cost’) could be better recognised in funding agreements by switching the focus from ‘activity-based’ funding (i.e. “count your widgets, take your dollars”), to ‘mission-directed’ funding (i.e. recognition of the social impact and additional resources that these contributions require and perhaps redirecting funding from the low cost ‘low hanging fruit’ approaches of some).

Who are we and how did we discover this? A team of researchers spanning multiple universities (Victoria Uni, ANU, Curtin RMIT) and ACER published an article exploring the costs associated with supporting students from low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds in university. Our study has a ridiculously complex methodology – using econometric modelling to explore the economies of scale in relation to the costs of educating students in Australian universities, with ten years of financial, enrolment and employment data from 37 universities, and then exploring the outcomes with people who run universities across a range of states – but when you pare it all back, a relatively simple set of findings:

Here’s an overview.

Quantifying costs and differences in costs

First we compiled a large dataset spanning all Australian universities across 10 years. The dataset contained operating expenditure, student enrolments, level of enrolment, field of education and background characteristics of students, teaching costs, research grants, location of university and type of university. This was analysed using an econometric model to identify the average costs for each student, and to explore if there are economies of scale in enrolling some groups of students – in other words, does the average cost decline the more of a group of students you enrol? 

The stark finding (that we checked and re-checked) was that when all other elements are controlled for, the average annual cost for a student from a low SES background at undergraduate level was about 6 times higher than for a student from a medium or high SES background. The difference was slightly lower for postgraduate level students, but nonetheless, it was still a notable difference.

However, the other aspect of the analysis did show that there are economies of scale in enrolling students from low SES backgrounds at undergraduate level – that is, the higher the number of students of this background, the lower the average costs per student become. We also found the opposite (i.e. a diseconomy of scale) for medium and high SES student enrolments.

Explaining the differences

We took our data findings ‘on the road’, visiting four diverse universities in Australia to talk with academic, finance and student support leaders. We wanted to test whether the outcomes from the analysis made sense on the ground and found that while views differed, some key explanations were clear:

  • The kind of additional support needed by students from low SES backgrounds includes: outreach support to raise aspiration and relevant individual capital prior to enrolment; academic, personal and financial support while at university; and in some cases, support to care for students with highly complex needs.
  • The support factors that contribute to the additional costs include investment in the items listed above plus the costs of establishing, maintaining and appropriately staffing multiple and/or regional campuses, particularly but not only those located in highly disadvantaged communities. Further, it was found that universities that are strongly prioritising or enacting missions to address disadvantage have higher costs than universities with other missions.
  • Additional support costs are not the same for all low SES students. Low SES students are not a homogeneous group. Depending on their particular background and circumstances, low SES students may experience different levels of disadvantage and/or multiple disadvantage.

In the universities consulted, there were different costs and different approaches to supporting low SES students. This was partly because of the differences in the universities’ missions, the number and geographic locations of campuses and the characteristics of the particular low SES students for whom support was being provided.

Future considerations on funding

We hope that what this research does is help to highlight the difference in investment required depending on the backgrounds of students enrolled in a university. The emphasis in shifting language from ‘cost’ to ‘investment’ is intended as a means of changing views and perceptions – much the way in which some universities in Australia embed in their mission an aim to open up opportunities by investing in areas or communities where previously a university pathway was not a consideration.

A radical, yet seemingly logical, proposition coming from this research is that if some student groups need a greater investment than others, then perhaps the funding pie should be cut in a way that recognises the variable investments required. From our work, we feel that consideration of ideas to recognise the various missions of universities and the different students they serve in following their mission could be captured in funding allocations. Ideas we have suggested for further consideration include a redistribution of funding based on need; shifting emphasis from activity-based to mission-directed costing; applying the principles of ‘cost compensation’; and conceptualising funding support for students from low SES backgrounds as a transformational investment that can improve outcomes for individuals, communities and society, rather than as a cost.

Dr Daniel Edwards is the Director of the Tertiary Education Research Program at the Australian Council for Educational Research, and an Honorary Senior Fellow with the University of Melbourne’s Melbourne Centre for the Study of Higher Education. Daniel Edwards (ACER) wrote this post on behalf of the project team: Marcia Devlin (VU), Liang-Cheng Zhang (ACER), Glen Withers (ANU), Julie McMillan (ACER) and Lyn Vernon (Edith Cowan University)

Is this now the Federal government’s most bone-headed idea ever?

Changes to higher education, equity in higher education, higher education, higher education policy, Participation in higher education, PhD education, PhD work, research work, , , , ,

Apparently international PhD students in Australia now have to seek ministerial approval to change their thesis topic or face deportation.  

Yes. You read that right. 

According to guidelines published on the Australian Government immigration and citizenship website (Karen Andrews, pictured in the header, is the Minister for Home Affairs), International PhD students who want to change their “thesis or research topic” now have to wait for an Australian politician to sign off the change or risk have their visa cancelled. As Julie Hare reports in the Australian Financial Review, the government is worried that “… there might be an ‘unreasonable risk of unwanted transfer of critical technology, or theft of intellectual property”. And apparently the minister will make a decision after they have ‘obtained an assessment from the competent Australian authorities.’ 

The deep, and – I’m just going to say it – totally bone headed stupidity of this idea is maybe not apparent to anyone who has not done a PhD. The whole first year of the PhD is meant to involve refining a topic. Many PhD students change their topic dramatically in the first year. Or they change it later on, due to unforeseen circumstances. Imagine the next Alexander Fleming having to wait for the minister to approve their investigation of this century’s equivalent of mouldy petri dish? Given how long it takes ministers to make decisions, I don’t have much hope Australia will produce the next penicillin. 

It’s not just medical geniuses who take their time. My own PhD application to Melbourne university in 2005 suggested I was going to study ‘genetic algorithms which can find architectural form’. Don’t even ask – the idea was deeply fashionable at the time. In the six months between my application being accepted and starting my research, I changed my mind about twenty times. My first research plan, written about 3 months in, suggested I was going to study the ‘linguistics of architecture’. This idea – to be clear – was Not Good. But my supervisor had to listen to me gibber on about it for a couple of weeks. Bless his heart, he never let me commit to such a crappy idea and coaxed me into exploring hand gestures. 

It was at least nine months into my PhD before I worked out why a study of architects’ gesturing was worth doing. I won’t bore for Australia as to why it was useful. The point of this story is that making knowledge is a deeply uncertain business. You need time to read, think and talk to people. That’s exactly why we don’t ask people to apply for a PhD with a ready to go project plan that can just be rolled out – as this visa legislation seems to assume. I’m deeply grateful for the time I was given to explore the possibilities and change my mind. The idea of getting ministerial approval every time an international PhD student changes their mind about your PhD thesis topic is not only stupid, and completely unenforceable. Worse, it’s all part of an insidious government over-reach into the business of being an academic in this country. Over-reach with creepy racist overtones to boot.  

This government seems perpetually anxious about international students and about academics more generally. PhD students from some countries have restrictions over what they can study, for instance, students from Iran are forbidden to study nuclear technology. Students on a visa don’t have the right to ‘be disruptive’, which handily limits their ability to protest. In case you missed it (I mean, it’s been a busy couple of years), all of us academics are now framed as being potentially dangerous traitors. In 2021, the Australian government published the Guidelines to counter foreign interference in the Australian university sector (the Guidelines) in which they state that universities will require: “declaration of interest disclosures from staff who are at risk of foreign interference, including identification of foreign affiliations, relationships and financial interests.” I’ve asked my university, what does a ‘foreign relationship’ mean? Does an ongoing research conversation over email and writing papers with colleagues in other country trigger the need for a declaration? No one can tell me for sure because the guidelines are so vague and all encompassing. 

