Two board members of Julia Gillard’s handpicked advisory group, Skills Australia, have reportedly joined the chorus of discontent over the federal government’s flagship VET funding program. ACTU president Sharan Burrow and Australian Industry Group chief executive Heather Ridout – both ...
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NBN to be a bonanza for training providers
The Rudd government’s national broadband network will be a massive consumer of new skills which could prove to be a bonanza for the training sector. But questions as to how many training places, at what level, in what areas of ...
More »Reviving Oz medical research will take $100m – and a bit more guts
The government should set up a $100 million fund to support early clinical testing of new drugs in order to attract venture capital of the scale needed to jump-start Australia’s languishing pharmaceutical industry, a public debate at the University of ...
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VET briefs
Tenders called for green jobs corps The federal government has called for tenders to provide 10,000 training places under its National Green Jobs Corps. Parliamentary employment secretary Jason Clare said several changes had been made to the original tender following ...
More »The bottom line for e-learning
Do educators and business people share the same view of e-learning, asks John Mitchell. Over the past decade Australian VET has actively investigated e-learning from the perspectives of policy, theory and pedagogy, but not so much from the point of ...
More »ESOS amendments aren’t enough: Coalition
The opposition has signalled in-principle support for Julia Gillard’s amendments to the Education Services for Overseas Students Act, but wants the federal government to go further. “The Coalition will be proposing three amendments to this Bill to ensure the legislation ...
More »International students branded as victims, even when they aren’t
International students are overwhelmingly portrayed as victims – both here and especially in the Indian media. The general picture is of well-intentioned, hopeful, law-abiding yet hapless individuals who get done over by dodgy training providers and unscrupulous employers. But the ...
More »USQ reform process given AUQA tick of approval
Major change is never easy, but the University of Southern Queensland has been there, done that and come out the other side with a clean bill of health, according to its Australian Universities Quality Agency audit. As AUQA notes, USQ ...
More »International student satisfaction rates unchanged: survey
If international students are having a terrible time in Australia, someone apparently forgot to tell them. The experience they recount to researchers has remained consistently positive for around five years, according to the latest survey on international student satisfaction. The ...
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