Australian Tertiary Sector Research Articles

A Strengths Awareness Pilot for an Australian University Mentoring Program

Strengths-based initiatives for university students to identify and develop their strengths are increasing in popularity in the tertiary sector. An understanding of strengths provides students with greater resilience in their transition in and out of university. While such strengths-based initiatives have been studied among first-year student populations at large universities in the United States, scant research has been conducted on strengths development in the Australian tertiary sector. This mixed methods study evaluates the efficacy of the use of the CliftonStrengths Assessment and targeted strengths workshops on a group of mentors and mentees within a peer mentoring program at a university in Australia. Quantitative analysis indicated increases in strengths awareness. Qualitative analysis also revealed participants could positively view their strengths, identify a plan for future strengths use, and view others and themselves in a new light. This study served as a base for further research into strengths development at Australian universities.

Facilitation strategies for enhancing the learning and engagement of online students

The opening up of online education in the Australian tertiary sector has made higher education accessible for a wide range of students, including those living in rural and regional areas. While student numbers continue to grow as a result of this opportunity, there are increasing concerns regarding low student retention and progression rates for online students in comparison with on-campus students. Reasons for this vary, however, online students report a sense of isolation and disconnection with their studies highlighting the need for educators to utilise effective facilitation to enhance student connections to an online community. In this paper, we investigated facilitation strategies using two case studies. This illustrated how two online instructors used design-based research to evaluate the impact of facilitation strategies on instructor presence, instructor connection, engagement and learning in maths education and human biology subjects. Findings indicate that focusing on social, managerial and technical facilitation strategies resulted in an increased instructor presence and active involvement, which in turn were influential in motivating students to engage with learning online. The findings have implications for higher education providers and instructors who are tasked with engaging online students. This identifies the importance of targeted online facilitation to enhance learner-instructor and learner-content engagement.

Insert image here]: a reflection on the ethics of imagery in a critical pedagogy for the humanities

Using the controversial image of Syrian toddler Alan Kurdi as its provocation, this paper reflects upon the ethics of images used in teaching in a time of high-volume image circulation via social media, as well as a time when debates about content and trigger warnings are starting to gain more traction in the Australian tertiary sector. It integrates personal reflection upon a variety of choices made by the author in teaching with a consideration of the related pedagogical and ethical issues, drawing particularly on theories of the pedagogy of discomfort and visual ethics. It is argued that the discursive space of trigger warnings per se remains problematic as this immediately places the students into a negative and possibly traumatic relationship with the material rather than empowering them to use their affective responses and experiences productively. Educators are instead encouraged to develop reflexive critical pedagogies that acknowledge the ethical relationship between student and teacher, while also still fulfilling the prosocial impetus of the humanistic education.

The online presence of teaching and learning within Australian university websites

Teaching and Learning as a form of scholarship has struggled for recognition in universities, with one of the biggest hurdles being visibility. As the Internet is now one of the primary sources of visibility, this study examines how Australia’s 39 universities present their teaching and learning profiles online. The purpose was to examine the aspects of teaching and learning that were visible and those which were not, highlighting the areas of scholarship that may require enhanced focus. The study used a scoring system of 15 primary criteria drawn from the literature, in conjunction with common teaching and learning website elements as ascertained from a brief study of 20 websites. The results revealed that while certain teaching and learning aspects such as professional development and awards are consistently presented across the Australian tertiary sector online, other aspects such as scholarship of teaching and learning research foci and external impact are not generally visible on Australian university websites.

Start With The End In Mind: Experiences Of Accelerated Course Completion By Pre-Service Teachers And Educators

In response to changes government funding and policies over the past five years, the Australian tertiary sector has entered an increasingly competitive climate. This has forced many universities to become more strategic in attracting increased numbers of PSTs. Providing accelerated learning opportunities for PSTs is viewed as one way to gain greater market share. Accelerated learning programs are one of the fastest growing transformations in Australian higher education over the past five years. There is limited research that investigates the effectiveness of accelerated programs and the ways in which PSTs experience them. This preliminary study investigates the experiences of pre-service teachers and educators, via a purpose built instrument, of an accelerated learning program in Australia. The study found that PSTs were strongly motivated by such factors as early course completion and greater study plan flexibility. This study contributes to the emerging field of accelerated learning design in the tertiary sector.