Where exactly is the line between reasonable caution and paranoia these days? It’s so hard to tell.  

Besides being impossible to enforce, this latest government brain fart seems to be a solution in search of a problem. Are there actual situations which have led to a clear need for this visa change, or is this the result of fevered imagining by intelligence agency personnel who don’t get out enough? I mean,  if these intelligence officials had taken the time to call any working academic in Australia I wouldn’t have to waste my Sunday afternoon writing this article. But I suspect it’s not the intelligence officials behind this change. We have a conservative government eager to punch on academics any chance they get, as we saw during the pandemic. It’s hard to avoid this feeling that this particular government just hates academics, which is a sad turn for our country. 

I don’t want to say Australia is turning into a fascist state, but perhaps our politicians are just a little too fascist curious? Just like our foreign interference guidelines, this new international student visa requirement is both vague and all encompassing. It seems designed to produce a chilling effect. To be honest with you, as I write this article I am starting to wonder – should I speak out so forcefully? Will I become a target? Is a file on me open inside the Australian government somewhere labelled: ‘middle aged female academic: angry’?

On the other hand, maybe the government is on to something. The minister for Home Affairs, Karen Andrews, could save a lot of us supervisors a lot of time by being the sounding board for these agonising PhD topic conversations. My imaginary conversation with Karen Andrews about my thesis topic changes goes something like this: 

“So Karen, hey girl!, I’ve been thinking about my PhD topic and maybe genetic algorithms… are they too 2005? you know? I’m wondering if this thesis will date me, but not in a good way. I’ve been thinking I need a topic that is, I dunno, more – timeless? So I’m thinking about linguistics… 

Karen? … Are you there Karen? I hope I’m not boring you…”

Professor Inger Mewburn is the director of the Researcher Development Office of the Dean of Higher Degree by Research at the Australian National University, Canberra. Her blog The Thesis Whisperer is a must read. You can find her at @thesiswhisperer.

Image of Karen Andrews in header by Mick Tsikas

Five Ways to Rethink Online and Blended Learning Post-COVID

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In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Australian universities rapidly shifted to online models of learning and teaching. Some argue that this shift was long overdue. But even before the pandemic, online learning was rapidly growing in popularity in Australian tertiary education institutions. Recent data collected by the Australian Department of Education and Training show that the number of students enrolling in online and blended offerings in the higher education sector is rising faster than the number of students studying on campus. But should online and blended learning stay post-COVID? The answer is clear: YES! 

Online and blended education allows universities to expand course offerings to an increasingly wider number of students. Online education offers increasing opportunities to students from historically marginalised groups who may have previously been excluded from higher education, including students from regional and rural parts of Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, and students from lower socio-economic backgrounds, students with disability, and students who are the first in their family to study at university.

Online education is more accessible to students who work part- of full-time while studying, or for students who have substantial family or carer responsibilities. Research including the student voice has identified several reasons why they are choosing to study online. Students have said they prefer online and blended learning because it offers increased flexibility (such as the ability to choose when and where to study), the ability to fit study around lifestyle commitments (such as family and work), and reduces barriers associated with fixed timetables, transportation, and the physical on-campus environment. 

Australian students who were not able to access higher education before due to geographic location, disability, work, or family commitments report that online education now offers them their first opportunity to participate. 

For these reasons, online and blended learning should feature prominently in Australian higher education institutions, and university educators and researchers should be encouraged and supported to explore new ways to deliver high quality teaching in primarily asynchronous online environments. 

But online learning presents new challenges. Media reports during the COVID-19 pandemic have suggested that online learning might not be meeting the needs of all students:

  1. Uni students with disabilities say remote learning must improve
  2. ‘COVID is being used as an excuse’: Sydney’s uni students are losing patience with online learning
  3. Faculties need policies for quality assurance of online learning
  4. College students ask: What’s up with my ‘ghost professor?’

These reports are corroborated by research findings. Several studies have included the student voice to identify challenges associated with participation in online education. Here are five challenges that students might experience when participating in online or blended learning, and potential and practical solutions. The proposed solutions may help university educators to rethink the design and delivery of online learning post-COVID, to ensure that it meets the needs of diverse learners: 

ChallengeSolution
Students have reported that they have difficulty navigating the online learning environment, or they don’t know what they are supposed to be doing each week.Create a ‘Welcome to the Unit’ video, and make it the first activity that students see and complete when they log in to the learning management system (LMS; e.g., Moodle or Blackboard). In the video, you can welcome the students to the unit, and provide a video tour of the online site. On your video tour, show the students where they can find the assessment information, the unit calendar and due dates, weekly learning materials, and any other important content. 
Second, keep the navigation of your LMS simple and intuitive. Use clear section headers to organise weekly content or topics. 
Third, provide students with a printable checklist with a list of activities they should be working on each week, and key due dates.
Students have reported that they need help learning to use course technologies and cannot find information about where to access institutional support, such as tech support or enrolment supportIn a clearly marked section on your LMS, provide links to:Disability support servicesTechnology support servicesStudent advisor servicesAny academic supports available to studentsThe online library 
In your first synchronous class with the students, review the different supports and services that the university provides, and show students where to access the links. 
You might also consider including this information in a Frequently Asked Questions document for students, which you can post as an announcement during the first week of the semester. 
Students have reported that the course content lacks purpose or is not pitched at the right levelCreate clear and measurable course-level and topic-level learning objectives. Your course-level learning objectives should appear at the very top of the LMS, and should tell the students what they will be able to say and do at the end of the semester. The assessment tasks should be designed to allow students to demonstrate the course-learning objectives. 
The topic-level learning objectives should be more specific and aligned to the weekly content. For example, when providing weekly topic-level readings or activities for the students to complete, state the learning objective name or number that the activity is aligned to in brackets next to the activity. Really strengthen the alignment between activities and learning objectives!
Provide multiple ways for students to learn and engage with the content. For example, when teaching a specific concept (or topic), you might provide a textbook chapter, a brief video lecture, a link to a blog post or website, and an interactive activity. This provides students with different ways to engage with material, that vary in complexity and form. 
Students have reported that online education does not provide them with opportunities to build personal relationships with lecturersFirst, set up an online ‘Introduce Yourself’ forum and ask students to introduce themselves and answer a fun question (for example, if you could travel anywhere in the world right now, where would you go and why?). Personally respond and welcome each student when they post an introduction.
Supplement the asynchronous (or self-paced) online study activities with some synchronous real-time activities, such as discussion groups, tutorials, or drop in sessions. 
Use discussion forums, wikis, google forms, or other tools to create collaboratively learning activities for students. To maximise student engagement, provide very clear instructions about the task and the expected contribution of each student. Make the activity relevant by linking it to one component of the assessment task. Be present in the forum or in the collaborative learning space by providing encouragement, praise, and scaffolding (all sorts of feedback!) in response to student contributions. 
Students have reported that course technologies and content are inaccessibleProvide an accessibility statement for any course technologies you use. An accessibility statement provides users with information about how the technology or software meets basic guidelines for accessibility. If the technology does not have an accessibility statement, look for different technology. 
Include alternative text for any images that you post on your LMS.
Ensure videos include a captioning option or a transcript. 
Do not use coloured text to convey meaning. 
Always upload word documents and PDFs that are accessible and searchable. Never upload scanned documents, which are not accessible or searchable. 

