Challenging Australian higher education : three places to begin

I want to begin by thanking Professor Johnson for this opportunity to rehearse and indeed expand on the comments I made earlier this year at the Universities Australia meeting of Vice‐Chancellors in Brisbane. My comments then and now are in part speculative, given that they comment on what might be, although they are also cognizant of what we already know about student equity issues in Australian higher education and of the research data currently available, including research undertaken by the National Centre but also research available more widely, nationally and internationally. Informed by this work, the central thesis that I want to put to you today and to open up to discussion is that if the Australian higher education sector is to take seriously the federal government’s 20/40 targets, then there are three main challenges that need to be confronted.

First, that expansion of higher education provision and of a particular mix, will need to be done in the context of limited excess student demand, certainly compared with previous periods of expansion by the sector. Second, that the 20/40 targets have brought into sharp relief the problems with our current set of definitions and measurements of students: of equity groups (including socioeconomic status) but also student achievement and aspiration. And third, that universities will need to confront the teaching and learning that is higher education. This is the very thing – or at least one of them – for which we would hope school students would aspire.

An institutional study of the influence of ‘onlineness’ on student evaluation of teaching in a dual mode Australian university

Student evaluation of teaching (SET) is now commonplace in many universities internationally. The most common criticism of SET practices is that they are influenced by a number of non-teaching-related factors. More recently, there has been dramatic growth in online education internationally, but only limited research on the use of SET to evaluate online teaching. This paper presents a large-scale and detailed investigation, using the institutional SET data from an Australian university with a significant offering of wholly online units, and whose institutional SET instrument contains items relating to student perceptions of online technologies in teaching and learning. The relationship between educational technology and SET is not neutral. The mean ratings for the ‗online‘ aspects of SET are influenced by factors in the wider teaching and learning environment, and the overall perception of teaching quality is influenced by whether a unit is offered in wholly online mode or not.

Asia-Pacific immigrant managers in Australia : their views about career

Systematic cross-cultural studies of career advancement are fragmented, despite the burgeoning cultural diversity of the global workforce. This study examines diverse groups of managers from the Asia-Pacific region and their stories of career progression to date in Australia. Immigrant managers were interviewed to examine the influence of the new environment on their current career and advancement prospects. In doing so, we demonstrate the experiences of internationally mobile managers when adapting to new boundaries for career advancement. We found that overseas managers have difficulties fitting into the Australian workplace norms. In addition, the study revealed that newcomers had expected to be recognised and promoted for their multiple qualifications; however this did not take place within the Australian workplace context.

Supermarket Healthy Eating for Life (SHELf): protocol of a randomised controlled trial promoting healthy food and beverage consumption through price reduction and skill-building strategies

Background: In the context of rising food prices, there is a need for evidence on the most effective approaches for promoting healthy eating. Individually-targeted behavioural interventions for increasing food-related skills show promise, but are unlikely to be effective in the absence of structural supports. Fiscal policies have been advocated as a means of promoting healthy eating and reducing obesity and nutrition-related disease, but there is little empirical evidence of their effectiveness. This paper describes the Supermarket Healthy Eating for LiFe (SHELf) study, a randomised controlled trial to investigate effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of a tailored skill-building intervention and a price reduction intervention, separately and in combination, against a control condition for promoting purchase and consumption of healthy foods and beverages in women from high and low socioeconomic groups.
Methods/design: SHELf comprises a randomised controlled trial design, with participants randomised to receive either (1) a skill-building intervention; (2) price reductions on fruits, vegetables and low-joule soft drink beverages and water; (3) a combination of skill-building and price reductions; or (4) a control condition. Five hundred women from high and low socioeconomic areas will be recruited through a store loyalty card program and local media. Randomisation will occur on receipt of informed consent and baseline questionnaire. An economic evaluation from a societal perspective using a cost-consequences approach will compare the costs and outcomes between intervention and control groups.
Discussion: This study will build on a pivotal partnership with a major national supermarket chain and the Heart Foundation to investigate the effectiveness of intervention strategies aimed at increasing women’s purchasing and consumption of fruits and vegetables and decreased purchasing and consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages. It will be among the first internationally to examine the effects of two promising approaches - skill-building and price reductions - on diet amongst women.

