CAREERS

Attending Career Adviser Seminars is always an interesting experience as one gets to talk directly to career advisers from high schools and one has the opportunity of giving them a good background in what courses are available for students. The main purpose of events such as these is to inform and update the career counsellors in secondary schools who need to have a good broad knowledge of the careers available to students and the courses that exist out there. This helps to guide the students into jobs that interest them and inspire them. This is all important at the present where new jobs are being constructed and one can expect students of today to graduate and work in a job that did not exist at the time of their student years.
 
It is extremely important for everyone to choose a discipline of study that interests them, and thus leads to a related career area. We spend so much of our life working that unless we work at something that is interesting, fulfilling, engaging and satisfying, we can quickly become miserable. It is usually the people who hate their job that produce the worst quality work and have the highest rates of absenteeism and sick leave. It is also these people that will tend to move around from job to job with great frequency, or even end up as chronically unemployed and unemployable.
 
I have always enjoyed my work and I believe someone gives their best performance at work if they are genuinely interested in what they are doing. This leads to engagement and a natural tendency for one to strive and excel in what they do day after day. I have certainly looked forward to getting to work every morning and no matter how full or how busy my workday is, at its end I can honestly say that I have enjoyed it, even though I may be tired. Sure enough there may be one or two unpleasant incidents here and there, every now and then, but that is part and parcel of life, not just work. On the other hand, the moment a job does not satisfy me, and I no longer enjoy it, I resign. This has only happened twice in my career, and I have not regretted those decisions I made to leave those jobs that soured.
 
Students that are beginning their studies at tertiary level nowadays are widely different to students when I was at University. We are finding more and more that we need to educate in a way that produces graduates who are flexible, adaptable and able to keep up with the changing times. Graduates need to respond to the evolving demands of the workplace, which needs people who can respond in the changing world rapidly. We need special, specialised and flexible workers who can bring a sense of curiosity, understanding, knowledge, experience, compassion and joyfulness to the work that they do. This is only possible when someone does what they love and they love what they do.
 
This is extremely important in a world which is becoming smaller and where globalisation is breaking down barriers, allowing people to not only move around and work on one continent today, another continent tomorrow; but also allows people to work remotely. Outsourcing and employing people that work on the other side of the world is something that is commonplace now and it appears that no industry is immune from this. We are able to automate more work with computers and software and to transmit that work anywhere in the world so that it can be done more efficiently or cheaply thanks to the technology. The smaller the world gets, the more essential it is for people to do what they love, because more and more jobs are going to be automated or outsourced in this brave new world.
 
One of the skills that I want our graduating students to have mastered is having learned how to learn. That will be really important if they want to be effective in the workplace as jobs will change faster and faster in the globalised world. The best way to learn how to learn is to love learning. Students remember their favourite teachers at University although they may not remember much anymore of what they taught. They remember the teachers because they certainly remember enjoying learning from them. Students appreciate how these special teachers taught, because what they did was to equip students with the ability to be a life-long learner who are enabled to adapt and stay special or specialised in a changing world.
 
There is great responsibility in being an educator. Teachers have the ability to reshape, influence, impact and control their students. They can guide, inspire, transform and shape the lives of their charges. On the negative side, educators can also brainwash, intimidate, prejudice and pressure students. As a teacher, one must remain objective, fair, transparent and helpful, while allowing the student to grow and explore and learn under their own personal conditions and desiderata. Learning to learn and loving what they learn is the best way to achieve a good education, and consequently, a satisfying career.

CONFERENCE ENLIGHTENMENT

I attended an educational conference this week and I must say that it left me quite excited and brimming full of ideas. I participated both as a speaker and as a member of a panel that stimulated an interactive discussion with the attendees. However, I also enjoyed my function as an engaged audience member, who contributed to the general discussion. The group was relatively small, but this perhaps contributed to the success of the conference as there was active engagement of all participants.
 

The conference was an excellent opportunity for networking, for contributing to an ideas fest and for also being made aware of developments in our sector across Australia and the rest of the world. Overall, if chosen well, such conference activities can revitalise an academic’s stagnant mental marshes and will serve as a powerful creator of currents of intellectual activity.
 

The reason conferences are such a good scholarly activity is that they bring under the one roof people that share similar ideas, interests, jobs, contacts. Attendees are in a receptive frame of mind and at the right time and place. The bringing together of so many people under the same roof where they actively engage with one another and exchange ideas is conducive to active thinking, generation of new ideas, learning and exploration of brave new territory. They are safe environments for discourse, thinking out loud and provoking people with some left field concepts and intellectual challenges. It is a good environment for oneself to be challenged and provoked!
 

