Higher education – Page 16 – Music for Deckchairs

Letting ourselves go?

Kate Bowles April 30, 2011 0 Comments

A Canadian study of health issues affecting early career academics suggests that they may be sacrificing physical exercise in order to try to secure an inside lane position on the cinder track that leads to tenure. The study hints that if they’re doing this, they’re “letting themselves go”, and the point is touchingly made with an illustration of a bulging (male) waistline. Remedies include taking part in a charity fun run or “park[ing] your car far away to get a little…

Casualisation of work, Change management, Higher education, Risk

Online learning in the iron triangle

Kate Bowles April 28, 2011 0 Comments

We’re hearing from every direction that online learning is going to be the solution to the coming bricks and mortar shortage. This week, Swinburne DVC(A) Shirley Leitch writes that: If we are to meet the target of 40 per cent of 25 to 34 year olds holding a bachelor degree by 2025, we need to move beyond bricks and mortar to learner-centred solutions. I’m not so sure that these two things are simple opposites. My daughter is at the stage…

Change management, Edtech and online learning, Higher education, Student engagement

Bursting point

Kate Bowles April 24, 2011 0 Comments

There’s a conversation building about whether we’re wise to look at higher education through the lens of the economy, given that nothing much looks good through the bottom of that dirty glass. Markets achieve extraordinary results using the levers and pulleys of scarcity, rivalry and desire, but this volatility doesn’t always help the big public institutions that deliver other kinds of social and cultural benefits, like education. So we half-protect these familiar institutions of public life from the market in…

Being an academic, Casualisation of work, Risk, Student engagement

Waiting to engage

Kate Bowles April 22, 2011 0 Comments

‘Student engagement’ is a feel-good term. We don’t really know what it is, but we want more of it. Like anything we want more of, we need to think of ways of measuring it, so that we can check that we’re tracking in the right direction. In Australia and New Zealand, we measure it with the Australasian Survey of Student Engagement (AUSSE), which matches closely and deliberately to the US National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), so that we can…

Being an academic, Student engagement

Tryin’ to keep the customer satisfied

Kate Bowles April 14, 2011 0 Comments

Listening to a presentation on student satisfaction survey results recently, I felt a sort of ambivalent sympathy with the administrative colleague whose job it is to assure students that we’re committed to ‘closing the feedback loop’, so that they can feel that their efforts in filling out our surveys result in meaningful action. ‘Closing the feedback loop’ is considered the acme of good practice, but it’s also the Everest of communication challenges. It relies on persuading everyone involved that ‘we’…

Being an academic

Universities are not very agile

Kate Bowles April 7, 2011 0 Comments

I’ve been in conversation with a number of colleagues about whether or not academics are “resistant to change”. This claim was included quite casually in a document written to explain to external stakeholders the kinds of characteristics they would expect to see in a university community. Students are experimental, technical staff are skilled, and academics are … resistant to change. Obviously, at one level this is just annoying.

Being an academic, Change management, Risk