Education for a new ‘museology’

This article provides a critical reading of a curriculum initiative in tertiary education designed to address students who are traditionally marginalised in the Australian tertiary sector. An argument is made that this curriculum approach with its emphases on authenticity, identity, agency and embodied learning addresses issues of the disjunct between access to knowledge, museums and cultural capital. The political work of this curriculum is situated in the new museology. The author draws on Ellsworth's sensation of learning to elaborate the contributions made possible by the curriculum Learning and teaching in public spaces to museum education and tertiary education

The Politics of Open-Access Publishing: <i>M/C Journal</i>, Public Intellectualism, and Academic Discourses of Legitimacy

This article investigates the discourses of academic legitimacy that surround the production, consumption, and accreditation of online scholarship. Using the web-based media and cultural studies journal (http://journal.media-culture.org.au) as a case study, it examines how online scholarly journals often position themselves as occupying a space between the academic and the popular and as having a functional advantage over print-based media in promoting a spirit of public intellectualism. The current research agenda of both government and academe prioritises academic research that is efficient, self-promoting, and relevant to the public. Yet, although the cost-effectiveness and public-intellectual focus of online scholarship speak to these research priorities, online journals such as M/C Journal have occupied, and continue to occupy, an unstable position in relation to the perceived academic legitimacy of their content. Although some online scholarly journals have achieved a limited form of recognition within a system of accreditation that still privileges print-based scholarship, I argue that this, nevertheless, points to the fact that traditional textual notions of legitimate academic work continue to pervade the research agenda of an academe that increasingly promotes flexible delivery of teaching and online research initiatives.

Investigating the probability of student cheating: The relevance of student characteristics,assessment items, perceptions of prevalence and history of engagement

Academic dishonesty is a fundamental issue in terms of the educational integrity of higher education institutions. Accordingly, there is a growing pool of literature that examines this issue. This study adds to this literature by investigating factors that may influence student engagement in academic misconduct. We examine the influence of the type of assessment items, age, gender, nationality, discipline and level of study and the students' self-reported history of cheating. Drawing from a survey of 1,057 students across four major Queensland universities, we find that a student's age, gender and nationality are useful in explaining the probability of a student cheating. Our key finding, however, suggests that the likelihood that a student will engage in any given cheating behaviour is most strongly influenced by the extent to which the student engages in other forms of cheating, supporting the notion of "once a cheat always a cheat". We conclude that more needs to be done to combat a culture of acceptance of academic dishonesty and to minimise defensive misconduct by students who otherwise might not engage in such behaviour. We suggest that university administrators devote increased resources to this issue and develop mechanisms for managing and curtailing the level of academic misconduct. A failure to do so may result in a further undermining of the academic integrity of the Australian tertiary sector.

Australian Regional Universities and the Idea of the University

IntroductionThis paper takes as its main point of concern relationship between regional universities within contemporary Australian tertiary sector and what we can call imperatives and values associated with idea of university. It is divided into three sections: first provides an overview of theoretical concepts and approaches used to contextualise and analyse cultural field of tertiary education; second considers how this field has been transformed - not just within a regional context - since advent of massification of university education, a phenomenon which can be roughly dated in Australia to late 1980s; third discusses ramifications of these changes within context of what we call 'the idea of university'.Cultural Field and HabitusThe approach taken here is largely predicated on theories of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and in particular his concepts of cultural field, cultural capital and habitus. A cultural field can be defined as a series of institutions, rules, rituals, conventions, categories, designations, appointments and titles which constitute an objective hierarchy and which produce and authorise certain discourses and activities. But it is also constituted by or out of conflict that is involved when groups or individuals attempt to determine what field really is or what its logics and values are, what constitutes capital within that field and how that capital is to be distributed. Bourdieu understands concept of cultural field to refer to fluid and dynamic, rather than static, entities. Cultural fields are made up not simply of institutions and rules but also of interactions among institutions, rules and practices.A cultural field can be said to have come into being when it fulfils at least two criteria. First, it is able to articulate and manifest itself simultaneously as a singularity and as a differentiated but cognate group of entities joined together by, and recognisable in terms of, certain core imperatives, values, functions, rules, categories and characteristics. Second and equally importantly, it must be recognised and accepted by, integrated into and function in compliance with regard to network of valorised fields that comprise wider sociocultural terrain. In order to do this, a field must have means and techniques to imagine itself into existence and then to represent, manifest and valorise itself in a consistent manner to its own members and to other fields. The viability of sport as a cultural field is necessarily predicated, then, on some degree of bureaucratisation of people, activities and events within a regime that is specific and universal, changeable and timeless, but above all else iterable.Institutions, bureaucracies, titles, rules and categories are, however, only objective manifestation of a cultural field: it is both a piece of anti-logic and an escapable truism that every field is simultaneously constituted from and constitutive of a habitus, understood as an ethos and set of dispositions which are embodied by its members, animate and justify its practices and speak (through and for) field as a discourseas- belief. Bourdieu defines habitus, in Outline of a Theory of Practice (1991), as the durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations (p. 78). A change to habitus produces a different set of experiences of same types of activities (for example, research or teaching) that continues to be productive in that it feeds back into and modifies and/or elaborates upon logics and dispositions that set it in train, including any understanding of what constitutes essence of that field.Cultural fields reproduce themselves through what Bourdieu refers to as strategies of misrecognition, symbolic violence, illusio and universalisation. Bourdieu (2000) understands misrecognition as a of forgetting that agents are caught up in and produced by:The agent engaged in practice knows worldtoo well, without objectifying distance, takes it for granted, precisely because he is caught up in it, bound up with it; he inhabits it like a garmenthe feels at home in world because world is also in him, in form of habitus. …