The theme the conference was Teaching and Learning Innovation in the Tertiary Sector and how we can utilise the technology to ensure that we achieve better training and teaching outcomes. I was pleasantly surprised to see how much good work is being done in Australia at the present time by some very passionate and dedicated academics, teachers and technology support personnel. The speakers were Australian  and knowledgeable, experienced and engaging.
 

The challenge for all such conference attendees is to go back and try to process all the information they have been exposed to, sort through what is interesting, relevant and do-able in one’s own institution and then gather up enough momentum in order to implement the new ideas in a format that is of direct relevance to them and their institution. The crystallisation of an idea for a project often comes to someone after such conferences and it is a chance for achieving some positive change within the organisation so as to achieve better educational outcomes. This new idea will be incubated and if the time is right and the right people are around, a project will be hatched.
 

In cases like these, one needs a leader but much more importantly passionate followers. Good leaders cannot act in isolation, they need followers who will be stimulated to carry forward the leader’s vision and realise it in actual terms. Good followers will gather up enough critical mass in order to move the new ideas from the realm of the notional into the corral of the tangible.
 

People are prepared to follow leaders that can inspire and create a comfortable atmosphere where creativity can flourish, where the change can come about in the most positive manner. Followers need to be treated as equals by the leader and will reject intimidation or manipulation. They will want to be recognised as an important part of the project that the team is involved in. The first follower who embraces what the leader proposes also shows leadership and can act as a powerful ally for the leader so as to involve more of the team into forming a cohesive group that shares a vision and aims at the same goal. It is such an environment that will generate innovative thinking and original solutions to problems that have vexed everyone for some time.
 

The leader will be able to contextualise the project and direct the team’s efforts into effecting the change that the project is engaged in. The purpose of leadership is to create and promote change. Leaders are the driving force of this change and need to be able to support the need for change with a good story. Followers will have questions and a leader must have logical, cogent, sensible answers that satisfy the followers.
 

The leader empowers the followers by providing information, advice, inspiration, acknowledgement and the mapping out of the journey ahead. The followers will then understand the need for change, share the vision and begin to innovate and function as an interdependent team. Such followers develop judgment and initiative, becoming better contributors. They are able to succeed even without continuous supervision and leadership, while gaining independence and become good leaders themselves.

CHANGE

Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher, said amongst other things that “Change alone is unchanging and the only constant in life”. By this of course he meant that change is inevitable and we should expect it to happen constantly and relentlessly. Change can occur slowly and thus be managed more easily, but often change can occur with dramatic rapidity and be quite widespread, which catches many unwary people off guard and this can have a disruptive influence not only on one’s working life, but also for one’s home life. The effects of change are not only intellectual and emotional, but also physical. The number of people that show symptoms of a physical disease after their emotional and intellectual stability has been seriously compromised is not insignificant.
 

Fear, anxiety, frustration, despair, anger and excitement are all feelings experienced by people affected by change. It is essential to recognise it is the change that is causing these emotions, not other people. If we centre our response to the change on people, we can lose perspective and lose control. It is essential to remain calm, logical and analytical about the change that is happening in our life. Understanding what exactly is happening and what the change entails is the first way of coping with it. If we understand change, we start to control our response to it. Analysing the situation may show that the change is not what we thought about initially and that a much less exuberant and less emotional approach is needed.
 

After getting over the initial shock and when we understand what the change is about, it is then that we can begin to actively take control. We can think of what we successfully did in the past and try the same strategies that worked then. When we think of the changes that we initiated in our own life to effect positive transformations in the way we work, live or even ways that we spend our leisure time, we can cope more effectively with the change that is imposed on us by others. It is also important to realise just how much change we allow ourselves to go through – we can control our destiny: Even if it is something as fundamental as changing our duties or our responsibilities, for example.
 

It is essential when coping with change to find a mentor that we trust. It can be a colleague, a family member or a peer. They can give advice, ask important (and sometimes blunt and painful!) questions, challenge our rationale and think through with us the reason for our actions. Mentors are usually not close friends but people whom we trust to be honest with us and are able to force us to be honest with ourselves. A mentor can help refine our strategy, offer suggestions as to the choices that we have available to us (often many of these we may not have considered ourselves). Choices are important as they can help us control the outcome of the change.
 