It is important to note that university educators have also expressed concern about online education. University staff have reported feeling like they lack institutional support to design high quality online learning experiences. Staff have reported that they do not have enough time or resources to design engaging online content, and others reported that the sector lacks quality standards for online education. Staff have raised concerns about the degree to which online education is designed with accessibility and inclusion in mind, with some feeling that the accessibility of online learning environments was an afterthought, rather than a priority. 

As we move into a post-COVID era and look to the future, university administrators must also ensure that educators have the time, resources, and support to design high quality online and blended learning experiences for students. Online education is not simply a cheaper and easier option for universities. Online education can make higher education more accessible, equitable, and inclusive, but it must be done well. 

To learn more about designing accessible and inclusive online learning experiences, please check out our new free e-learning course for tertiary educators and learning designers.

Dr Erin Leif is a Board Certified Behaviour Analyst (BCBA) and Senior Lecturer in School of Educational Psychology & Counselling, the Faculty of Education,
Monash University. Her research interests include Educating for Diversity and Inclusion and Enhancing Health and Wellbeing

Why your doctorate can make you feel like you’re drowning

higher education, Mental health in higher education, PhD education, PhD work, , ,

This is not a cry for help. These aren’t my thoughts on the difficulties of managing money, time, kids, spouses, visas, conferences, the thesis, the job, or the dog, real as all these pressures clearly can be. Rather I want to share some of the impacts of early PhD studies on me, invite reflection, and offer a note of caution.

I am enjoying my doctoral studies more than any before it. I regarded my admission to the degree as a licence to read widely and write wildly. I’ve engaged with discourse from classical philosophy through neuroscience to behavioural biology, all through the lens of jurisprudential enquiry. I’m enthralled by it all. The possibility of realising nascent knowledge drives me forward. I feel accomplished when an idea reveals itself as a clear, sometimes seemingly novel, pure thought. If it does so at the right time it can manifest as a sentence or two which sparkles with satisfying clarity. Such is the evolution of a thesis, I hope. And a mind. 

My supervisors are quietly encouraging. Nevertheless, in their presence, I can feel woefully inadequate. I have said things to them that are just plain dumb, and other things just plain dumbly. An example of the latter kind was my remark that I found the PhD experience somewhat ‘destabilising’. When probed as to what I meant by that, I could offer nothing adequate. 

Where do we find a safe harbour?

Stumbling over the words of my attempt at an explanation, I muttered that everything was becoming less certain; I was less clear about what I knew, what I didn’t, and even about who, what and why I was. The global health pandemic didn’t wholly explain the phenomenon. No, I continued with deflating confidence, there was something in what I was reading, and in the process of learning itself, that was impacting me in ways I had simply not anticipated. I found it confronting. And I still do.

My research leads me to believe that our earliest hominin ancestors lived free of overt construct. They behaved first according to instinct and departed from it only when cognitive ability enabled them to believe that they had the choice to do otherwise. They resolved the existential problems with which they were confronted and, it seems in the process, transcended the objective fact of their entity as beings, to actually being. Our ancestors quite literally did ‘awaken’. I am left wondering if they did so in ways that I never have, can, or will. Thoreau said he felt as though he never did meet a person who was “quite awake”. It seems that, like me, he doubted that he was. His solution was Walden Pond.

There is perhaps an assumption that we, as modern humans, living as we do in this busy and sophisticated world, start from a position of self-awareness; with an understanding of what and who we are and the rules of our own existence. My doctoral studies suggest to me this isn’t so. I don’t understand very much at all. It is this knowledge, as much as any, that I can experience as destablising. 

Bertrand Russell validates what I feel. He wrote that philosophy ‘raises doubts’. It diminishes our feelings of certainty as to what things are. Russell regarded the doubt as liberating, enlarging our thoughts and freeing them “…from the tyranny of custom”. I agree. But when we are buffeted by those newly freed thoughts, encountered as part of the rigours of PhD study and life besides it, where do we find a safe harbour? 

I wonder if, more than any other course of study, the PhD doesn’t inherently involve breakage at some level, like a vase might as it smashes on a hard floor. For a time, there is only mess; scattered broken pieces that are disconnected from one another, such that the entity as a whole no longer exists (assuming that it ever did). Instead there are shards of sharp material that, if mishandled, will cause injury. The PhD candidate must confront that mess, all that ‘liberating doubt’, and try to understand what it represents. If the pieces are put back together so that something is (re)formed, better or differently understood, that is perhaps the true mark of a Doctor of Philosophy. But inherent in the journey, I think, is the possibility, and indeed the risk, that the vase will smash and that the candidate won’t be able to put it back together. It remains a broken mess which might never make sense again. Doubt prevails. 

Doubt doesn’t always feel liberating. It can be crippling, isolating, scarily confronting and personally challenging. Doubt is a frame of mind wherein feelings of being unsupported, anxious and depressed more easily surface, where we can feel deficient as researchers and our efforts pointless. We know that PhD candidates are susceptible to all these feelings, contributing to what Inger Mewburn has recently described as a “…frightening epidemic of mental health issues among PhD students.” No such epidemic has yet claimed me and one reason it hasn’t is because of my university. Increasingly I rely upon it as a space within which I can safely expose myself to ‘liberating doubt’. My supervisors are my ‘port of call’. For me at least these are important aspects of the value proposition of the university – it will provide me with the support I need to ‘break’, as it were, and then to try and reform. It will lessen the very real risks inherent in the process of my doing so. 

These are the risks about which I would caution new PhD candidates. They should be considered and reflected on more explicitly and universities could, I believe, lead and facilitate that discussion more than they do. A consequence of doing so might be candidates who are more resilient and better prepared to confront the all-pervasive and, yes, potentially destabilising doubts of the kind that go to the very core not only of who they are as researchers, but as persons. When properly supported within the educational setting of the university these same doubts are better able to become truly liberating and, in that form, are perhaps our best chance of moving toward that state of being “quite awake”. 

Richard Stewart is a practising lawyer in Melbourne and a confirmed PhD(Law) candidate at Southern Cross University. My research concerns the capacity for property law to be used as an agent for behavioural change. LinkedIn

We struggled to make university more equal. Has that battle for equality worked now?

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Australian education policy has really focussed on getting  ‘equity groups’ into university and then onto completion with initiatives designed to improve access and participation.

That worked. 

Recent data indicate that there has been growth in the university enrolment of these equity groups in the past ten years. Published studies have also found evidence for comparable employment outcomes for university graduates from equity groups shortly after degree completion with favourable employment outcomes sustained at three years after graduation.

But what happens next and why does it matter?

Education drives social mobility and levels the playing field for those with  disadvantaged backgrounds.

Our study looked at postgraduate study outcomes in tandem with employment for graduates from equity groups in Australia. We found graduates from equity groups are afforded the same, if not better, opportunities to engage in further study after the completion of their bachelor qualification. 

But we also discovered  graduates from some equity groups, namely those from low socioeconomic status backgrounds, with a disability, or from non-English speaking backgrounds experience weaker employment outcomes including being in full-time employment and salaries. 

Why is postgraduate study an outcome of importance? 

The opportunity to engage in postgraduate study is an important outcome in its own right, especially from an equity perspective. University degree attainment is influential on social mobility and associated with higher earnings over a lifetime, with higher earnings found for those with postgraduate qualifications. Globally, bachelor degree attainment has been growing and arguably, postgraduate degree attainment is increasingly needed to gain a competitive edge in the workplace, and to provide greater opportunities for leadership roles. Moving beyond benefits at the individual level, there are also persuasive reasons for encouraging a diverse postgraduate student base. Encouraging diversity in postgraduate education will flow on to diversity in a nation’s leaders, educators of future generations and other important influencers of a country’s future. 

