Campus Review Podcasts

With on-campus learning almost non-existent in many universities, remote or online learning in the higher education sector is the status quo. While COVID-19 ushered in this change extremely quickly, institutions are wanting to ensure that a remote learning experience is comparable to an on-campus one and won’t negatively affect student learning and outcomes. An expert in this area is Andrew Martin, Scientia Professor and Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of New South Wales. His research interests lie in student motivation and the cognitive science of learning. He’s advocating a teaching approach called Load Reduction Instruction to help maintain high standards of teaching and learning remotely while the pandemic drags on.Load Reduction Instruction in grounded in educational psychology and its primary aim is to increase learners' long-term memory to promote deep learning. Before this can be achieved, however, students' long-term memory must be developed by relying on shorter, linear tasks t

Melbourne’s West is one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse regions in Australia, with up to 46 per cent hailing from backgrounds where English is not their first language. This has a flow-on effect in sport, particularly in the area of Brimbank, “showing it is among the lowest in Victoria for club-based sport and sport participant registrations, and the lowest for its number of sports facilities, playing fields and courts”.But Dr Brent McDonald and his colleagues at Victoria University - who have studied the relationship between sporting membership and social inclusion previously - are determined to see a positive change, knowing that inclusion in sports requires a breakdown of the exclusionary and structural practices relating to income, transport, fees and language. McDonald and his colleagues at VU have just begun a two-year project titled ‘Change Makers: Empowering sports to enhance social inclusion for migrants and refugees’.McDonald spoke to Campus Review about the myriad barriers facing

Dr Jarrod Kath from USQ’s Centre for Applied Climate Sciences is investigating a variety of coffee that supplies roughly 20-40 per cent of the world’s market. It was named robusta after it was thought to be extremely resilient. What he and his colleagues are finding, however, is that the bean is not as tough as first thought and may require a range of strategies to keep it growing in South East Asia, particularly in Vietnam where millions are dependent on it for income.Examining robusta coffee crops is the beginning of a research project titled ‘De Risk South East Asia’, which is being conducted in collaboration with the World Meteorological Organisation and the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture. The project will examine how a host of South East Asian agricultural crops, such as coffee, sugar and rice, are threatened by the effects of climate change. Once the effects have been investigated, “climate management systems” will be employed to try and attenuate the negative climatic effects on yields.K

Professor Sandra Milligan from the University of Melbourne and her fellow experts were inspired to write the report 'Future Proofing Students: What they need to know and how educators can assess and credential them' after noticing a disconnect between "what teachers want students to learn and how they are credentialed" or assessed.The authors of the report also found that employers often knew little of what a student could really do based on a report card. Students, too, often complained that some credentials didn't reflect who they really were.Campus Review spoke to Milligan about this issue as well as the skills all students will require now and into the future. Depending on the context, these skills are called different things: soft skills, 21st century skills, general capabilities and graduate qualities. They include teamwork and collaboration, communication in a range of forms, critical and creative thinking, and problem solving, to name a few. Milligan refers to them as "learning skills" as they are ess

Education minister Dan Tehan's recent announcement to change the course fee structure across Australian universities had been met with a range of views. Some believe it sets Australia up for the future, while others, including former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, called it "baffling", Other critics, too, have pointed to the irony of how important the coalition considered the soft skills of humanities to the future of jobs before making such a decision.One of the most vocal and cogent critics of the proposed changes that need to be legislated is the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Campus Review spoke to the academy's president about the issue, ProfessorJoy Damousi.In contrast to the government's line, Damousi said arts and humanities graduates are incredibly job ready and statistics support this . She also said humanities graduates possess "very transferable, very transportable skills".Damousi also focussed on the need for students to follow their talents and passions, not enrol in courses purely base

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a quick rethink of how got get unemployed or underemployed workers back into jobs and retain their skills base.It has also necessitated that individuals consider retraining in new fields that they might not have considered in he past. To facilitate this, the government passed the Higher Education Relief Package, helping to create subsidised Undergraduate Certificates in a range of high-demand fields.Now, the government has gone one step further, creating the Higher Education Short Courses Scheme. This will allow not only displaced workers, but anyone to access a plethora of two-hour courses for free. Such courses can even be competed on your mobile.Torrens University General Manager, Design and Creative Technology, Paul Brafield, spoke to Campus Review about the success of the scheme so far, with over 6000 short courses already completed since April.The most popular courses are in leadership, social media marketing, design thinking, emotional intelligence and agile project man