Building the capacity of family day care educators to promote children’s social and emotional wellbeing : an exploratory cluster randomised controlled trial

Background: Childhood mental health problems are highly prevalent, experienced by one in five children living in socioeconomically disadvantaged families. Although childcare settings, including family day care are ideal to promote children’s social and emotional wellbeing at a population level in a sustainable way, family day care educators receive limited training in promoting children’s mental health. This study is an exploratory wait-list control cluster randomised controlled trial to test the appropriateness, acceptability, cost, and effectiveness of “Thrive,” an intervention program to build the capacity of family day care educators to promote children’s social and emotional wellbeing. Thrive aims to increase educators’ knowledge, confidence and skills in promoting children’s social and emotional wellbeing.
Methods/Design: This study involves one family day care organisation based in a low socioeconomic area of Melbourne. All family day care educators (term used for registered carers who provide care for children for financial reimbursement in the carers own home) are eligible to participate in the study. The clusters for randomisation will be the fieldworkers (n = 5) who each supervise 10-15 educators. The intervention group (field workers and educators) will participate in a variety of intervention activities over 12 months, including workshops; activity exchanges with other educators; and focused discussion about children’s social and emotional wellbeing during field worker visits. The control group will continue with their normal work practice. The intervention will be delivered to the intervention group and then to the control group after a time delay of 15 months post intervention commencement. A baseline survey will be conducted with all consenting educators and field workers (n = ~70) assessing outcomes at the cluster and individual level. The survey will also be administered at one month, six months and 12 months post-intervention commencement. The survey consists of questions measuring perceived levels of knowledge, confidence and skills in promoting children’s social and emotional wellbeing. As much of this intervention will be delivered by field workers, field worker-family day care educator relationships are key to its success and thus supervisor support will also be measured. All educators will also have an in-home quality of care assessment at baseline, one month, six months and 12 months post-intervention commencement. Process evaluation will occur at one month, six months and 12 months post-intervention commencement. Information regarding intervention fidelity and economics will also be assessed in the survey.
Discussion: A capacity building intervention in child mental health promotion for family day care is an essential contribution to research, policy and practice. This initiative is the first internationally, and essential in building an evidence base of interventions in this extremely policy-timely setting.

Progress on building energy labelling techniques

The building sector consumes around 30–40 per cent of the primary energy in most developed countries. The importance of labelling buildings as a national strategy for energy efficiency is well recognized worldwide. The last 10–15 years have seen an emergence of programmes in different parts of the world. As seen in the United States, European Union, South America and Asia, there is a collection of rating systems or tools internationally, designed with the intention of evaluating the design, construction and operation of buildings. This study presents an overview and critical reflection on the progress on building energy labelling techniques in recent years. The scope of labelling, methodology and methods of implementation are discussed in detail.

Regulatory theory insights into the past, present and future of general purpose water accounting standard setting

Purpose – Accounting and water industry experts are developing general-purpose water accounting (GPWA) to report information about water and rights to water. The system has the potential to affect water policies, pricing and management, and investment and other decisions that are affected by GPWA report users' understanding of water risks faced by an entity. It may also affect financial returns to accounting and auditing firms and firms in water industries. In this paper the authors aim to examine the roles of the accounting profession, water industries and other stakeholders in governing GPWA. Recognising that the fate of GPWA depends partly upon regulatory power and economics, they seek to apply regulatory theories that explain financial accounting standards development to speculate about the national and international future of GPWA.

Design/methodology/approach – Official documents, internal Water Accounting Standards Board documents and unstructured interviews underpin the authors' analysis.

Findings – The authors speculate about the benefits that might accrue to various stakeholder groups from capturing the GPWA standard-setting process. They also suggest that internationally, water industries may dominate early GPWA standards development in the public interest and that regulatory capture by accounting or water industry professionals will not necessarily conflict with public interest benefits.

Practical implications – Accounting for water can affect allocations of environmental, economic, social and other resources; also, accounting and water industry professional standing and revenues. In this paper the authors identify factors influencing GPWA standards and standard-setting institutional arrangements, and thereby these resource allocations. The paper generates an awareness of GPWA's emergence and practical implications.

Originality/value – This is an early study to investigate water accounting standard-setting regulatory influences and their impact.

Designing online role plays with a focus on story development to support engagement and critical learning for higher education students

Online role plays, as they are designed for use in higher education in Australia and internationally, are active and authentic learning activities (Wills, Leigh & Ip, 2011). In online role plays, students take a character role in developing a story that serves as a metaphor for real-life experience in order to develop a potentially wide range of subject-related and generic learning outcomes. The characteristics of these stories are rarely considered as factors in the design―and success―of these activities. The unspoken cultural assumptions, norms and rules in the stories that impact on the meanings students make from their experiences are also rarely scrutinised in the online role play literature. This paper presents findings from a case study of an asynchronous text-based online role play involving politics and journalism students from three Australian universities. The findings highlight the centrality of students’ collaborative story-building activity to their engagement and learning, including their development of critical perspectives. The study underlines the importance of certain aspects of the role play's design to support students' story-building activity.

