Enhancing learning for culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) students

Objectives: Academic staff have noted that culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) students have faced difficulties during their studies and in adapting to workplace experiential learning.

Method: To explore this issue, three focus groups were held to identify the barriers to learning faced by CALD students and to develop strategies for CALD students, academic staff and workplace supervisors to assist in the students' academic progress and skill development. The three focus groups represented academic staff: CALD students and placement supervisors in courses where workplace supervision was a requirement of the course.

Results: The barriers to learning were identified as difficulties with English language communication skills, including reading, writing and verbal skills; course content that was too local; extra time not being allocated to academic and placement staff to allow for the greater time commitment required for CALD students; large tutorial groups; social isolation; discriminatory assessment, and lack of awareness of existing support services for academic staff dealing with international students.

Conclusions: Strategies suggested to help assist CALD students to learn included conducting introductory sessions on Australian culture for CALD students; having additional and smaller tutorial groups; having academics spend time with individual CALD students; incorporating international issues into the course content and assessment; providing support and assistance for academic staff teaching CALD students, and organising experienced CALD students to mentor their less experienced peers. Implementing the strategies suggested would require greater resources to be committed to CALD students, which may be difficult given competing demands within the university for limited financial resources.

[P]lucky Jane et al: ideal types in the legal academy?

This article started as a response to a decision by Deakin University's Law School late last year to embark upon a major recruitment of new staff. That decision caused the writer to wonder what published sources of advice were available to assist aspiring legal academics in choosing and shaping a career. To date it would seem that whilst there is no dearth of sources about what law schools should teach, or on the content and structure of the curriculum, research on the selection and formation of academics is somewhat less common. This is changing. In 2003 a short biographical study of six law teachers, based on structured interviews, was published and in 2004, a major study of the identity of 54 law teachers became available. There have also been significant studies on the particular issues encountered by female academics in the legal academy.

Pandora`s box : academic perceptions of student plagiarism in writing

Plagiarism is viewed by many academics as a kind of Pandora's box—the elements contained inside are too frightening to allow escape for fear of the havoc that may result. Reluctance by academic members of staff to discuss student plagiarism openly may contribute to the often untenable situations we, as teachers, face when dealing with student plagiarism issues. In this article, I examine the dilemmas English for Academic Purposes (EAP) staff face when dealing with student plagiarism in the tertiary classroom. The perceptions of all 11 teachers involved in teaching a first year EAP writing subject at South-Coast University are detailed in light of the university's policy on plagiarism. My research indicates that not only is an agreed definition of plagiarism difficult to reach by members of staff teaching the same subject, but plagiarism is a multi-layered phenomenon encompassing a spectrum of human intention. Evaluating the spectrum can lead to differences in the implementation of university plagiarism policy, the result of which embodies issues of equity. The aim of the article is to encourage policy-makers and academic staff to acknowledge the concerns about implementation of plagiarism policy. Collaborative, cross-disciplinary re-thinking of plagiarism is needed to reach workable solutions.

`Just give me someone who can hit the ground running`: an investigation into the job-ready public relations graduate

Public relations educators perform an academic and vocational balancing act. Employers demand graduates with developed vocational skills. In the meantime, academics strive to provide students with work skills as well as solid theoretical base, and to also address emerging issues. This paper uses a case study in Geelong, Victoria to examine what Australian regional employers see as desirable attributes in public relations graduates. It then explores how educators address the needs of the employers as well as the needs of the public relations profession.

Performance appraisals in higher education: an Australian perspective

This paper considers performance appraisals in Australian universities. It examines some of the theory underpinning performance appraisals and applies it to the world of academia. It then considers the nature of universities and the changes which have taken place in Australian universities since the late 1980s and the implications of these changes on the performance appraisal of academics. It concludes by identifying questions for further research.

Valuing the arts : theorising and realising cultural capital in an Australian city

For those who make and admire artistic works, there is no question of their value. However, for others interested in economic development, the value of the arts is often more tangential, contested and questionable. While the post-modern world of consumption and spectacle suggests to some academics and governments that the arts and cultural industries are the way of the future, others remain sceptical about their social and economic value. This is a theoretical as well as a practical issue this paper explores by offering a reconceptualisation of Pierre Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital as a way of re-assessing the value of the arts. The paper then applies this framework to quantify and qualify the value of the arts in one regional city in Australia – Geelong in Victoria – focusing on the work of two artists. The aim is to describe the interconnected processes by which the arts generate cultural capital in the form of confidence, image, individual well-being, social cohesion and economic viability. The analysis also highlights the ongoing power relations which prescribe artistic production, circulation and valuation. The implications of such a rethinking and application go well beyond one city and region to other places grappling with the relationship between artistic production and urban well being. By focusing on the broad-ranging process by which artistic value is created for individuals, groups, professionals, communities and governments, a model becomes available for other places to use in realising their cultural capital.

Who`s complaining? Using MOSAIC to identify the profile of complainants

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to bring together established research in the field of consumer complaint responses: to contextualise this research into the area of complaints about advertising in Australia; and to empirically test the proposition that it is possible to construct a profile
of complainants about advertising in Australia.

Design/methodology/approach – Postcodes obtained from the Advertising Standards Board complaints database were entered into Pacific micro marketing MOSAIC software, which uses data at the postcode level to cluster individuals into homogeneous groups.

Findings – Characteristics shared among consumers who engage in “amplified voicing” include above average income levels, above average disposable income levels, higher than average education levels, professional and associate professional occupations, middle- to late-middle-aged household heads and above average representation of working women. Their interests tend towards culture, technology, entertaining, sport, food and fashion.