Change often challenges our skill base and it is important in any case to continue to learn new things every day. Knowledge, new skills, increasing experience and new expertise in what we do will allow us to cope with change much more easily. Flexibility of attitude and ability to deal with new scenarios – i.e. change – is something that an expanding skill base makes us more adept at when handling all sorts of crises, including dramatic change.
 

After thinking through the change, considering our options and determining the way that we wish to respond to the change, it is important to plan ahead. We should start with small steps, consider the short-term goals, then progress to bigger steps and longer-term goals. If one of these planned moves fails, it is important that we do not get discouraged and we should persevere. Losing a battle doesn’t mean we shall lose the war. We should regroup and replan and try again. At the same time it is important to celebrate our successes. We should so while looking back at where we have come from, what we have achieved and how our plan of action is progressing.
 

Change is inevitable and change is positive if it is done with good reason. How we cope with it is very much a personal matter and our choices in dealing with it, as well as our plan of action to deal with it, will determine our successful negotiation of all the transformations that change brings about, and succeeding in making the change positive for us.

ASSESSMENT

Assessment in education is something that generates a great deal of discussion, or even some heated debates. Educators have a remarkably broad view regarding what constitutes assessment and how it fits into the educational framework. For certain types of education (e.g. VET training), assessment is well defined and has to fit into a set of criteria relating to the competency of a student in carrying out certain tasks after specific training. With higher education, assessment becomes a more interesting proposition.
 
Even today one can find enshrined in educational institutions assessments that have changed remarkably little from traditional assessment tasks that are hundreds of years old. The university “essay”, for example, that has to be completed within a strictly controlled time span (60, or 90 minutes) in a particular place (an examination hall, under invigilation) is still subscribed to with great gusto by many departments of universities around the world. The well-defined “thesis”, which can be part of the assessment, or indeed all of the final assessment of a higher degree is still standard practice and has to abide by certain “rules” in how it is presented.
 
Assessment is very important part of what we do and we should have a clear idea as to what we are trying to achieve whenever we are assessing students. Innovative assessment practice is part of excellence in teaching and learning, and this is something that we should be thinking a lot about. I summarise below some common forms of general types assessment, though this is not an exhaustive list. It is a start.
 
1. Formative Assessment
An important factor determining learning effectiveness is the quality of the feedback students receive on their performance while they are learning. Assessment that is conducted to provide students with feedback on their performance but does not contribute to their final grade is known as formative assessment. To be effective, formative assessment should be conducted throughout the teaching period beginning at an early stage. Feedback to students should include suggestions on how performance might be improved. Formative assessment also provides teaching staff with valuable feedback on what students are learning and how effectively they are teaching.
 
2. Summative Assessment
The main reason summative assessment is carried out is to provide students, academic staff, the institution and employers with evidence of the extent to which students have achieved intended learning outcomes. To fulfil this purpose summative assessment must be valid and reliable as well as being systematically recorded and communicated. The summative assessment is reflected in the “grades” that appear on a student’s transcript of results and this can have important consequences, as the Grade Point Average (GPA) is calculated using these. The GPA is an internationally recognised calculation used to find the average result of all grades achieved for a student’s course of study. The GPA helps tertiary providers compare student results with those of other students, and assists prospective employers interpret a given student’s results.
 
3. Self-Assessment and Peer Assessment
Assessment practices of academic staff may include opportunities for students to develop the skills of self-assessment, which is an important outcome of professional education and a key skill for lifelong and independent learning. Students can be encouraged to assess their own performance, and that of their peers, and to compare their own perceptions of that performance with the judgements made by academic staff and by their peers.

Students can gain a great deal from self-assessment and peer assessment, and quite often the criteria they use are quite stringent. Peer-assessment, if used appropriately can provide students with great learning opportunities as they can be engaged in the learning and assessment process very readily if it their peers that are involved in these.

4. Authentic Assessment
“Authentic” has a specific meaning in the context of assessment, especially in professional contexts associated with the subject or discipline. To be authentic, assessment tasks should be seen by students to be challenging, interesting and meaningful, and where possible should be related to real-life applications. Authentic assessment has the capacity to provide students with motivation to engage actively in the learning process.
 
5. Program Assessment
The aggregated results of assessment of individual student learning provide the institution, Government and other stakeholders, including the professions, with evidence on the effectiveness of academic programs at unit, course or program level. This aspect of assessment may be referred to as program assessment. The institutional role of assessment requires that assessment outcomes are recorded in a form that allows comparison between results for the same unit over time, among different units in the same institution and among similar units at other institutions. Program assessment should be conducted on a regular basis and be linked to planning processes involving curriculum and resources.
 
