An evaluation of viability of public private partnerships in social infrastructure procurement projects in Queensland, Australia

Public private partnerships (PPP) have been widely used as a method for public infrastructure project delivery not only locally and internationally, however the adoption of PPPs in social infrastructure procurement has still been very limited. The objective of this paper is to investigate the potential of implementation of current PPP framework in social affordable housing projects in South East Queensland. Data were collected from 22 interviewees with rich experiences in the industry. The findings of this study show that affordable housing investment have been considered by the industry practitioners as a risky business in comparison to other private rental housing investment. The main determents of the adoption of PPPs in social infrastructure project are the tenant-related factors, such as the inability of paying rent and the inability of caring the property. The study also suggests the importance of seeking strategic partnership with community-based organisation that has experiences in managing similar tenants’ profiles. Current PPP guideline is also viewed as inappropriate for the affordable housing projects, but the principle of VFM framework and risk allocation in PPPs still be applied to the affordable housing projects. This study helps to understand the viability of PPP in social housing procurement projects, and point out the importance of developing guideline for multi-stakeholder partnership and the expansion of the current VFM and PPPs guidelines.

Authentic assessment of work integrated learning

The paper examines how poster presentations can be used to authentically assess student learning during internships. While poster presentations are commonly used for assessment in the sciences, they are an innovative approach to assessment in the humanities. It is argued that posters are one way that universities can overcome the substantial challenges of assessing work integrated learning. The paper evaluates the use of poster presentations for assessment in two internship units at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT)]. The first is a unit in the Faculty of Business where students majoring in advertising, marketing and public relations are placed in a variety of organisations. The second unit is a law unit where students complete placements in government legal offices. The two units adopt different approaches to the poster assessment; the unit in the Faculty of Business is non-graded and the poster assessment task requires students to reflect on their learning during the internship. The law unit is graded and requires students to present on a research topic that relates to their internship. In both units the posters were presented during a poster showcase which was attended by students, workplace supervisors and members of faculty. The paper evaluates the benefits of poster presentations for students, workplace supervisors and faculty and concludes that posters can effectively and authentically assess various learning outcomes in internships in different disciplines.

Destination branding case study : tracking brand equity for an emerging destination between 2003 and 2007

Place branding has become a major focus of operations for destination marketing organizations (DMOs) striving for differentiation in cluttered markets. The topic of destination branding has only received attention in the tourism literature since the late 1990s, and there has been relatively little research reported in relations to analyzing destination brand effectiveness over time. This article reports an attempt to oprationalize the concept of consumer-based brand equity (CBBE) for an emerging destination over two points in time. The purpose of the project was to track the effectiveness of the brand in 2007 against benchmarks that were established in a 2003 student at the commencement of a new destination brand campaign. The key finding was there was no change in perceived performance for the destination across the brand's performance indicators and CBBE dimensions. Because of the common challenges faced by DMOs worldwide, it is suggested the CBBE hierarchy provides destination marketers with a practical tool for evaluation brand performance over time.

Empirical evaluation of a service analysis and design methodology

Service-orientation has gained widespread acceptance and is increasingly being employed as a paradigm for structuring both business and IT architectures. An earlier study of extant service analysis and design methodologies discovered a need for holistic approaches that equally account for both business and software services, which motivated the design of a new, consolidated service analysis and design methodology. A challenge in design-oriented research is to evaluate the utility of the newly created artefacts (here: the methodology), as they are often intended to become part of complex socio-technical systems. Therefore, after presenting a brief overview of the consolidated methodology, the paper discusses possible approaches for the “evaluate” phase of this design-science research process and presents the results of an empirical evaluation conducted in an Action Research study at one of Australia’s largest financial services providers.

Internships in marketing: Goals, structures and assessment - student, company and academic perspectives

Work-integrated learning in the form of internships is increasingly important for universities as they seek to compete for students, and seek links with industries. Yet, there is surprisingly little empirical research on the details of internships: (1) What they should accomplish? How they should be structure? (3) How students performance should be assess? There is also surprisingly little conceptual analysis of these key issues, either for business internships in general. or for marketing internships in particular. Furthermore, the "answers" on these issues may differ depending upon the perspective if the three stakeholders: students, business managers and university academics. There is not study in the marketing literature which surveys all three groups on these important aspects of internships. To fill these gaps, this paper discusses and analyses internships goals, internship structure, and internship assessment or undergraduate marketing internships, and then reports on a survey of the views of all three stakeholder groups on these issues. There are a considerable variety of approaches for internships, but generally there is consensus among the stake holder groups, with some notable differences. Managerial implication include recognition of the importance of having and academic aspects in internships; mutual understanding concerning needs and constraints; and the requirement that companies, students, and academics take a long-term view of internship programs to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes.