Institutional Commitments, Individual Compromises: Identity‐related responses to compromise in an Australian university

This study explores compromises by individual academic staff, which reflect their multiple understandings of academic work. I offer a brief overview of the changing Australian tertiary sector environment and the ways in which this has had an impact on the academic role. The discussion centres around the need for investigations of academia to be premised on an understanding of the heterogeneous nature of the academic workforce. A study of the ways in which staff differently integrate the corporate‐driven activities into their conceptualizations of academia is the focus of this paper, with particular reference to the compromises described by interviewees. The multiple meta‐narratives and academic identities, which were identified from the research data, reveal diverse attempts by academic staff to reconcile preconceptions of academia with experiences of working in a corporatized university, resulting in differences in the levels and nature of compromise. Interviewees in this study indicated that the need to compromise their understandings of academic work led to a degree of role strain. Finally, the interviewees' perceptions of the presence of their narratives in the wider organizational conversations are examined.

Perceptions of the prevalence and seriousness of academic dishonesty in Australian universities

Academic dishonesty is a fundamental issue for the academic integrity of higher education institutions, and one that has lately been gaining increasing media attention. This study reports on a survey of 1206 students and 190 academic staff across four major Queensland universities in relation to student academic misconduct. The aim of the survey was to determine the prevalence of academic misconduct, and to investigate the extent to which perceptions of dishonesty are shared between students and staff, as preliminary steps toward developing effective strategies to deal with the academic dishonesty/misconduct problem. Results indicate a higher tolerance for academic misconduct by students in comparison to staff, particularly with respect to falsification of research results and plagiarism, as well as considerable underestimation by staff of the prevalence of virtually all forms of student academic misconduct. Overall, the study’s findings confirm the significance of the issue of academic dishonesty within the Australian tertiary sector, indicating considerable divergence between students and staff in terms of perceptions of the seriousness and prevalence of student academic misconduct. We suggest that university administrators need to examine this issue closely in order to develop mechanisms for managing and curtailing the level of academic misconduct, since a failure to do so may lead to a further undermining of the academic integrity of the Australian tertiary sector.

Report on a social norm intervention at a South Australian university

Issues addressed: The false beliefs of university students concerning the drug and alcohol use of their student peers. Methods: The development and implementation of a Social Norm Marketing project at a university in South Australia targeting the false beliefs of students (established by use of a prior survey) through the use of positive, normative messages using a number of marketing approaches. Results: Inconclusive. Conclusions: Social norm marketing strategies require multiple levels of attack for the messages to be believed. So what?: As a strategy for targeting 'risk taking' behaviour associated with alcohol and other drugs of tertiary students in the US it is being seen as highly successful. It is worthy of further development and exploration in the Australian tertiary sector as a health prevention strategy. (author abstract)

The Value of “Almost” Perfect Weather Information to the Australian Tertiary Sector

This paper is an attempt to determine the extent to which Australian tertiary sector organisations stand to gain from improved weather forecasts. An upper limit to this amount must be the sum of the maximum savings afforded by weather forecasts sufficiently accurate (“almost” perfect) to result in weather-error-free decisions for each organisation. The paper presents the results of a survey of tertiary sector organisations undertaken to determine the amount of these potential savings. The paper discusses operational improvements to increase the usefulneww of forecasts, and also discusses the structure of the weather forecasting industry in general.