Online course to fill a gap

A new interactive online program to teach students the basics in consumer rights and responsibilities aims to meet a strong demand for such a course from business. By Antonia Maiolo. Australia’s competition watchdog has launched a MOOC-style course to help universities educate students about competition and consumer law. The course will be made available online where academics and students can access and download information at their will. Although it is mainly targeted towards future business leaders, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission says the free program is suitable for any student and can be incorporated into a wide variety of degree courses including business, marketing, journalism, media studies and entrepreneurship. It is the ACCC’s third online resource, following its small business online program and a pre-entry franchise education program. Deputy chair of the ACCC Dr Michael Schaper says the program is a simple and interactive tool designed for lecturers to be able to teach the material without any prior knowledge of the relevant laws. “It’s a simple modular structure that allows academics to pick the areas they want to teach students about,” Schaper, a former business school dean, says. The course – intended for both undergraduate and postgraduate programs – was born out of a large-scale ACCC stakeholder survey which discovered a strong demand from business for students to be taught the basics in competition and consumer rights and responsibilities under the law. Schaper says the course could help fill a gap that exists in many generic postgraduate programs, “like a lot of MBAs where there’s not a prior level of expertise presumed of any business discipline”. “The ACCC is committed to helping aspiring future business leaders and university-educated professionals to understand their rights and responsibilities under the Competition and Consumer Act, including the Australian Consumer Law,” he says. However the aim is not to provide students with an understanding of all the fine points of the law but to give them at least a working knowledge of their rights and obligations under the consumer and competition act. “We don’t need to be giving them the full details,” he says. “What we want to do is just give them generic knowledge.” The new course has already undergone a test run at the University of NSW’s school of tax and business law, where students trialled four of the 12 modules available. Schaper says so far most of the anecdotal evidence from the UNSW trial suggests that the students found it useful and that most of them would like the course to be incorporated as part of their program rather than as a stand-alone. The Australian Business Deans Council also welcomes the ACCC online tertiary education program. The council’s president, Professor Michael Powell, says the course would greatly assist them to educate students on the most recent laws. “In an environment where we are increasingly seeing litigation, it is important that business graduates and future business leaders understand how consumer and competition principles apply to them and their future roles,” he says. Academics can rest assured that they are teaching something that is up-to-date and accurate, as the ACCC will revise the material at the end of each semester. There are 12 different modules on a range of topics covering issues such as misleading sales and advertising practices, social media, pricing laws, business scams, cartels, misuse of market power, product safety and consumer rights. Each learning module comes with a list of learning objectives and assessment material, which university lecturers can subscribe to and use directly in their own courses. At the end of most modules, users can do a short assessment quiz to test their understanding of the topic. Lecturers will also be able to contact ACCC staff members who can talk them through any problems they might be having with the material.