Furthermore, finances are one of the greatest barriers to participation in higher education. Direct costs such as tuition fees are substantial, but are dwarfed by the opportunity cost of study – the missed earnings from time spent away from the workforce and in study. These costs are exacerbated for postgraduate degree study. It has been argued that social inequalities extend beyond first degrees into unequal graduate outcomes, including postgraduate degree attainment and occupational class. 

Postgraduate study and work outcomes 

Our study used data on over 40,000 Australian graduates sourced from the national Graduate Outcomes Survey, linked to data from 19 universities in Australia to examine work and further study for bachelor degree graduates. We considered employment and further postgraduate study outcomes for six equity groups: low socioeconomic status; with a disability; Indigenous; non-English speaking background; from regional and remote locations; and women in non-Traditional areas of study. We found that graduates from low socioeconomic backgrounds, with a disability, and from non-English speaking backgrounds experienced lower rates of employment, particularly those from non-English speaking backgrounds whose prospects of being employed after degree completion lagged far behind those from English speaking backgrounds. Conversely, graduates from regional and remote areas had superior prospects of being employed. 

Further study opportunity, however, were positive for all equity groups, except those from regional and remote areas. We found, however, that equity group graduates tended to be engaged in study of another bachelor qualification, and did not have comparatively higher rates of study in a postgraduate qualification. The one notable exception here was for women in STEM fields, who had markedly higher rates of further postgraduate research study. 

We also examined the outcome of full-time employment for equity group graduates. Once again, the same groups of graduates from low socioeconomic backgrounds, with a disability, and from non-English speaking backgrounds were found to be less likely to secure full-time employment. Separate analyses of hourly wages showed that these exact same groups also experienced weaker earnings.

What does these all mean? 

The comparable or slightly favourable employment outcomes for three of the equity groups (regional or remote areas, Indigenous, women in STEM) are encouraging and suggest that higher education policy for these groups are achieving their intended purposes. However, given the weaker employment and earning outcomes for the other three groups (low socioeconomic status, with disability, non-English speaking background), there is still work to be done. Our study was not able to pinpoint the reasons for the weaker employment outcomes due to the nature of the data, but previous studies have noted the lack of social capital and/or labour market discrimination for these groups, and these might require policy intervention and development. 

The finding that equity group graduates are more likely to be engaged in further study after their degree completion is interesting, but there remains some issues of concern. Firstly, a higher proportion of equity group graduates are engaging in further study at the bachelor degree level. This potentially limits any advantage that can be gained from further study and time further spent out of the workforce. Secondly, and related to the first point, it is possible that graduates from equity groups feel that they require further study to gain an edge in the labour market. It also raises questions on whether these graduates felt that their first degree did not adequately prepare them for work, and possibly concerns that they felt further investment in study is required to overcome labour market discrimination or other barriers. These important considerations will hopefully be the subject of future studies and action. 

Ian Li is an economist based at the School of Population and Global Health, The University of Western Australia. He is interested in applied fields of health and labour economics, particularly on research on the determinants of well-being, economic evaluation of healthcare, graduate outcomes and higher education policy equity. Ian is a member of the UWA Academic Board, the Equity and Participation Working Group, and director of the Public Health undergraduate major. He is an editorial board member of the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management and a co-editor of the Australian Journal of Labour Economics.

At least six ways COVID has crushed higher education (now university managers make it worse)

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Even less work-life balance, anxiety around online skills, fears the pandemic will be used to crush academic autonomy and cut costs. And by the way, COVID hit academic women hard.

Our research found the onset of the pandemic produced unprecedented organisational challenges for the higher education sector globally. That has been widely documented. As part of research funded by the Worldwide Universities Network, we undertook a global attitudinal survey in June and July 2020 to identify the impact of universities’ response to the pandemic on academics’ wellbeing.

Our publication, forthcoming in the Higher Education Research and Development journal, reports findings from the survey specific to the Australian higher education context and presents stark results. One year on, many academic staff in Australia are again working remotely, having previously returned to campus, and are likely to be feeling significant strain.

From the 370 survey responses, key findings include: work-related stress due to COVID-19 (78% agreement); reduced work-life balance (77% agreement); and digital fatigue (78% agreement). In terms of university leadership and managerialism, 69% of respondents felt that COVID-19 had intensified top-down governance and 60% felt that it had weakened trust in university leaders. This was also implied in strong agreement (92%) with the statement ‘The COVID-19 crisis will be used by universities as a means to legitimise ‘cost-cutting’ initiatives (closing programmes/departments/making job cuts)’.  Responses to open-ended survey questions reflect frustration over the implications of government policies that have created a quasi-market model of higher education in Australia and the associated over-reliance on international students as an income source, severely impacted by the pandemic.  These political and sectoral conditions, combined with the pandemic, created the perfect storm, the effects of which have impacted on the wellbeing of staff, as supported by the survey data.

Although overall there were some similarities with findings from other countries, respondents generally commented primarily on their universities, university leadership and the higher education sector, and government treatment of the sector was a secondary theme.  In the UK for example, the government’s furlough scheme has been available to the university workforce although to what extent it supported the sector remains to be seen.  Our global findings have also noted the gendered impact of COVID on female academics.

Ultimately it is the sense of community that will suffer most.

Academic staff reported undermining of academic autonomy with regard to rigid requirements around online teaching but the potential for greater autonomy if some of the more flexible working arrangements were to be retained. Some respondents had concerns about their own competence in using online digital tools, and concerns that changes to teaching, such as online teaching, would negatively impact on student learning outcomes. Conversely, some noted that digital skills and confidence had rapidly been acquired during the pandemic. Online working was also perceived by some respondents to weaken relationships: ‘Ultimately it is the sense of community… that will suffer the most.’ Facing the possibility of more online teaching and remote working in future, a challenge for the sector is to foster and maintain meaningful relatedness with colleagues and others via digital technologies. Although most survey respondents did not report an improved sense of belonging within their institution, this gap was filled by a general sense of support from colleagues and line managers.

The need for effective leadership within the higher education sector has never been more apparent than during COVID-19, but as made clear by our respondents, government appears to have abandoned the sector and university leadership are seen to use the pandemic as an opportunity to reduce costs. Sadly, many of the predictions in the survey responses were quickly borne out, including redundancies, restructures, pay cuts, course cancellations and moves to fully online courses.

The move away from the physical campus was occurring incrementally across Australian campuses prior to COVID-19. For example, unlike the UK, mandatory lecture recording was already commonplace in Australia and many students do not attend lectures in-person as a result.  It seems likely that the pandemic will have accelerated this process, which will have implications for staff and student wellbeing that university leadership should anticipate.

So what further lessons can we learn from the pandemic and its impact on the higher education sector in Australia? First, it is clear that COVID-19 exacerbated existing issues with the neoliberal, marketised model and cannot be entirely blamed for the current crisis in the sector. Second, although government support of the sector — for example, the exclusion of JobKeeper supports — has been critically lacking during COVID-19, this is not out of step with recent policy trends in Australia. Third, the pandemic brought into sharp focus the sector’s strong reliance on the international education market, and the resulting impact on the Australian economy. The interconnected issues of marketisation, inadequate government support, reliance on (and treatment of) international students require robust discussion at a national level and a revised policy approach for the future. Fourth, the evidence from this study shows that university leaders must address the wellbeing needs of academic staff; not only through Employee Assistance Programs and other supports, but through reasonable and sustainable expectations.

