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1.
The internationalisation of higher education in Australia over the past two decades has brought about dramatic changes in Australian universities. Growing numbers of international students have enrolled in Australian universities and the number of students studying offshore has also increased dramatically. While considerable material has been published on the ramifications of the increased numbers of onshore international students studying at Australian universities, there is relatively little published research on the specific challenges facing academics participating in offshore programs. The aim of this project was to examine the current pre-departure cross-cultural training taking place in the business faculties of three Australian universities in order to gain a better understanding of the adequacy of the support given to Australian academics teaching offshore. Twenty staff involved in offshore education were interviewed as part of this project, including academics with considerable offshore teaching experience, senior academic managers and cross-cultural trainers. While these institutions engage in little formal preparation for offshore teaching, a great deal of informal mentoring and briefing is taking place. We consider the implications of the new quality assurance framework for Australian universities, which requires that institutions be able to demonstrate the ways in which they ensure the quality of teaching and learning. Under this new system, universities are bound by the Australian Vice Chancellors' Committee's guidelines for the provision of education to international students. It appears that Australian universities will need to establish more formal mechanisms to ensure that offshore staff are adequately prepared for offshore teaching posts.  相似文献   

2.
This paper reports a discriminant analysis of Australian universities using academics' perceptions of their university-level environment. A sample of 514 academics from 52 departments in 26 publicly funded universities responded to the University-Level Environment Questionnaire, which assesses academic's perceptions of seven dimensions of institutional environment (viz. Academic Freedom, Concern for Undergraduate Learning, Concern for Research and Scholarship, Empowerment, Affiliation, Mission Consensus and Work Pressure). Discriminant analysis revealed that the four university types were separated by the first discriminant function, with long-established universities separated widely from new universities. Concern for Research and Scholarship was the major discriminating variable, with Academic Freedom a minor discriminating variable. The study suggests that new universities must improve their level of research and scholarship if they are to become more like other Australian universities.  相似文献   

3.
The field of Australian higher education has changed, is changing and is about to change, repositioned in relation to other “fields of power”. It is a sector now well defined by its institutional groupings and by their relative claims to selectivity and exclusivity, with every suggestion of their differentiation growing. The potential of a “joined-up” tertiary education system, of vocational education and training (VET) and universities, has the potential to further rework these relations within Australian higher education, as will lifting the volume caps on university student enrolments. Moreover, Australian universities now compete within an international higher education marketplace, ranked by THES and Shanghai Jiao Tiong league tables. “Catchment areas” and knowledge production have become global. In sum, Australian universities (and agents within them) are positioned differently in the field. And being so variously and variably placed, institutions and agents have different stances available to them, including the positions they can take on student equity. In this paper I begin from the premise that our current stance on equity has been out-positioned, as much by a changing higher education field as by entrenched representations of social groups across regions, institutions, disciplines and degrees. In taking a new stance on equity, the paper is also concerned with the positioning in the field of a new national research centre with a focus on student equity in higher education. In particular, the paper asks what stance this new centre can take on student equity that will resonate on a national and even international scale. And, given a global field of higher education, what definitions of equity and propositions for policy and practice can it offer? What will work in the pursuit of equity?  相似文献   

4.
In this article, we utilise recent theorising on praxis and educational development to explore how academics in universities can foster public, institutional and more personal development, even as they are challenged by what are sometimes described as more ‘managerial’ and ‘neoliberal’ conditions. The research draws upon a variety of sources of data, including publicly available correspondence on the university sector in Australia, interviews with colleagues, and personal reflective journals. These data reflect three instances of educational praxis development in the Australian university context, and at three scales/levels: nationally; unit-wide (university/faculty/institute); and sub-unit/individually. The findings reveal such development in the form of: academics using mainstream media to inform the general public about the nature of university industrial relations and funding at a national level; junior and senior academics collaborating and engaging in mentoring practices to build institutional research capacity at a university/institutional level; and, individual academics meeting to develop individual teaching practice. Through explicating the characteristics and value of educational development for and as praxis, we provide resources for hope for better understanding how the work of universities, including their broader mission to inform the public, might be enacted more educationally.  相似文献   

5.
Australia is now the third largest provider of education to overseas students. Between 1994 and 2000 the number of overseas students taught by Australian universities increased by 150% to 107,622. It is estimated that 41% of the recent growth in international education has been in offshore enrolments, with each of Australia’s 38 universities now providing offshore education. This paper reviews recent Australian literature on transnational teaching and presents an overview of a study with academics who teach transnationally and who are drawn from nine Australian universities. The study covers the professional development and teaching experiences of these academics and their perceptions of the induction/orientation and ongoing professional development needed to support the delivery of quality trans‐cultural education offshore.  相似文献   