Dr Melissa Barnes is a lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Monash University, working within the fields of teacher education, assessment, policy and TESOL. She is a critic of the controversial initial teacher education test, also known as the LANTITE.To begin with, Barnes highlighted the problem with attaching the word "quality" to the those who pass the LANTITE test or "quality" teachers in general. As she explains, quality is a diverse and difficult-to-explain phenomenon that varies in different educational contexts. The academic does not believe "a literacy and numeracy test is the best way to measure teacher quality in the country".Barnes also argues that a third-party organisation such as the Australian Council for Education Research (ACER) is not the best way to assess students' literacy and numeracy skills, and such a test would be best left up to the universities to administer.Finally, the Monash lecturer in education holds concerns about the standardised nature of the test, meaning students are c

According to ANU experts, deaths from climate change have been “substantially under reported” in Australia’s national health records, and it's high time it's listed as a reason for death on official documents.Indeed, the research contends that deaths attributed to environmental heath factors is at least 50 times more than what is officially published on death certificates.Recently published in The Lancet Planetary Health, figures show that, over the past 11 years, 340 deaths in Australia were recorded as being due to excessive heat. But a more in-depth, statically analysis has dwarfed that figure, finding 36, 475 deaths could have been attributed to excessive heart brought on by climate change. “Climate change is a killer, but we don’t acknowledge it on death certificates," co-author of the study Dr Arnagretta Hunter, from the ANU Medical School said. Campus Review interviewed Dr Hunter about this terrible, yet some would day predicable, revelation as our climate worsens. Hunter said while COVID-19 is a deadl

The COVID-19 pandemic had witnessed a mass migration to online learning, with some Australian universities being more experienced at it than other,Campus Review spoke to Associate Professor Petrea Redmond of the University of Southern Queensland(USQ), and a member of the Australian Association of Research in Education. The expert in online learning said that, while “there has been much talking about technology... educators need to consider equally the teaching methods being deployed."During the podcast Redmond, who has been teaching online at USQ since 2000, said educators have been "thrown into this new environment "and it's understandable if lessons don't work out as well as intended."She said there have been a host of success stories, as well as times when things didn't go to plan. The trick, she says is "We need to be forgiving of each other."In essence, Redmond does not believe there is any difference is the quality of online versus face-to-face education; "it all comes down to context," she says. Howeve

Campus Review talk with Dr Donna Bossio form Swinburne University about the Opera Project.A collaboration between Eastern Community Legal Centre and Swinburne, the program has used extensive community consultation to explore how ageism plays out in the day-to-day experiences of older people and better understand its trajectory towards elder abuseSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Dr Lukas Carey, a long-time educator, trainer, coach and research academic at Edith Cowan University, recently published an article about how the COVID-19 pandemic is impacting incarnated learners, entitled ‘Education while imprisoned during the COVID-19 outbreak, the forgotten frontier’.While Carey did concede that not all educational facilities or programs at jails have their prisoners’ education disrupted, enough inmates are angry about it, saying it perpetuates the stereotype that prisoners are irredeemable and not worthy of a full education.The research academic was able ask detainees what they thought about the current state of education amid COVID-19. The responses were varied, poignant and underscore just how much more work needs to be done in this field.“The officers won’t even let us use the computers. They have locked down the library for everyone and that’s where the computers are. It is really s***and makes the guys trying to learn really angry. They just don’t care,” one detainee said.Another sa

While some people may have been able to access Work from Home (WFH) policies in the past, the COVID-19 pandemic has seen anyone who can technically work from home do so. But how do people feel about this? And will WFH practices become the norm for many in the future. To discuss this topical issue, I interviewed Dr Sarah Bankins, a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Management at Macquarie Business School. She wrote about this issue recently for the university’s The Lighthouse publication, entitled ‘The coronavirus has changed work forever’.Bankins contended that, while technologies such as Zoom, Google Hangouts and Skype have existed for some time and offer the workforce a way of communicating that is functional, they are far from perfect. Connectivity issues, slow internet speeds as well as technical glitches can impede businesses trying to communicate on a regular basis. Because it is too early to empirically conclude what impacts WFH has had on employees’ productivity and wellbeing, the Macquarie Univers