Forthcoming article: 

Fiona McGaughey, Richard Watermeyer, Kalpana Shankar, Venkata Ratnadeep Suri, Cathryn Knight, Tom Crick, Joanne Hardman, Dean Phelan, Roger Chung This can’t be the new norm’: academics’ perspectives on the COVID-19 crisis for the Australian University Sector

*Corresponding author: fiona.mcgaughey@uwa.edu.au 

From left to right: Fiona McGaughey is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Western Australia Law School and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA).  Fiona has broad research interests including international human rights law, modern slavery, pedagogy and student wellbeing.  Richard Watermeyer is Professor of Higher Education and Co-Director of The Centre for Higher Education Transformations (CHET) in the School of Education at the University of Bristol. A sociologist of higher education his recent books include Competitive Accountability in Academic Life: The Struggle for Social impact and Public Legitimacy (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar) and the Impact Agenda: controversies, challenges and consequences. (Bristol: Policy press). Kalpana Shankar is a Professor of Information and Communication Studies at University College Dublin and co-director of the UCD Centre for Digital Policy.

Illustration of a Zoom tutorial

Online learning will never be a substitute for face-to-face

21st century teaching, Changes to higher education, higher education, Online higher education, online learning, ,

In 2020 higher education student satisfaction with their ‘entire educational experience’ hit its lowest point since Australia’s national survey of current students began in 2011.

But the detailed survey results, which cover many aspects of student life, paint a mixed picture. Despite an unexpected shift to online learning due to COVID-19 restrictions, satisfaction with many aspects of teaching changed little between 2019 and 2020. The lost opportunity for personal contact with other students drove the biggest falls in satisfaction.

The Student Experience Survey (SES) is sent each year to commencing and later year students, who based on subjects taken to date are estimated to be in their final year. All higher education providers, public or private, university or non-university, are now within scope, with 184,000 undergraduates completing a survey in 2020. The SES includes postgraduates, but this post focuses on undergraduates. 

Students who enrolled for on-campus education led the decline in satisfaction. 

Most SES questions refer to specific aspects of student experience, but there is a general ‘overall how would you rate the quality of your entire educational experience this year?’ question. This fell from 78 per cent of respondents rating their educational experience as good or excellent in 2019 to 69 per cent in 2020. It had never previously been below 2019 levels. The SES report produced by the Social Research Centre notes that, as we would expect, students who enrolled for on-campus education led the decline in satisfaction. 

Despite lower overall satisfaction, no specific question probing responses to the work of academic staff declined by more than 5 percentage points – that was the drop in those agreeing that their course was delivered in a way that was ‘well-structured and focused’, to 62 per cent (suggesting that this was already an issue for a third of students). 

Ratings of teacher concern for student learning and feedback on work showed no year-to-year change at all, and other questions on intellectual stimulation, clear explanations of coursework and assessment, and teacher helpfulness and approachability registered only small dips in satisfaction. The quality of online learning materials was rated as good or excellent by 81 per cent of students, four percentage points lower than in 2019 – but a good result as it includes judgment on materials were not going to be online until COVID struck. 

In the eyes of their students teaching staff managed the move from campus-based teaching better than expected given earlier reports of dissatisfaction.  But online study diminished other aspects of the higher education experience. This was especially so for commencing students. The proportion of them reporting working often or very often with other students as part of their study dropped 16 percentage points, to 48 per cent. Frequent interaction with other students outside study was down 15 percentage points to 27 per cent. A sense of belonging to the university declined 12 percentage points to 42 per cent. Self-perceived development of skills to work effectively with others fell 11 percentage points to 52 per cent. 

The published SES reports don’t provide demographic detail for individual question results, but undergraduates aged under 25 years reported larger overall declines in satisfaction than older students. Young people had the most to lose from online education. For many of them university offers a significant social experience as well as a formal education. No matter how good the online educational technology, there is no perfect digital substitute for face-to-face contact. Later year students were less satisfied in the same areas as commencing students, but with lower year-on-year declines. Possibly maintaining friends and connections established before 2020 online was easier than forming new relationships. 

A return to on-campus teaching is the obvious way to lift face-to-face contact between students. That is partially happening, but going back to where we were in early March 2020 will not be easy. Universities won’t remove online versions of courses while the threat of lockdown remains, or while there are still students, especially international students, who cannot get to an Australian campus. And as with workers who are reluctant to return to the office despite most restrictions on doing so being lifted, students may have formed new habits while being forced to study at home. They might miss their friends, but they don’t miss the commute. 

 A university survey conducted earlier this year suggests that COVID accelerated moves to permanently reduce, or even eliminate, teaching via lectures. While there are long-standing pedagogical critiques of lectures, this could take away another reason for students to visit their campus regularly.  

So many big things are happening in higher education at the moment – COVID-driven changes to domestic student behaviour, the loss of international students on campus or entirely, the reduced per student funding of Job-ready Graduates – that it is hard to predict what campus life will look like in two or three years time. 

But the latest Student Experience Survey results show that while hasty transitions to online tuition had surprisingly small negative effects on student ratings of teaching, for some students the lack of face-to-face interaction makes their overall student experience much less satisfying. 

Andrew Norton is Professor in the Practice of Higher Education Policy at the Centre for Social Research and Methods at the Australian National University.  He blogs at andrewnorton.net .au Follow him on Twitter @andrewjnorton 

I found my PhD journey extremely stressful and mentally exhausting

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The secret lives of doctoral students and how academics can help

Every year, thousands of students enrol into doctoral programs across Australia and around the world. New PhD students enter an environment characterised by the persistent pursuit for knowledge – there is always something more to learn.

They also hear advice about academia from all and sundry. When we spoke to students in 2021, one final year PhD student noted, 

“There are so many different aspects to learn about and it’s difficult to know what you don’t know. This leaves you always wondering whether you are missing something. There are also many different perspectives offered by others – everyone’s experience is so different that it’s hard to work out what advice applies to you and what does not.”1

Given that each person’s experience in a PhD program is unique, how does a PhD student come to know what their identity as a researcher is?

When someone asks you to describe yourself, on which area of your life do you focus? Perhaps you highlight your job or education, listing your interests and achievements. Maybe you highlight your religion and/or ethnicity, highlighting how these shape your approach to life. You may explore your family and personal life, showcasing the impact these areas have on your life satisfaction. The stories we tell ourselves and others about who we are, who we are not, and who we ‘should’ be in our context, can be defined as our identity. 

Identity is multifaceted and continuously shaped through our experiences. It is also significantly influenced by the context in which we find ourselves – the implicit practices within our context tell us what is expected of us.  As researchers, we are particularly interested in the concept of academic identity – the stories people tell themselves and others about who they are or are not within the context of academia. A PhD student’s academic identity is, therefore, largely shaped through the narratives and practices they experience within academia as they conduct their research.

An area of special interest for us is the doctoral education environment in higher education institutions. As higher education researchers, we experience the daily influence of academia on our own sense of who we are. We have seen PhD students try to navigate the often implicit knowledges and practices of academia during their studies. These implicit knowledges and practices are rarely taught and can cause an environment of exclusiveness – a space where some are privileged while others are marginalised. We were interested in exploring how PhD students’ experiences influence their perception of their place within the context of academia.