6. Criterion and Norm-referenced Assessment
Criterion-referenced assessment involves the assessment of student performance against pre-determined criteria related to the learning outcomes of the unit. Norm-referenced assessment assesses student performance against the performance of other students. A criterion-referenced approach to assessment policy and practice is advocated.
 
With criterion-referenced assessment, the criteria by which work is to be judged are made explicit and the grade awarded is intended to directly reflect how well the student has met the criteria. Within a purely criterion referenced assessment system, students are not judged in comparison to each other, every student might achieve the highest grade or none might.
 
In contrast, with normative assessment, grades are awarded based on a predetermined distribution. The most common form of normative assessment, sometimes called ‘grading on the curve’ or ‘bell curve marking’, assumes grades are distributed according to a standard distribution curve. Certain proportions of each grade are awarded, for example, one third each passes and credit passes, one sixth each distinctions and high distinctions. This means that each student’s grade on the unit is determined in part by how well other students on the unit do.
 
7. Continuous Assessment (Progressive Assessment)
Continuous assessment documents a student’s progress throughout a course of study rather than exclusively by examination at the end of it. This can be a powerful technique as it makes the student (and the instructor) aware of how the student is comprehending and learning the subject matter as they progress through the course of study. Feedback given to the student after the assessment tasks can be a valuable stimulant for further enquiry and can get the student to channel their energy in learning in areas they are weaker in.
 
Innovative Assessment
Both conservative forms of assessment and innovative forms of assessment can fall within one or more of the general types presented above. Progressive academics will consider the learning outcomes of a particular unit of study and think innovatively about the type of assessment that will demonstrate a student’s learning most effectively – and demonstrate it not only to the instructors but also to the students themselves. As we “chunk” teaching and present material in innovative ways, we may also chunk assessment in a more manageable way, and perhaps embed it as part of the course, such as tests, papers, projects, or portfolios.
 
We can utilise new technology to help us assess students and use it in a way that discourages cheating and highlights plagiarism. Assessment tasks can be linked to various learning analytics parameters and can provide valuable real time feedback to students (and instructors!). Learning analytics can also allow comparison of results and provide an easier mechanism for moderation of assessment.
 
How do you assess your students? Is a review of your assessment practices in order? Who moderates your assessments? What mechanisms do you have in place for appeals against assessment decisions?

eBOOKS

I recently attended a presentation by one of the major science publishers, which presented a platform for accessing e-texts and e-resources. It was quite interesting to see what is now being done in terms of making textbooks available on electronic platforms with some added, media-rich resources that bring the content to life. This of course means that in the near future the physical printed textbook may become redundant, as interactive and custom-designed learning resources are made available to students.

This is especially important in tertiary education where new research and developments make the physical printed textbook out of date almost as soon as it is published. An e-Book has the advantage of being easily updated and revised, with the latest material being immediately added to the electronic edition, which is constantly updated every time the reader logs into the publisher’s site. The other advantage is that the material can be brought to life with animations, sound files, videos, interactive formative assessments, access to hyperlinked material on the web, wikis, blogs, etc, etc.

Another bonus is that that these e-Books are not as “rigid” as a printed text. An instructor can be quite creative when putting together learning resources for use in class. For example if I, as an instructor, wish to use Chapters 1, 3, 5 and 6 from one textbook, Chapter 2 and 3 from another and Chapters 11, 13 and 14 from yet another, I can construct my own bespoke “recommended reading text” through this anthologising process, so that my students get the learning text resources that correspond best with the specific curricular needs of any given subject area. This customisation of an e-Book to suit a particular subject in a given course and its integration with other learning resources available to students in order to create a customised personal learning space will increase the learning opportunities for students.

As we move towards more flexible and more engaging educational resources, it is important to consider the collaborative learning opportunities that can be used effectively in a classroom and personal learning space environment. The instructor becomes a facilitator of learning and provides opportunities for the class and individual students so that they construct their own tailor-made environment in which learning can occur. The use of wikis is one such example of collaborative learning opportunities, but also self-selection of the learning resources that each student can personally garner, allows each learner to individualise their own personal library of resources that best help them to learn from.

The physical book of course will not disappear completely as there will always be bibliophiles amongst us that revel in the book and its physical presence in our hands. Whatever technology may come, there will always be books, less of them maybe, but one would hope that they will represent the best of what is available in terms of publishing and careful, beautiful and well-prepared editions.