When the COVID-19 pandemic initially took off in China, grave fears were held for Australia's university sector. This was primarily due to Australia's reliance on Chinese students and the travel bans that are still in place. But now universities are facing another challenge. With the banning of large gatherings and recent social distancing protocols, on-campus students are now affected and a range of technologies are being relied upon like never before. But as Michael Sankey, Deputy Director for Learning Transformations in the Learning Futures Group at Griffith University, explains, most Australian universities are adapting to the new "learning ecosystem", delivering on-campus students their content and assessment online. He stresses, however, that a lot of hard work has gone into the changes and there are some universities, who are no so experienced in online learning, "that are playing catch up". Griffith University has also installed some 1500 VPN connections into Chinese students' computers who are still

In part three of our podcast series on the megafires that brought destruction to Australia this summer, Campus Review spoke to a world-authority in land management practices - Professor David Bowman from the University of Tasmania. This episode focuses on the the challenges of reducing fire loads, the ability of megafires to overcome fire containment lines, and a question that is leading to intense debate in the field: Will more fire burning lead to more carbon emissions in the atmosphere than intense bushfires or even megafires in the future? And what will be the implications of this?One of the salient points Bowman makes is that Australia, as a landscape, is not an idealised environment that makes controlled burning easy. As he puts it, Australia "is not a frictionless surface" : it is full of mountainous streams, rivers, tributaries and a whole host of other complicating factors. He also warned that the scale of controlled burning required to establish fire breaks across the country would be "mind-boggling

Professor Zlatko Skrbis is the chief principal investigator of ARC-funded social futures project entitled, My Lives. With the support of various experts and research assistants, the project aims to investigate the challenges and milestones of young Australians as they transition from adolescence to adulthood.Beginning in 2006 and inspired partly by the British documentary series 10 up, the longitudinal project tracks the shifting opinions of over 2000 Queenslanders on salient including job security, early partnering, home ownership, wellbeing and agency, social and environmental attitudes, and approaches to new technology.The cohort was only 12 to 13 years of age when first surveyed; now they are in their mid twenties. One of the most interesting, and perhaps alarming findings stemming from the Our Lives project is that young adults have a less certain idea of their life trajectories and mental health issues are on the rise. These could have serious policy implications for the future.See omnystudio.com/listen

When English and Music teacher Michael Lawrence visited Finnish schools in 2017, many teachers asked him why Australia used a test like NAPLAN to assess students, particularly young ones.That experience, plus the Finnish children's interest in learning, convinced Lawrence to write a book on the topic, entitled Testing 3, 2, 1: What Australia can learn from Finland's education system. It is supported by a bulk of personal observations and evidence, and is due for release in April.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In part two of our series on Australia's megafires this summer, Campus Review talks to firefighter and PhD candidate at Edith Cowan University Greg Penney.With his unique mix of academia and hands-on knowledge, Penney explains how unprecedented the bushfire season has been so far and the types of technology Australia already has, and needs to develop, to combat such fires in the future. He also discusses his research project and warns that traditional models of volunteerism within the firefighting community are being stretched to the limit.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Two of the most important points highlighted in Davis's interview was that the world is barrelling towards its limit of no more than a 2 degree Celsius temperature rise and drastic action will need to be undertaken to contain it. He also said the urban sprawl, seen in a large number of Australian cities, needs readdressing, as fuel loads around these areas tend to be abundant. He also said that when large fires join together, they produce there own - often deadly - weather systems.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

As concerns about the spread of coronavirus deepen in Australia, attention has turned to the effect it is having on Australia's billion-dollar education sector. As around 250,000 Chinese students bound for Australia wait for the travel bans to lift, universities are implementing a range of strategies to deal with the situation: tuition fee refunds, free deferrals of study, online study and adjustments to teaching calendars. However, for Chinese high school students, the situations is more difficult, with the academic year well and truly away. CEO of the International Education Association of Australia, Phil Honeywood, who has been appointed to coordinate the sector's response, spoke to Campus Review after attending the Global Reputation Taskforce. The taskforce emphasised the need for "common, transparent and comprehensive" information being available to all during what Honeywood describes as an extremely "fluid" situation affecting many sectors. Honeywood also urged against the racial profiling of Chinese st

Last week Campus Review published an article based on the research of UWA's Dr Cyril Grueter and a team of Edith Cowan researchers. In contrast to what one might instinctively think, the study found that altruism - or kindness - does not apply to everyone and is more prevalent among high-SES individuals and suburbs.In this podcast Grueter talks about the "lost letter" technique used in the study, speculates about the reasons for the results and underscores the importance of education in shaping kinder, pro-social individuals in the future.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.