We believe that, to understand the experiences of PhD students as they navigate this complex environment, you have to highlight their voices. By listening to their stories, we believe we can better understand their journeys and, consequently, design improved educational experiences. We have used this approach in the past, which allowed us to explore the personal journeys of several doctoral students as they reflected on their own studies.2 The autobiographical narratives that the PhD students wrote highlighted that the PhD significantly influenced their wellbeing, sense of identity, and intercultural competence. For example, one student noted:

“I understand the PhD as an office-like job; however, your job has a lack of clarity regarding how you are supposed to achieve your goals. You get to decide what you need to do each day, but your plans change all the time as your research results take your study in a new direction. This of course means that you have a great deal of flexibility, but it also means there is a lot of uncertainty during your PhD journey. Personally, this meant that I found my PhD journey extremely stressful and mentally exhausting.”3

To explore PhD students’ academic identity development, we conducted a large-scale research project exploring the experiences and lived realities of 29 PhD students at an Australian university. We used a creative approach that was designed to highlight the voices of the students through narratives and poems, allowing us to explore academic identity development from their points of view. The first findings from this project was recently published in The Journal of Higher Education and has since received significant attention from the academic community. An open access post-print version of this article is available here.

To start our research, we wanted to know why students committed the time and energy to pursue a PhD degree. We found our participants pursued a PhD as a stepping stone for future career success, to learn more about themselves or a particular academic topic, and to solve a problem in their local context. The students believed that the PhD was an all-consuming endeavour, something that should only be attempted by someone if they could fully dedicate themselves to the pursuit.

Further exploration of our participants’ experiences helped us to discover that PhD students experience significant pressure to build their personal brand. They felt that there was considerable tension between developing disciplinary knowledge and building professional skills (also sometimes termed “soft skills” or “transferable skills”). Yet they also felt that both these forms of personal knowledge were essential for later career success. Importantly, our study showed that several of our participants felt marginalised in their ability to develop these different forms of personal knowledge. They felt that their agency to take control of their own learning was hindered by various institutions that influenced the context of academia including the universities themselves, government agencies, and scholarship funding agencies. As a result, several students felt disempowered during their educational journey which adversely affected their academic identity.

As noted by one participant,

“This has been taxing intellectually but VERY taxing on my sense of self and my sense of self worth as a scholar.”1

The tension students experience highlights that the links between disciplinary knowledge and professional skills are not made clear to students. We believe that professional skills actually increase the applicability of disciplinary knowledge. For example, if PhD students do not have the ability to communicate their research to a wider audience, it is likely that their disciplinary knowledge will linger in relative obscurity. We also believe that the act of doing disciplinary research teaches a range of professional skills as a consequence. For example, conducting literature research to identify a research project for study necessitates the use of a variety of analytical skills. It is, therefore, our responsibility as educators to help PhD students reflect on the knowledge and skills they already possess. This reflective approach can help students develop an understanding of the variety of skills they have already developed during their studies, giving them the agency to seek targeted professional development approaches for future career success.

Importantly, our research should act as a clarion call for those in academia. We implore educators to value different forms of knowledge and skills. This approach will help the scholars and problem-solvers of the future develop a strong sense of who they are and where they fit within their respective fields.

Dr Lynette Pretorius works with undergraduate, postgraduate, and graduate research students to improve their academic language and literacy skills in the Academic Language, Literacy and Numeracy Development Team at Monash University.

Dr Luke Macaulay is a research fellow at Deakin University’s Centre for Refugee Employment, Advocacy, Training, and Education (CREATE), researching the education and employment experiences of people from refugee and asylum seeking backgrounds.

References

1.     Pretorius, L., & Macaulay, L. (2021). Notions of human capital and academic identity in the PhD: Narratives of the disempowered. Journal of Higher Education, 1-25. https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.2020.1854605

2.     Pretorius, L., Macaulay, L., & Cahusac de Caux, B. (2019). Wellbeing in doctoral education: Insights and guidance from the student experience. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9302-0

3.     Lau, R. W. K., & Pretorius, L. (2019). Intrapersonal wellbeing and the academic mental health crisis. In L. Pretorius, L. Macaulay, & B. Cahusac de Caux (Eds.), Wellbeing in doctoral education: Insights and guidance from the student experience (pp. 37-45). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9302-0_5

IS THE LECTURE DEAD?

21st century teaching, higher education, success at university, supporting other teachers online, Universities futures, Universities in Australia, , ,

Instagram-worthy?

Memorable?

Universities all over Australia are welcoming back students – but what will the learning experience look like?

The Australian National University’s vice-chancellor Brian Schmidt told staff last week:: “We need our teachers to be more than just people who stand at the front of the lecture hall or before a video camera. We need them to connect with their students in richer ways. This might include fewer lectures, and those that we do deliver, will be memorable and sophisticated, utilising technology.”

Campus Morning Mail reported his remarks: “It would be easy to make the university into an on-line supermarket of inexpensively delivered courses and divert the savings into research or other funds.”

And The Guardian reported: “Australian universities are prioritising ‘Instagram-worthy’ experiences on campus, while cutting building costs and face-to-face lectures, according to an external report on university digitisation. Darren McKee, the chief operating officer of Murdoch University in Western Australia was quoted in the report saying: ‘The face-to-face mass lecture is all but dead’.”

And read this in THE: Berkeley scraps plans for great big lecture theatres.

We asked educators to respond to these comments. Shirley Alexander, deputy vice-chancellor. University of Technology Sydney; Sarah O’Shea, director of the National Centre of Student Equity in Higher Education at Curtin University; Marcus O’Donnell, director, Cloud Learning Futures at Deakin University; Sally Male, chair in engineering education, University of Western Australia; and Amy Wong, research fellow at Queen’s University Belfast, formerly of the University of Queensland.

Have lectures ever really been alive?

By Shirley Alexander: Avid readers of higher education news will have noticed a recent run of articles proclaiming the lecture as “dead”, with universities reported to be ceasing expensive building programs, and/or no longer building “lecture theatres”.  But have lectures ever really been alive? 

To answer this question we need to explore what we actually mean when we use the term ‘lecture?’ One form (and one which I’m sure many have experienced) is the practice of conveying information. This can range from someone engaged in a one way communication of knowledge, perhaps even reading Powerpoint slides to an audience (who presumably already know how to read) to someone who is incredibly inspiring and motivating to listen to. Do students learn from these? It depends on what the learner does, and how he/she/they perceives the context.

Another teaching activity sometimes described as a lecture, is one in which the teacher gives a clear explanation of an important concept, and then asks students to apply that knowledge to solve a problem or complete an exercise that makes use of that concept and creation of personal meaning. Students might submit their own responses and then have the benefit of seeing a variation of responses from their peers, after which they might refine their own understanding. Do students learn from these experiences? It depends on what the learner does, and how he/she/they perceives the context.

My original question “have lectures ever really been alive?” can only really be answered by analysis of whether they have led to good student learning outcomes. The prevailing evidence is that the more active learning approaches to ‘lectures’ as described in the second scenario are much more likely to achieve that. But I also sound a note of caution as hinted at above. No teaching method can guarantee learning independent of what the learner does and how they perceive the context of their learning.

There is a certain amount of ‘invisibility’ around the resourcing of online teaching and delivery

By Sarah O’Shea “Participants reported that the lecturers with whom they felt more engaged with were those who i) “transcended” the online environment ii) responded in a timely manner and iii) demonstrated an active and engaged attitude.”

