With its straw polls and ‘gotcha’ moments, the media is killing debate, a Canberra policy forum heard last week. The nature of modern media and the desire of academics and other advocates to speak freely are coming together in a ...

The federal government is upbeat about the prospects for a genuinely national system of VET regulation, after the NVR legislation narrowly passed parliament. The government has successfully steered its national vocational regulator (NVR) bills through both houses of parliament, after ...

With all eyes on the legislation to set up the new VET regulator, training ministers have quietly axed the organisation that was expected to house the VET standards agency. The week before the federal government managed by a hair’s breadth ...

The devil is in the detail as universities pursue changes to draft TEQSA law Australia’s universities have pledged to battle on to have self-accreditation enshrined in the primary legislation setting up the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) Legislation, ...

Foster defends her soft marking finding based on statistical analysis Economist Dr Gigi Foster, who interpreted her econometric research data as showing that UTS and the University of South Australia were soft marking international students in their business faculties has ...

The ERA has given universities a chance to find out how well they’re doing on indigenous research – so long as they’re researching the indigenous culture of New Zealand. Last year’s Excellence in Research Australia (ERA) exercise didn’t give universities ...

An “extremely disappointed” ALTC board is determined to salvage the organisation’s work and make it available to the higher education sector. A new web site will live on after the demise of the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC), as ...

Ballarat hasn’t waited for foreign university legislation to get through before announcing a new partnership operation in India. Australia has taken the next tentative step into the Indian higher education market, with the University of Ballarat announcing plans to establish ...

A new ALTC project will build leadership capacity in communities of practice. More than 350 academics in the growing communities of practice (CoP) space have signed on to a new project that will strengthen their impact on wider teaching and ...

ARC inundated with ERA feedback More than 6800 submissions have been made to the Australian Research Council (ARC) about its Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) initiative since it opened a new round of feedback last month. An ARC spokesperson ...