With on-campus learning almost non-existent in many universities, remote or online learning in the higher education sector is the status quo. While COVID-19 ushered in this change extremely quickly, institutions are wanting to ensure that a remote learning experience is comparable to an on-campus one and won’t negatively affect student learning and outcomes.

An expert in this area is Andrew Martin, Scientia Professor and Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of New South Wales. His research interests lie in student motivation and the cognitive science of learning. He’s advocating a teaching approach called Load Reduction Instruction to help maintain high standards of teaching and learning remotely while the pandemic drags on.

Load Reduction Instruction in grounded in educational psychology and its primary aim is to increase learners' long-term memory to promote deep learning. Before this can be achieved, however, students' long-term memory must be developed by relying on shorter, linear tasks that allow them to build up a foundation of knowledge. As Martin contends, practices such as teaching too much too soon, 'busy' screens with too much information to digest, and non-linear teaching and learning plans do nothing to help students with their long-term memory of the content and, subsequently, their understanding of the content becomes fragmented.

This insightful podcast also raises questions about whether Australian universities are comparable in their online delivery and whether online learning should have been at the forefront of our minds years ago. It also touches on important issues of socialisation at university and how specific groups would be best placed to keep attending, if practical and safe.

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Melbourne’s West is one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse regions in Australia, with up to 46 per cent hailing from backgrounds where English is not their first language. This has a flow-on effect in sport, particularly in the area of Brimbank, “showing it is among the lowest in Victoria for club-based sport and sport participant registrations, and the lowest for its number of sports facilities, playing fields and courts”.

But Dr Brent McDonald and his colleagues at Victoria University - who have studied the relationship between sporting membership and social inclusion previously - are determined to see a positive change, knowing that inclusion in sports requires a breakdown of the exclusionary and structural practices relating to income, transport, fees and language. McDonald and his colleagues at VU have just begun a two-year project titled ‘Change Makers: Empowering sports to enhance social inclusion for migrants and refugees’.

McDonald spoke to Campus Review about the myriad barriers facing newly arrived migrants and refugees in relation to social inclusion through sports and how the $330,000 project will operate. The project was just one of 57 successful applications for an Australian Government social inclusion grant from a pool of 800.

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Dr Jarrod Kath from USQ’s Centre for Applied Climate Sciences is investigating a variety of coffee that supplies roughly 20-40 per cent of the world’s market. It was named robusta after it was thought to be extremely resilient. What he and his colleagues are finding, however, is that the bean is not as tough as first thought and may require a range of strategies to keep it growing in South East Asia, particularly in Vietnam where millions are dependent on it for income.

Examining robusta coffee crops is the beginning of a research project titled ‘De Risk South East Asia’, which is being conducted in collaboration with the World Meteorological Organisation and the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture. The project will examine how a host of South East Asian agricultural crops, such as coffee, sugar and rice, are threatened by the effects of climate change. Once the effects have been investigated, “climate management systems” will be employed to try and attenuate the negative climatic effects on yields.

Kath and his colleagues have already discovered that the optimal temperature for the robusta bean is 20.5 degrees Celsius, not between 22 and 28 degrees Celsius that had once been unquestioned. Also, Kath’s research is indicating that the overnight minimum temperature might be having more of an effect on the robusta yield, not daytime temperatures.

In addition to these research findings, the project is exploring ways farmers can mitigate the effects of climate change through equipping farmers with more accurate weather knowledge (and thus knowing when to irrigate more) and mulching more during hotter periods. The idea of a genetically engineering a robusta bean that can tolerate higher temperatures has also been considered.

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Professor Sandra Milligan from the University of Melbourne and her fellow experts were inspired to write the report 'Future Proofing Students: What they need to know and how educators can assess and credential them' after noticing a disconnect between "what teachers want students to learn and how they are credentialed" or assessed.

The authors of the report also found that employers often knew little of what a student could really do based on a report card. Students, too, often complained that some credentials didn't reflect who they really were.

Campus Review spoke to Milligan about this issue as well as the skills all students will require now and into the future. Depending on the context, these skills are called different things: soft skills, 21st century skills, general capabilities and graduate qualities.

They include teamwork and collaboration, communication in a range of forms, critical and creative thinking, and problem solving, to name a few. Milligan refers to them as "learning skills" as they are essential to the learning process.

Milligan also discussed the idea of a learner profile, which is allows educators to assess these credentials - or general capabilities in school language - in a more detailed way than a report. She's hoping this new way of assessing credentials gains traction but admits there are big challenges in going forward.

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Education minister Dan Tehan's recent announcement to change the course fee structure across Australian universities had been met with a range of views. Some believe it sets Australia up for the future, while others, including former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, called it "baffling",

Other critics, too, have pointed to the irony of how important the coalition considered the soft skills of humanities to the future of jobs before making such a decision.