O’Shea, Stone and Delahunty, 2015

The best way lectures can be delivered in the new environment is by adopting a diversity of modalities of delivery including face-to-face, online with small supportive groups. It is offering students that choice between different delivery modes that is most optimal.

Effective teaching and learning can be delivered online and face-to-face but academics need both time and additional specialist skills to do that. Simply, you can’t just deliver the face-to-face content and put that online. It won’t be effective. Creating online content is time consuming and may require fundamental changes in delivery. Academics may need to shift their existing skill set and also need recognition of the time this involves. To do that, they need additional support.

There is a certain amount of ‘invisibility’ around the resourcing of online teaching and delivery – having taught online for over a decade I know how significant this time commitment can be. Recent  research also indicates this,  such as Cathy Stone’s work in this regard. Aside from the time commitment, there are also equity implications. Academics and educational developers need to remain mindful of the context of learners. It is recognising that not all learners have high level NBN, high uploads and downloads or  access to even basic technology – content needs to be delivered according  to the context of the learners within the institution. Yes, we must have interactive strategies but we also need to recognise that not everyone can be online at the same time. It’s more important to offer options and flexibility in order to make learning truly equitable . We  cannot assume that all learners are the same or have access to the same equipment. Students from a range of equity backgrounds have indicated the diversity of ways used to access online content for their studies which can range from driving on-campus, sitting in McDonalds’ car parks or using friends or family. Some may only have pay as you go data plans which are notoriously more expensive and may often be shared with other family members. Hence, offering a diversity of modalities of delivery is key, a combination of online, face to face and also, asynchronous mediums such as recordings, podcasts and static downloads   

To be effective in online delivery and development – professional development for academic staff and a greater investment in educational technologists and technology is also needed urgently. The educational technology support staff are absolutely key; they understand how to maximise available platforms and how to ensure that all students are getting the same learner experience. 

With colleagues, I have interviewed over 1,000 students from a diversity of backgrounds. Overwhelmingly, what  makes a positive learning experience for them is often just the accessibility of people to talk to. It can be as simple as knowing who to contact if they have a problem, just knowing there is someone at the other end of the line can make all the difference for both retention and progression.

Sarah O’Shea is a Professor and Director of the National Centre of Student Equity in Higher Education at Curtin University. Sarah has over 25 years experience teaching in universities as well as the VET and Adult Education sector, she has also published widely on issues related to educational access and equity.

Citations: 

Stone, C., & O’Shea. S. (2019). ‘Older, online and first: Recommendations for retention and success’. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology.

Drane, C.F., Vernon, L. & O’Shea, S. Vulnerable learners in the age of COVID-19: A scoping review. Aust. Educ. Res. (2020).

The Walking Dead

By Marcus O’Donnell Higher education is currently emerging from a fraught year of constraints and experiments where COVID19 forced a move away from on campus experiences to online only delivery. This seems to have emboldened some institutions to finally bite the bullet and scrap traditional lectures. So is the lecture dead?

The reality is that the lecture has been dead or dying for a very long time. Students have largely been voting with their feet. One lecturer in my own institution famously went viral a few years ago when he tweeted a picture of his empty lecture hall at the start of trimester with a cranky rant.

The persistence of lectures is largely driven by the fact that they are the most economical way for universities to deliver an in-person experience to large numbers of students. We know however that it is not an effective or engaging form of learning. Active learning where students are set tasks, asked to solve problems, asked to engage with their peers – not only mimics how we learn in real professional situations – it is now widely confirmed as a more effective form of learning.

Over the last few decades Australian universities have all committed themselves to turning out graduates who are digitally literate, critical thinkers, problem solvers, and excellent communicators. These are the learning outcomes that employers constantly demand. We cannot deliver these outcomes in programs which are primarily lecture-based because this is not just about “knowing stuff” it’s about “doing stuff”.

The danger in the post-COVID transition for higher education is that institutions take the worst of our old methodologies (ie hours of one way information transmission) and simply transpose this to online recordings. At Deakin we have adopted what we call a “Cloud First” philosophy. This takes as a given that all students engage with the university through digital tools – one quarter of our students are fully online, but all students who attend our physical campuses also engage with learning materials online. We have become very adept at producing these online learning materials in smart engaging formats, in our best courses we match this with active learning seminars where students learn together in more interactive ways. But transformation to this way of teaching and learning is hard and expensive. It takes leadership and resourcing.

Lectures have become the key-way universities organise staff time allocation and physical campuses have traditionally been organised around large lecture theatres, so until we address these elephantine structural issues lectures will persist, just like the walking dead.

Students still benefit from explanations and demonstrations

By Sally Male Universities have diverse student demographics, teachers, teaching and research strengths, campuses, relationships with employers and communities, and funding models. The meaning or existence of classes such as ‘lectures’, ‘tutorials’, and ‘practicals’ varies by discipline.


How we teach must adapt to changes with requirements, contexts, resources and constraints. Desirable graduate attributes have changed as work and society have changed. For example, the significance of addressing sustainability has increased in recent decades. Technology has provided
opportunities. Students now access numerous resources online. Simulations, models, virtual and augmented reality and online interactions are used in teaching and learning. In 2020, constraints changed due to COVID and we adapted.

Requirements for diverse students in diverse disciplines in diverse universities will be diverse. Requirements include equitable opportunity and support to learn in order to lead a successful life contributing to society, and inclusive opportunity to develop identity. Students still benefit from explanations and demonstrations. In classes that might be called lectures, teachers complement explanations and demonstrations with active, interactive learning activities. For example, students consider carefully designed problems and are led in discussion about the common alternative conceptions revealed by these.

By taking advantage of technology, and with thoughtful implementation, blended synchronous classes are likely to be one element of the range of classes and learning activities that meet future requirements. Face-to face classes can be convenient and involve rich experiences and opportunities
to establish relationships for a school-leaver living in college. A student with work and dependents might prefer to join online. A student outside the dominant cultural group might prefer to ask questions via chat despite sitting in class. A student with poor vision might attend face-to-face and
watch their laptop more easily than a projected image. Rather than abandon lectures, in many circumstances, and especially to achieve equity and inclusion, there is opportunity for blended (face-to-face, and online), synchronous (with students participating concurrently) lectures, involving
instruction and carefully designed, active learning.

Why we need live lectures

By Amy (Wai Yee) Wong Live lectures provide an invaluable opportunity for students to engage in synchronous interactions with lecturers and their peers. These social interactions are unique in live lecturing which is core to co-create knowledge and skills that are meaningful to the context of students’ university and lifelong learning.

The use of educational technology such as online polling and collaboration tools not only enables these interactions among a large cohort of students, either in a lecture hall or in a virtual environment, but also provide an inclusive opportunity to involve the less ‘out-spoken’ students to have a voice to connect with the lecturers and their peers. To make the best out of the live lectures, lecturers play a pivotal role as knowledge translators, co-creators and change agents developing partnership learning communities with students (Advance HE, 2016). 

The current pandemic has encouraged lecturers to adapt their teaching practices to a digital world. Reflecting on my recent experience of delivering live lectures online for an evidence-based practice (EBP) course in health professions education, I argue that lectures underpinned by purposeful pedagogical design work for higher education. For example, as a co-creator to construct meaningful knowledge with students, I have to know the existing level of their understanding of a topic and take students to a high level of learning. I heavily rely on real-time feedback from students during the lecture through an online polling tool which provides me with instant results of student responses showing in a bar graph or a word cloud. Based on the students’ inputs, I translated the abstract concepts of EBP to concrete examples in the healthcare setting that are relevant to the students’ practical experience. Students suddenly realised how the theoretical knowledge can be applied to the real-life context to make an impact on enhancing practice. This also creates new ideas for further professional conversations and inquiry.