Narrating heritage's living stories : a comparative study of China's Suojia ecomuseum and Australia's Melbourne living museum of the West

The Ecomusée, as emerged in France in the 1970s, is a form of open-air museum that aims to maintain collections in their original environments with local communities serving as curators and managing their own heritage. This approach and philosophy implies and is dependent upon democratic principles in the conservation and interpretation processes. Since the 1990s, China has adopted the ecomusée concept for the conservation of selected ethnic villages to relieve tensions between poverty and heritage conservation. However, does this concept really work in China? To answer this question, the Suojia Ecomuseum, the first such initiative - has been selected as a case study and assessed using the mixed methodologies of on-site observation, documentation and semistructured interviews. This process has identified several issues and problems associated with this ecomuseum. It demonstrates that Suojia Ecomuseum has not achieved international benchmarks, neither philosophical nor practical expectations have been met. This conclusion challenges the internationally acknowledged notion that all ecomuseums develop and are operated using a bottom-up approach, that they were all community-based and democratic. These discrepancies lead to other questions about the differences between ecomuseums in China and elsewhere. In order to map and compare the differences between ecomuseums in China and in Western democracies, a detailed survey was undertaken using Melbourne’s Living Museum of the West, Australia. Applying the same methodologies as in China, a comparable examination was undertaken as to its background, objectives, management structures, programs and activities, and project outcomes as well as problems. The differences between Suojia Ecomuseum and Melbourne’s Living Museum are then explained and shown. They demonstrate quite diverse organisations with different objectives and management structures relating to different cultural and natural resources. However, the unexpected finding was that the futures of both ecomuseums relied on the financial support and passion of younger generations and hence were vulnerable.

Creative conservation and Balinese traditional landscape : scenarios for eco city concepts and culturally sensitive tourism development

Bali is internationally recognized as an island possessing a beautiful natural landscape as well as a unique culture. The natural qualities of its mountains, lakes, rivers, rice terrace fields with subak irrigation make Bali an important tourism destination. Cultural Tourism is integral in Bali’s tourism industry providing the basic capital for development1. The social condition of this society that is strongly characterized by religious beliefs, and its nature and ecology also supports this. The conservation and maintenance of this traditional landscape is often forgotten because of government agendas to implement cultural city programs aimed at encouraging tourism development. Despite this, the government is now supporting the program of ‘Bali toward Garden Island’, which aims to sustain the physical and cultural environment of the island towards conservation of its landscape. The implementation of this program includes attention to universal, societal and cultural values as unity indicators, of which the landscape planning of the Balinese characteristics and traditions cannot be separated. Landscape planning is integral in this initiative of character defining the region.

Globalisation is increasingly becoming one of the most important discussions amongst the Balinese people. It has become a national concern about the changes implicating Bali’s environment. Urbanisation, population growth, ribbon development, migration and consumption of energy are important imperatives and necessary evils for growing cities. These imperatives are creating the sprawl of building planning, development information, loss of open spaces, as well as the decline of the identity of cities. Places such as Denpasar City are struggling with increasing population at a rate of 1.94% per year that is causing increase in housing and public facilities demanded by both residents and ex-patriates. Thus land associated with the city has been lost to the rapid development of this cultural landscape.

This paper examines the Balinese traditional landscape and its role in encouraging tourism development that based on the Balinese culture and its ecology. The paper focuses on the planning of city landscape appearance characteristics and seeks to test and adopt the terms ‘creative conservation’ and ‘eco city concept’. By conserving the most important philosophy of the Balinese Tri Hita Karana Concept will better inform all aspects of city development in Bali. This study seeks to offer guidance for the legitimate use of landscape planning especially for city development in Bali.

The performance of a student evaluation of teaching system

Student evaluation of teaching (SET) is now commonplace in many universities internationally. While much effort has been devoted to examining the statistical validity of SET instruments, there has been limited examination of the methodological and consequential validity (together referred to as ‘utility’) of the ways in which SET data are used. This paper examines the SET system at Deakin University from the perspective of utility. It draws on publicly available SET results for an entire annual cycle of unit offerings. Consideration is given to the representativeness of the data produced, and to the utility of the data reported, by the system. While this investigation focuses on the SET system currently employed at Deakin University, it offers both an analysis methodology and conclusions that can be applied more generally.

