Obtaining peak performance in the transition to Higher Education: Support for the worried well, acutely anxious and seriously sluggish student

Research suggests that students in their late teens and early twenties have not reached "identity formation" (James Marcia, 1969, 1980). The heightened anxiety and uncertainty about themselves and their future contribute to sometimes crippling fears emanating as anxiety, clinical depression and other mood disorders. This paper will explore some issues and suggest healthy ways of helping young people safely through these chaotic years and into a fulfilling career.

Extreme science and engineering : a higher education widening participation initiative at QUT

The QUT Extreme Science and Engineering program provides free hands-on workshops to schools, presented by scientists and engineers to students from prep to year 12 in their own classrooms. The workshops are tied to the school curriculum and give students access to professional quality instruments, helping to stimulate their interest in science and engineering, with the aim of generating a greater take up of STEM related subjects in the senior high school years. In addition to engaging students in activities, workshop presenters provide role models of both genders, helping to breakdown preconceived ideas of the type of person who becomes a scientist or engineer and demystifying the university experience. The Extreme Science and Engineering vans have been running for 10 years and as such demonstrate a sustainable and reproducible model for schools engagement. With funding provided through QUT’s Widening Participation Equity initiative (HEPPP funded) the vans which averaged 120 school visits each year has increased to 150+ visits in 2010. Additionally 100+ workshops (hands-on and career focused) have been presented to students from low socio-economic status schools, on the three QUT campuses in 2011. While this is designed as a long-term initiative the short term results have been very promising, with 3000 students attending the workshops in the first six months and teacher and students feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.

Resisting innovation talk in higher education teaching and learning

The exhortation to innovate is a pervasive one that occupies a central position across university mission statements, strategic plans, marketing literature and job titles. This paper locates a discourse of innovation within a history of Australian federal higher education policy, a history that may bear similarity with other national contexts. This paper names this discourse as an innovation talk that influences our teaching and learning practices, a discourse that can be reconfigured in a way that opens up the possibility for change. As such, this paper presents an analytical process used to resist taken-for-granted views of what constitutes valuable teaching practices. Suggestions for re-conceptualising how universities govern and support teaching and learning innovation are drawn from analysis of key federal policies that have influenced university practices in recent years.

Informed learning in online environments : supporting the higher education curriculum beyond Web 2.0

As boundaries between physical and online learning spaces become increasingly blurred in higher education, how can students gain full benefit of Web 2.0 social media and mobile technologies for learning? How can we, as information professionals and educators, best support the information literacy learning needs of students who are universally mobile and Google-focused? This chapter presents informed learning (Bruce, 2008) as a pedagogical construct with potential to support learning across the higher education curriculum, for Web 2.0 and beyond. After outlining the principles of informed learning and how they may enrich the higher education curriculum, we explain the role of library and information professionals in promoting informed learning for Web 2.0 and beyond. Then, by way of illustration, we describe recent experience at an American university where librarians simultaneously learned about and applied informed learning principles in reshaping the information literacy program.

An exploration of the maturity model concept as a vehicle for higher education institutions to assess their capability to address student engagement : a work in progress

Gaining a competitive edge in the area of the engagement, success and retention of commencing students is a significant issue in higher education, made more so currently because of the considerable and increasing pressure on teaching and learning from the new standards framework and performance funding. This paper introduces the concept of maturity models (MMs) and their application to assessing the capability of higher education institutions (HEIs) to address student engagement, success and retention (SESR). A concise description of the features of maturity models is presented with reference to an SESR-MM currently being developed. The SESR-MM is proposed as a viable instrument for assisting HEIs in the management and improvement of their SESR activities.

The maturity model concept as framework for assessing the capability of higher education institutions to address student engagement, success and retention : new horizon or false dawn?

While the engagement, success and retention of first year students are ongoing issues in higher education, they are currently of considerable and increasing importance as the pressures on teaching and learning from the new standards framework and performance funding intensifies. This Nuts & Bolts presentation introduces the concept of a maturity model and its application to the assessment of the capability of higher education institutions to address student engagement, success and retention. Participants will be provided with (a) a concise description of the concept and features of a maturity model; and (b) the opportunity to explore the potential application of maturity models (i) to the management of student engagement and retention programs and strategies within an institution and (ii) to the improvement of these features by benchmarking across the sector.

Australian higher education evaluation through assurance of learning

A collaborative research project conducted by five Australian universities inquired into the philosophy and motivation for Assurance of Learning (AoL) as a process of education evaluation. Associate Deans Teaching and Learning representing Business schools from twenty-five universities across Australia participated in telephone interviews. Data was analysed using NVIVO9. Results indicated that articulated rationale for AoL was both ensuring that students had acquired the attributes and skills the universities claimed they had, and the philosophy of continuous improvement. AoL was motivated both by ritualistic objectives to satisfy accreditation requirements and virtuous agendas for quality improvement. Closing-the-loop was emphasised, but was mostly wishful thinking for next steps beyond data collection and reporting. AoL was conceptualised as one element within the larger context of quality review, but there was no evidence of comprehensive frameworks or strategic plans.

Pathways for developing a 'smart' workforce : does the achievement of formal workplace qualifications encourage participation in higher education?