The process of co-constructing knowledge is a distinctive feature achieved through synchronous interactions with students during live lectures. The personal interactions in live online or face-to-face lectures are irreplaceable by other means of delivery in higher education. To make live lectures truly work for student learning, we need to take the advantage of technology to deliver lectures with innovative design supported by sound pedagogical principles to connect, inspire and empower students to create partnership learning communities.

References

Advance HE (2016). Essential frameworks for enhancing student success. Student engagement through partnership.

Image by Adobe Stock

Our university workforce has become a fragmented, casualised ‘gig economy’. The problems we face

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The quality and integrity of higher education in Australia is dependent on the quality of the academics who staff our universities. The supply pipeline of the academic workforce needs careful planning if it is to continue to be effectively renewed by fully rounded academics who are engaged in research and can contribute to sustaining the quality of Australian higher education.

Unfortunately, the higher education sector response to this challenge has been reactive and haphazard. We believe the problems in the sector are wide ranging and can be profoundly destructive to the future of all Australians unless we co-operatively address them and get government and policy action to change what is happening.

Problems facing the future of academic work

Growth demands

For more than a decade demographers and researchers have drawn attention to the impending need to renew the academic workforce in Australia. The Group of Eight (Go8) coalition of Australian universities estimated  that by 2030 an additional 26,600 full-time teaching staff would be needed to meet growth demands, on top of the 16,400 to replace retirements. There is little evidence of policies or support from governments to address this problem.

Changes to the nature of our work in an increasingly competitive environment

Substantial changes in the nature and context of academic work have emerged in the slipstream of commodified higher education. There is now mass participation by students in higher education, with diverse needs, interests and abilities and they are engaged in multiple modes of course delivery.  Academics today need to be agile in learning new technologies and delivery platforms, while they work in loosely co-ordinated teams often with out-of-area teaching allocations.

At the same time, universities have become intensely competitive, with global league tables promoting a hierarchy of institutions, and, in an effort to support high quality teaching and research, increased competition for declining resources. University administrations have sought to reduce the risks of continuing academic staff positions by resorting to sessional, short-term contracts and teaching-only positions. 

Casualised and fragmented workforce under high levels of stress

During the last two decades the conceptualisation, organisation, and nature of academic work has been disrupted, re-designed and transformed, resulting in an increasingly stratified, segmented, and fragmented workforce. A number of major studies have established the Australian academic workforce is experiencing excessive workload demands, intrusive managerialism and bureaucratic reporting requirements, widespread work dissatisfaction, work-related stress and burnout, at higher levels in Australia than elsewhere.

It is also highly casualised, and reliant on sessional academic staff at the lowest appointment levels to undertake face-to-face and online teaching and marking at the undergraduate level.  Concurrently, the on-going academic workforce is disproportionately skewed toward the older end of the age distribution. Impending retirement among the “baby boomer” generation will intensify the gap between on-going senior academic appointments and those occupying insecure, precariously funded positions founded on “soft” money from research grants and tenders.

Struggles of working in the ‘gig economy’

Short-term policy responses to meet staffing demands over the last decade or more have left a climate of career uncertainty and insecurity, lessening the attractiveness of the academic career. In meeting their on-going operational and educational demands in an unpredictable and volatile funding environment created by successive governments, universities have generated a new class of highly flexible and agile academic workers employed on insecure short-term, casual contracts.

They are subject to somewhat arbitrary rules of hiring and firing, income insecurity, and are distinguishable by their job and employment insecurity, lack of negotiating power about working conditions, and lack of career prospects and planning.

These are “the precariat” who find themselves in the “gig” economy. A significant proportion of these people have completed their PhD and then find there are few opportunities for ongoing employment. They piece together teaching and marking contracts at one or more universities without necessarily building the foundations of a career.

The growth of teaching-only positions undermining our future workforce

Early career academics (defined as 5 years post PhD) constitute the future workforce of the academy; yet, many are employed on sessional teaching contracts, concentrated in the lowest appointment levels and teaching-only positions. The percentage of “teaching only” staff rose by 360%, and specialised research roles by 96% in the period from 2001-2014. Casual staff, estimated between 40-60%, experience greater job insecurity, lowered access to support structures, juggle multiple demands and piecemeal contracts, suffer occupational, financial and personal stress, all of which stunt the development of expertise, undermine persistence, and fracture academic career motivations and ambitions.

Workload and burnout

Pressures have intensified with frequent reviews and restructures, standardisation and external regulation, performance measures (of teaching, research, impact, and engagement), unmanageable workloads, and the abandonment of tenure in some universities. Research has suggested that almost 40% of Australian academics aged under 30 were not committed to an academic career, or were planning to pursue other careers within 5-10 years, and 13-18% had immediate plans for departure. In the intervening period the prospects of a career in academia have not got better.

It seems inevitable that universities will not be able to meet the key performance indicators set by government and that academic staff will continue to experience job burnout at high rates.

Struggling with how to help

We need to know more about how early career academics cope with the competing demands of the job and what personal and work-related resources help to sustain healthy and committed academics. Conversely, we need to understand what job-related demands undermine the personal career motivations and goals, reduce work commitment and result in poor personal health and well-being outcomes. These are not trivial questions.

Massive growth of non academic staff in universities and related tensions

Alongside casual academic staff, new types of professional staff appointments have grown exponentially and found secure positions within universities as student advisers, HR managers, teaching and learning advisers, technical staff to manage digital technologies, academic advisers or facilitators to administer teaching programs in “flexible” modes, including technology mediated on-line teacher-less classrooms, and most recently, the emergence of practice professionals who teach but are not expected to contribute to the research endeavour.

There are irrevocable tensions that will continue to build in the university higher education workforce, between academic and professional staff who are appointed to ongoing positions with a career path and prospects, versus the short-term, contracted, sessional academic appointments who are not offered a career path, creating a sense of existential precariousness with few future prospects.

Funding uncertainty

Funding uncertainty and poor long-term planning for higher education more generally and, for universities in particular, is undermining the capacity and contribution of a skilled and committed academic workforce, making hollow the promise of Australia’s future economic productivity, innovation, growth and social stability.

Without due care and attention to the systematic renewal of the academic workforce, we believe Australia’s enviable reputation for high quality university-level education cannot be sustained.

Paul Richardson is Professor of Education at Monash University. Paul’s research interests focus on the career choice motivations of beginning teachers and the career paths, health and wellbeing of mid-career teachers. His interest in the career choice motivations, goals, health and wellbeing of academics, especially early career academics, is a development from his earlier empirical work on teachers and observations made during his time as Associate Dean Research for the Faculty of Education at Monash University.Paul is on Twitter @academiccentral

Dr Amanda Heffernan is a lecturer in Leadership in the Faculty of Education at Monash University. Amanda’s key research interests include educational leadership, social justice, and policy enactment. Amanda also has research interests in the lives and experiences of academics, including researching into the changing nature of academic work. She can be found on Twitter @chalkhands

Paul Richardson (paul.richardson@monash.edu) and Amanda Heffernan (amanda.heffernan@monash.edu)  are beginning a pilot study examining the career motivations and coping strategies among Early Career Academics (within 5 years of PhD) working in Australian Universities. If you would be willing to contribute your experiences to this study, we would be pleased to hear from you.