The impact of divergent historical and cultural factors on convergence in global communication practice

Communication practice is increasingly converging around globally consistent approaches and techniques shaped by both globalisation and globalising communications technologies. However, this paper argues, national and regional practice histories and cultural characteristics have shaped, and continue to shape, practice in individual markets. The paper analyses the extent of that these divergent histories and cultures have shaped the structure and practices of the public relations industry in Australia and other countries. The paper challenges the common assumptions about public relations development and industry practice having developed from a predominantly US-based model progressively disseminated globally. It traces the history of public relations in Australia, counter-pointing its distinctive origins, to the US-origin thesis. It also examines the impact of demography and diverse national culture on industry shape and practice, comparing the Australian industry to that of other industries around the world. It uses mini-case studies of campaigns in specific countries to assess the extent to which they are culturally-bound by historical and cultural differences and the extent to which they are capable of being transferred or adapted to individual markets. For instance, assumptions about globally-consistent brand identities are contradicted by McDonalds’ branding practices in markets such as Canada and Japan. The paper also discusses how emerging market PR industries are being shaped by distinctive and divergent cultures and development paths and may create new structural and practice models as the emerging economies becoming dominant internationally. The authors suggest that history and cultural diversity continue, and will continue to, shape national and regional practices.

Modelling engineering student academic performance using academic analytics

Internationally, the recruitment, management and retention of students has become a high priority for universities. The use of information technology systems and student data by institutions to understand and improve student academic performance is often referred to as ‘academic analytics’. This paper presents an academic analytics investigation into the modelling of academic performance of engineering students enrolled in a second-year class. The modelling method used was binary logistic regression, and the target predicted variable was ‘success status’—defined as those students from the total originally enrolled group that achieved a final unit grade of pass or better. This paper shows that student data stored in institutional systems can be used to predict student academic performance with reasonable accuracy, and it provides one methodology for achieving this. Importantly, significant predictor variables are identified that offer the ability to develop targeted interventions to improve student success and retention outcomes.

Alcohol consumption, obesity, and psychological distress in farming communities — an Australian study

Purpose: Alcohol consumption patterns nationally and internationally have been identified as elevated in rural and remote populations. In the general Australian population, 20.5% of adult males and 16.9% of adult females drink at short-term, high-risk levels. Farmers are more likely to drink excessively than those living in major cities. This study seeks to explore the relationships between farmers’ physical and mental health and their alcohol consumption patterns. Our hypothesis is that farmers consume alcohol at high-risk levels more often than the Australian average and that this consumption is associated with obesity and psychological distress.

Methods: Cross-sectional descriptive data were collected within Australian farming communities from 1,792 consenting adults in 97 locations across Australia. Data on anthropometric measurements, general physical attributes and biochemical assessments were used to explore the interrelationships of self-reported alcohol consumption patterns with obesity, psychological distress, and other physical health parameters.

Findings: There was a higher prevalence of short-term, high-risk alcohol consumption (56.9% in men and 27.5% in women) reported in the study compared with national data. There was also a significant positive association between the prevalence of high-risk alcohol consumption and the prevalence of obesity and abdominal adiposity in psychologically distressed participants.

Conclusions: The prevalence of short-term, high-risk alcohol consumption practices in this cohort of farming men and women is significantly higher than the Australian average. These consumption practices are coupled with a range of other measurable health issues within the farming population, such as obesity, hypertension, psychological distress, and age.

Patron offending and intoxication in night time entertainment districts (POINTED) : a study protocol

Risky alcohol consumption is the subject of considerable community concern in Australia and internationally, particularly the risky drinking practices of young people consuming alcohol in the night-time economy. This study will determine some of the factors and correlates associated with alcohol-related risk-taking, offending and harm in and around licensed venues and night-time entertainment precincts across five Australian cities (three metropolitan and two regional). The primary aim of the study is to measure levels of pre-drinking, drinking in venues, intoxication, illicit drug use and potentially harmful drinking practices (such as mixing with energy drinks) of patrons in entertainment areas, and relating this to offending, risky behaviour and harms experienced. The study will also investigate the effects of license type, trading hours, duration of drinking episodes and geographical location on intoxication, offending, risk-taking and experience of harm. Data collection involves patron interviews (incorporating breathalysing and drug testing) with 7500 people attending licensed venues. Intensive venue observations (n=112) will also be undertaken in a range of venues, including pubs, bars and nightclubs. The information gathered through this study will inform prevention and enforcement approaches of policy makers, police and venue staff.