Last night’s Four Corners program Cash Cows has sent shock waves through Australia’s $34 billion university sector. The program alleged that some Australian universities have become far too reliant on foreign fee-paying students to boost revenue, and have subsequently jeopardised ...
More »Humanising our future: Why Australia can’t afford to neglect the humanities
In an age where science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) disciplines receive the lion’s share of policy attention and funding, you can understand how those in the humanities, arts and social sciences (HASS) feel a bit miffed. Despite cultural and ...
More »Strung out: research finds a quarter of uni students stressed daily
In contrast to the sanguine, laughing faces of students you see on most university marketing flyers and websites, a uni student’s life is no walk in the park. It’s not supposed to be: the whole purpose of enrolment is to ...
More »It’s ‘worldschooling’, not homeschooling: Meet the family championing real-life classrooms
Monday to Friday, behind a desk, in the one place. This is the standard – and much-bemoaned – model for work life. It’s also the model for much of pre-tertiary education, from kindergarten to Year 12. Is this monotonous, precisely ...
More »Taking a fresh approach to cybersecurity in the education sector
As we approach the middle of 2019, education institutions the world over are no doubt bracing for a busy year of learning against an ever-increasing number of cyber-attacks. For many, their natural defence mechanism is to deploy new technology and ...
More »Proposed contract cheating legislation a good first step but more action needed
Contract cheating refers to students outsourcing their assessments to professional cheating services or through arrangements with friends or peers. A typical example would be a student paying for an essay which is then submitted as their own work. As classroom ...
More »Great expectations: helping students weighed down by the pressure to succeed
Final year school students and university undergraduates are rushing towards an imaginary finishing line burdened by societal expectations about their future, leading to a state of anxiety that impairs academic performance and negatively affects decision-making. That’s the view of University ...
More »Bio-computer example of ‘risky’ technology that should be funded: researcher
Half-living, half-synthetic bio-computers will soon be able to reason and multi-task like humans, paving the way for a world where computers can help solve ‘unsolvable’ problems, if QUT researcher Associate Professor Dan Nicolau has his way. Nicolau, who recently published ...
More »It’s time: Watch the Australian education sector race towards a cloud delivery model
After almost a decade of sluggish shuffling towards a cloud-based, digitally driven operating model, Australian education providers are collectively twigging to the benefits that can accrue from giving students and staff real-time access to information and services. Chief among these ...
More »Opinion: what a local and an international scandal suggest about education inequality
On Monday, ABC chief economics correspondent Emma Alberici was doing some routine research via Twitter when she stumbled into a furore. Infamous for her supposed anti-Liberal bias, she provoked the opposite kind of ire by asking for people's “…stories about living ...
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