The purpose of this paper is to investigate a public workforce education initiative in the context of State and agency policies designed to enhance employee capabilities to adapt to a volatile and changing environment. In particular, we are concerned with public employees’ experience of a higher educational pathway that resulted in their obtaining a Diploma level qualification. In addition to understanding the employees’ experience of this pathway we were interested in whether the experience contributed to their openness to the prospect of university level education. We conducted telephone interviews with a sample of participants from the program. Employees reported very positive experience of the program; in particular employees reported enhanced efficacy beliefs, a strong sense of achievement, and a feeling of recognition. This experience is explained by four main factors; (1) a program design that was well aligned with the employees learning needs, (2) strong support by organisational staff who delivered and assessed participants on capability criteria, (3) strong management support for employees’ participation, (4) an academic ceremony that provided participants with public recognition of their achievement by valued others. Participants’ motivation to participate was primarily intrinsic rather than extrinsic. Participants in the study reported that their experience in this educational pathway gave them the confidence to consider the possibility of university level education. The paper also discusses the practitioner-academic collaboration that led to the development of this paper.

Not a dirty word : arts entrepreneurship and higher education

While the majority of creative, performing, and literary artists are self-employed, relatively few tertiary arts schools attempt to develop capabilities for venture creation and management (and entrepreneurship more broadly) and still fewer do so effectively. This article asks why this is the case. It addresses underlying conceptual and philosophical issues encountered by arts educators, arguing that in all three senses of the term: new venture creation; career self-management; and being enterprising, entrepreneurship is essential to career success in the arts. However, the practice of entrepreneurship in the arts is significantly different from the practice of entrepreneurship in business, in terms of the artist’s drivers and aims, as well as the nature of entrepreneurial opportunities, contexts and processes. These differences mean that entrepreneurship curricula cannot simply be imported from Business schools. This article also examines the arts-idiosyncratic challenge of negotiating distinctive and potentially conflicting entrepreneurial aims, using career identity theory. It concludes by suggesting strategies by which adaptive entrepreneurial artist identities can be developed through higher education programs.

Transition to higher education

This chapter in a monograph covering many different transitions, focuses on the variables contributing to a successful or problematic transition from High School to a tertiary institution and is based on responses from a sample of students at a large city university who encountered difficulties.

Navigating in a sea of change : second set of working papers of the higher education policy project

This volume represents teh second collection of working papers and articles by participants in the Higher Education Policy Project (HEPP), a project funded by the Australian Research Council and based in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Queensland. The first volume, 'Higher Education in Transition: Working Papers of the Higher Education Policy Project (Bella, McCollow and Knight, 1993), took the broad theme of "higher education in transition" in order to introduce readers the HEPP and give them some idea of the breadth of the research being pursued by the HEPP research team itself and by the cohort of post-graduate students also associated with the project. Since then, higher education has remained in transition. Stubborn and resurgent questions continue: such as what a university ought to be, what forms of research should be supported in a mass system, and how institutional accountability can be demonstrated. In differing ways and using a variety of research perspectives and methodologies, the contributors to this volume explore these and other questions of relevance to higher education today.

Like our page : using Facebook to support first year students in their transition to higher education

Facebook is approaching ubiquity in the social habits and practice of many students. However, its use in higher education has been criticised (Maranto & Barton, 2010) because it can remove or blur academic boundaries. Despite these concerns, there is strong potential to use Facebook to support new students to communicate and interact with each other (Cheung, Chiu, & Lee, 2010). This paper shows how Facebook can be used by teaching staff to communicate more effectively with students. Further, it shows how it can provide a way to represent and include beginning students’ thoughts, opinions and feedback as an element of the learning design and responsive feed-forward into lectures and tutorial activities. We demonstrate how an embedded social media strategy can be used to complement and enhance the first year curriculum experience by functioning as a transition device for student support and activating Kift’s (2009) organising principles for first year curriculum design.

Using cases in a mixed learning environment : meeting the challenges of higher education reform

This paper explains the context for pedagogy in a specific undergraduate course; the comparative benefits of using cases in a mixed learning environment (simultaneous large and small groups); and illustrates one significant way for universities to respond to increasing demand for delivery efficiency while maintaining high quality learning outcomes. Thus, to achieve objectives of the subject, tutorial classes expand on what is taught in lectures and provide the necessary context to analyse cases in more detail. A small, qualitative study explored experiences of market research tutors with the use of case method teaching reported. Implications of the study for case teaching in higher education are identified.

Multimodal approaches to reflective teaching and assessment in higher education

Reflection is not a new concept in the teaching of higher education and is often an important component of many disciplinary courses. Despite this, past research shows that whilst there are examples of rich reflective strategies used in some areas of higher education, most approaches to and conceptualisations of reflective learning and assessment have been perfunctory and inconsistent. In many disciplinary areas reflection is often assessed as a written activity ‘tagged onto’ assessment practices. In creative disciplines however, reflective practice is an integral and cumulative form of learning and is often expressed in ways other than in the written form. This paper will present three case studies of reflective practice in the area of Creative Industries in higher education – Dance, Fashion and Music. It will discuss the ways in which higher education teachers and students use multi-modal approaches to expressing knowledge and reflective practice in context. The paper will argue that unless students are encouraged to participate in deep reflective disciplinary discourse via multi-modes then reflection will remain superficial in the higher education context.