Research limitations/implications – Complainants seem to be unrepresentative of those most likely to be disadvantaged by “unacceptable” advertising. It is suggested that it now falls to advertising professionals and marketing academics to encourage greater involvement of all members of Australian society in the current complaints process and build wider understanding of practices that contravene the regulatory system.

Originality/value – This study investigates the effects of advertising on consumers and hence on society in general, and examines the changing nature and structure of the advertising self-regulatory system in Australia. Though based on fieldwork in Australia, it provides an international perspective, and is potentially transferable to other societies.

QuickTime multi-track theatricks

Digital media, corporate database applications and intranets provide efficient ways to create, store and deliver information and educational services. However some academics perceive new workload and other constraints eroding the potency of these technologies. Proposed corporate level information management systems for digital objects and their metadata are new complexities entering academicsÕ thoughts about using online multimedia.

Few staff understand digital multimedia concepts and fewer still, the systems designed to deal with IP management, copyright law compliance and the tracking of digital resource creation processes. Faltering staff enthusiasm warns of their need to experience working models and tangible benefits from these new directions. A project in Deakin's Faculty of Education provides a case study showing how QuickTime is helping academics understand, and increase their use of, multimedia in e-learning environments with an integrated library of digital resources with metadata.

We also report our experience of QuickTime in creating interactive learning objects using multi-tracks. We discuss our idea of theatricks as a performance drawcard - people will come! There is orchestration of multimedia and QuickTime conducts the events, its flexible functionalities providing a safer development environment for solving problems and grasping opportunities.

While difficult for some academics to comprehend, scripting automation and database connectivity through intelligent interfaces might facilitate QuickTime's use in building integrated learning environments with academics. These ideas are considered in relation to staff development, central to the case study project.

The effects of unions on labour productivity: a meta-analytic review

The impact of unions on productivity has been an important area of debate in
industrial relations and economics. The theoretical and empirical literature has produced conflicting results. In this paper, meta-analysis is used to quantify the association between unions and productivity and reach a quantitative assessment of the empirical literature. The results suggest that the union-productivity association is not invariant, and is country, industry and time specific.

Toward supporting e-learning and providing e-teaching services for e-world

We are entering the e-World. One special part of it is an e-University that supports e-Learning and provides e-Teaching services. Graduates must be well prepared for working in, with and through the e-World. e-Learning and e-Teaching services are necessary to support modern students learning and help academics to provide excellent teaching. This document reports on the School of Information Technology' initiatives, projects, courses and systems that lead toward e-Learning and e-Teaching in preparation of graduates for the e-World. The major lesson of our work toward supporting e-Learning and providing e-Teaching services is that the School's (the authors believe higher education) greatest asset is intellectual capital (human capital), not intellectual property.

A model of online teaching and learning

Deakin University has a long history of supporting distance education with technology. Such presentations have matured from a mix of remote-login/FTP/email in the 1980s through web mediated access in the 1990s to institution-wide learning management systems which are emerging currently. By the commencement of semester I, 2003, online teaching at the University will be supported by a single, institution-wide, learning management system, which is expected to support approximately 28,000 students, who will each be accessing up to 4 of some 1500 undergraduate and 700 postgraduate courses. In this paper we describe a model for online teaching of both on-campus and off-campus students in the Bachelor of Computing, using various technologies to support different aspects of online teaching and learning. This programme has been running in a web-mediated environment for over six years. Each year the administration of the programme has been modified in a reactive manner, based on student feedback and the identification of failure points during the previous semester, resulting in the model maturing over that time. We discuss how the changes have impacted the model, the academics involved in the teaching of the unit and the students' experience of learning in the online environment. We also discuss the advantages and disadvantages of online teaching and learning, as well as some potential pitfalls and how to avoid them, or, at least, minimise their impact.

Mapping pedagogy to technology - a simple model

As academics we are often encouraged to “go online” by our institution, by either moving or supplementing our teaching in an online environment. We have several options. We could simply attempt to replicate our face-to-face teaching, in effect changing nothing; we can enhance our face-to-face teaching with the available technology; or we can transform our face-to-face teaching by the available technology. The approach we choose will be determined by several factors, one of which will be our existing knowledge of the technological environment we are using. In this paper I propose a simple framework which provides novice eTeachers in particular with a simple mapping from classroom activity to technological functionality, reducing the need to have extensive technological literacy of the learning environment when designing online activities initially.

Students' perspective of online learning

When a student commences a course of study that includes an online component the initial feedback academics receive can reflect their fear of the online concept, their bias against the use of technology, as well as difficulties they may have encountered with using the supporting technologies rather than with online learning per se. In second semester 2002, an evaluation of an online unit in the B. Computing was conducted at the end of the semester to gain a better understanding of students’ perceptions of online learning as well as the effectiveness of the technologies that support these activities. We report some preliminary results from the evaluation. Initial indications are that poor first impressions are reflected in students’ perceptions of the overall online learning experience. We highlight some areas, normally considered outside the immediate domain of eLearning, that must be attended to in order to minimise the potential negative impact on students, maximise the benefits of learning online and improve the learning experience for students.

Getting abstracted: teacher educators as research writers

While the term 'early career' researcher, is a familiar identity label within competitive Australian Research Council grant writing and bidding, it is a strange appellation in Australian Faculties of Education, where many early career academics have, in fact, carried out successful professional careers in education for 10-15 years before they embark on mid-career doctoral work. In this sense, they are more mid than early career. While they are not novices, however, they are often positioned as beginners with regard to accessing the journal, conference and other discourse communities of the academy. This paper explores the tensions and anxieties experienced by mid-career researchers in teacher education as they begin to publish from their dissertations and extend the audience for their doctoral work. It focuses on the writing of abstracts, which it is argued is a rich site for both text work and identity work and a practice which goes beyond technique to questions of identity and the promotional economies of academic work.