Intentional first year curriculum design as a means of facilitating student engagement: some exemplars

The importance of student engagement to higher education quality, making deep learning outcomes possible for students, and achieving student retention, is increasingly being understood. The issue of student engagement in the first year of tertiary study is of particular significance. This paper takes the position that the first year curriculum, and the pedagogical principles that inform its design, are critical influencers of student engagement in the first year learning environment. We use an analysis of case studies prepared for Kift’s ALTC Senior Fellowship to demonstrate ways in which student engagement in the first year of tertiary study can be successfully supported through intentional curriculum design that motivates students to learn, provides a positive learning climate, and encourages students to be active in their learning.

Link-the-Wiki : performance evaluation based on frequent phrases

In this paper, we discuss our participation to the INEX 2008 Link-the-Wiki track. We utilized a sliding window based algorithm to extract the frequent terms and phrases. Using the extracted phrases and term as descriptive vectors, the anchors and relevant links (both incoming and outgoing) are recognized efficiently.

Australian student reactions to U.S. tourism advertising : a test of advertising as public diplomacy

A study among Australian college students gauged their reactions to a television commercial produced for the U.S. Commerce Department to bolster sagging tourism numbers among international visitors. In addition to using traditional measures applied to tourism advertisements, the student also concluded items to measure attitudes toward the U.S. government and its people Pre- and post-viewing results indicated that while the Hollywood-movie-themed commercial was not well received by the Australian students as a tourism message, it did result in more favorable attitudes toward the U.S. government, though not the U.S. people. The findings lend partial support for the potential of tourism advertising efforts to exert a "bleed-over effect" in terms of their contributions to overall attitudes toward a country, regardless of whether viewers plan to visit the country whose travel advertisements they see.

Australian student reactions to US tourism advertising : a test of advertising as public diplomacy

A study among Australian college students gauged their reactions to a television commercial produced for the US Commerce Department to bolster sagging tourism numbers among international visitors. In additional to using traditional measures applied to tourism advertisements, the study also included items to measure attitudes toward the US government and its people. Pre- and post-viewing results indicated that although the Hollywood-movie-themes commercial was not well received by the Australian students as a tourism message, it did result in more favourable attitudes toward the US government, although not the US people. The findings lend partial support for the potential of tourism advertising efforts to exert a 'bleed-over effect' in terms of their contribution to overall attitudes toward a country, regardless of whether viewers plan to visit the country whose travel advertisements of which they see.

A model of teacher professional development based on the principles of lesson study

The researcher’s professional role as an Education Officer was the impetus for this study. Designing and implementing professional development activities is a significant component of the researcher’s position description and as a result of reflection and feedback from participants and colleagues, the creation of a more effective model of professional development became the focus for this study. Few studies have examined all three links between the purposes of professional development that is, increasing teacher knowledge, improving teacher practice, and improving student outcomes. This study is significant in that it investigates the nature of the growth of teachers who participated in a model of professional development which was based upon the principles of Lesson Study. The research provides qualitative and empirical data to establish some links between teacher knowledge, teacher practice, and student learning outcomes. Teacher knowledge in this study refers to mathematics content knowledge as well as pedagogical-content knowledge. The outcomes for students include achievement outcomes, attitudinal outcomes, and behavioural outcomes. As the study was conducted at one school-site, existence proof research was the focus of the methodology and data collection. Developing over the 2007 school year, with five teacher-participants and approximately 160 students from Year Levels 6 to 9, the Lesson Study-principled model of professional development provided the teacher-participants with on-site, on-going, and reflective learning based on their classroom environment. The focus area for the professional development was strategising the engagement with and solution of worded mathematics problems. A design experiment was used to develop the professional development as an intervention of prevailing teacher practice for which data were collected prior to and after the period of intervention. A model of teacher change was developed as an underpinning framework for the development of the study, and was useful in making decisions about data collection and analyses. Data sources consisted of questionnaires, pre-tests and post-tests, interviews, and researcher observations and field notes. The data clearly showed that: content knowledge and pedagogical-content knowledge were increased among the teacher-participants; teacher practice changed in a positive manner; and that a majority of students demonstrated improved learning outcomes. The positive changes to teacher practice are described in this study as the demonstrated use of mixed pedagogical practices rather than a polarisation to either traditional pedagogical practices or contemporary pedagogical practices. The improvement in student learning outcomes was most significant as improved achievement outcomes as indicated by the comparison of pre-test and post-test scores. The effectiveness of the Lesson Study-principled model of professional development used in this study was evaluated using Guskey’s (2005) Five Levels of Professional Development Evaluation.

Design and evaluation of an image analysis platform for low-power, low-bandwidth camera networks

We describe the design and evaluation of a platform for networks of cameras in low-bandwidth, low-power sensor networks. In our work to date we have investigated two different DSP hardware/software platforms for undertaking the tasks of compression and object detection and tracking. We compare the relative merits of each of the hardware and software platforms in terms of both performance and energy consumption. Finally we discuss what we believe are the ongoing research questions for image processing in WSNs.