One of the most vocal and cogent critics of the proposed changes that need to be legislated is the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Campus Review spoke to the academy's president about the issue, ProfessorJoy Damousi.

In contrast to the government's line, Damousi said arts and humanities graduates are incredibly job ready and statistics support this . She also said humanities graduates possess "very transferable, very transportable skills".

Damousi also focussed on the need for students to follow their talents and passions, not enrol in courses purely based on financial reasons. She called this "an insidious choice". The academy's president was also concerned about how the new course fee structure would affect low socioeconomic students and how discounting subjects like history ran the risk of cultural amnesia and the rise of deeply troubling ideologies.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a quick rethink of how got get unemployed or underemployed workers back into jobs and retain their skills base.

It has also necessitated that individuals consider retraining in new fields that they might not have considered in he past. To facilitate this, the government passed the Higher Education Relief Package, helping to create subsidised Undergraduate Certificates in a range of high-demand fields.

Now, the government has gone one step further, creating the Higher Education Short Courses Scheme. This will allow not only displaced workers, but anyone to access a plethora of two-hour courses for free. Such courses can even be competed on your mobile.

Torrens University General Manager, Design and Creative Technology, Paul Brafield, spoke to Campus Review about the success of the scheme so far, with over 6000 short courses already completed since April.

The most popular courses are in leadership, social media marketing, design thinking, emotional intelligence and agile project management methodologies.

Brafield also mentioned that, while the short courses are not accredited, they can be used as credit toward other longer, accredited university programs.

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Dr Melissa Barnes is a lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Monash University, working within the fields of teacher education, assessment, policy and TESOL. She is a critic of the controversial initial teacher education test, also known as the LANTITE.

To begin with, Barnes highlighted the problem with attaching the word "quality" to the those who pass the LANTITE test or "quality" teachers in general. As she explains, quality is a diverse and difficult-to-explain phenomenon that varies in different educational contexts. The academic does not believe "a literacy and numeracy test is the best way to measure teacher quality in the country".

Barnes also argues that a third-party organisation such as the Australian Council for Education Research (ACER) is not the best way to assess students' literacy and numeracy skills, and such a test would be best left up to the universities to administer.

Finally, the Monash lecturer in education holds concerns about the standardised nature of the test, meaning students are completing a multiple-choice test essentially. Barnes recently conducted a study with roughly 134-fourth year education students and found that many of them had concerns about the validity of the test.

While Barnes believes strong numeracy and literacy skills are critical to teaching, she is unconvinced LANTITE has much to offer in assessing the skills we want to see in teachers.

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According to ANU experts, deaths from climate change have been “substantially under reported” in Australia’s national health records, and it's high time it's listed as a reason for death on official documents.

Indeed, the research contends that deaths attributed to environmental heath factors is at least 50 times more than what is officially published on death certificates.

Recently published in The Lancet Planetary Health, figures show that, over the past 11 years, 340 deaths in Australia were recorded as being due to excessive heat. But a more in-depth, statically analysis has dwarfed that figure, finding 36, 475 deaths could have been attributed to excessive heart brought on by climate change.

“Climate change is a killer, but we don’t acknowledge it on death certificates," co-author of the study Dr Arnagretta Hunter, from the ANU Medical School said. Campus Review interviewed Dr Hunter about this terrible, yet some would day predicable, revelation as our climate worsens.

Hunter said while COVID-19 is a deadly and extremely serious disease, it's affected approximately five million people at the moment. In contrast, in years to come, climate change is expected to affect millions, if not billions, of people.

"Climate change is a killer," Dr Hunter warns, "And we need to include it in our health data set.

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The COVID-19 pandemic had witnessed a mass migration to online learning, with some Australian universities being more experienced at it than other,

Campus Review spoke to Associate Professor Petrea Redmond of the University of Southern Queensland(USQ), and a member of the Australian Association of Research in Education.

The expert in online learning said that, while “there has been much talking about technology... educators need to consider equally the teaching methods being deployed."

During the podcast Redmond, who has been teaching online at USQ since 2000, said educators have been "thrown into this new environment "and it's understandable if lessons don't work out as well as intended."

She said there have been a host of success stories, as well as times when things didn't go to plan. The trick, she says is "We need to be forgiving of each other."

In essence, Redmond does not believe there is any difference is the quality of online versus face-to-face education; "it all comes down to context," she says. However, Redmond also contends that some students may be struggling trying to study from home, finding the lines of work, study and life difficult to demarcate.

"Finding a commitment to learning learning is a bit more difficult now," she said.

Finally, she concluded that a key challenge facing both universities and students is availability, on a personal level.

"The biggest challenge at the moment is to demonstrate that you are available for your students," she said.

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Campus Review talk with Dr Donna Bossio form Swinburne University about the Opera Project.
A collaboration between Eastern Community Legal Centre and Swinburne, the program has used extensive community consultation to explore how ageism plays out in the day-to-day experiences of older people and better understand its trajectory towards elder abuse

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