6.
In this paper I use a governmentality framework to explore the growth of women's mentoring programmes in Australian universities over the last 10–15 years. These programmes are supported because they speak to institutional concerns with improving performance in a performative culture, while being seen to deal with the problem of gender inequity. I draw on the mentoring experiences of two women academics from a larger study to illustrate the ways women are governed and self-govern, and negotiate subjectivities through mentoring. This reading locates mentoring within a network of institutional power relations, in so doing unsettling the truths we hold about mentoring as always good and unproblematic. It offers an important account of why mentoring has become so popular in these places in these times and reflects on the implications for feminist political goals.  相似文献   

7.
Place is a concept used to explore how people ascribe meaning to their physical and social surrounds, and their emotional affects. Exploring the university as a place can highlight social relations affecting Australian Indigenous students’ sense of belonging and identity. We asked what university factors contribute to the development of a positive sense of place for these students. Findings are presented from two Australian universities, based on focus groups with Indigenous students, and interviews with Indigenous and non-Indigenous staff. Students prioritized relationships with academics as a key theme, stressing academic’s flexibility and understanding enabled their persistence at university. Students situationally manage self-identification, requiring academics to engage effectively with diverse students, but staff felt they required further professional development. We argue that academics can ‘make’ university places in their pedagogies and mentoring roles, but require universities to recognize this pedagogical caring as a legitimate and valued element of their work.  相似文献   

8.
Australia, like the rest of the developed world, is in the midst of dealing with notable issues related to the age structure of its academic workforce. These issues are widespread and have been articulated in the Australian context most comprehensively by Hugo (2008). This paper investigates issues with demographic change and other key factors related to the desirability of a science or mathematics academic career within Australian universities. It draws on the findings of a research project undertaken in 2008 for the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations. The findings show that while demographic issues are not as dire for science academics compared to the entire sector, issues relating to tenure, workload and retaining young science academics in Australia are a threat to the long-term sustainability of science faculties in Australian universities.  相似文献   

9.
One consequence of globalisation is the demand on academics to better prepare students for work and life in an interconnected world through curriculum internationalisation. Many academics are hesitant, resistant, or ill-prepared to engage with curriculum internationalisation. This paper explores how this can be addressed by reconfiguring the way academic developers engage with academics within their teaching/program teams at the discipline level. Drawing on Star Trek and nomadic space, we theorise a participatory, situative approach to engaging disciplinary academic teams in the internationalisation of the curriculum process. We illustrate this from our work with teaching/program teams in two Australian universities.  相似文献   

10.
Globalisation has meant an increased demand from students, employers, and academics for indicators of the international academic standing of universities. In this paper we examine the broad methodological issues involved in measuring international academic standing and apply our conclusions to data for 38 Australian universities. Determinants of the international academic standing of universities are grouped into six broad categories: standing of academic staff, quality of undergraduate intake, quality of undergraduate programs, quality of graduate programs, resources, and peer opinion. The relative importance of each of these attributes is ascertained though a worldwide survey of university presidents, rectors and vice-chancellors plus Australian deans, thus reducing the need for subjective weighting by the researchers. The empirical findings are used to weight quantitative performance data for Australian universities and the results compared with two other recent worldwide rankings of universities.  相似文献   

11.
A striking feature of contemporary Australian higher education governance is the strong emphasis on centralized, template style, metric-based, and consequential forms of performance measurement. Such emphasis is indicative of a low degree of political trust among the central authorities in Australia in the intrinsic capacity of universities and academics to do their work efficiently and effectively. At the same time, it is indicative of a deep-seated political trust in highly centralized and top–down forms of performance measurement, and their capacity to effectively control and coordinate the work of universities and academics. In this article, we argue with regard to performance measurement that these patterns of trust and mistrust embody contradictory assumptions regarding the agency and motivations of universities and academics and prevent adequately coming to terms with the unintended effects that the current performance measurement regime has on universities and the academics working in them.  相似文献   

12.
Abstract

In its drive for higher efficiency and effectiveness in higher education, the Australian Commonwealth Government released its policy on higher education, Higher Education: A Policy Statement during the late 1980s which contributed to the introduction of performance indicators to manage and assess the performance of the higher education system. The research component of annual Commonwealth funding to universities, called the Research Quantum, is now distributed by a set of performance indicators: external research income, publications count and higher degree research completions. This paper analysed the impact of these indicators on the research activities of Australian university academics based on Leibenstein's model of X‐efficiency. Although the impact of performance indicators on university academics was found to follow the pressure‐effort relationship, for some respondents, the increase in effort as a result of heightened pressure had involved strategic behaviour. Two conditions that are identified for the minimisation of an institution's X‐inefficiency despite high staff effort are a high ratio of maximising to non‐maximising decisions for both the staff and institution, and for all the institution's essential objectives/activities, and not just those which are measured by the performance indicators. The implications of these findings for the development and application of performance indicators are discussed.  相似文献   

13.
Although governments and universities worldwide recognise the value of study abroad as a means to prepare graduates to live and work in a globalising world, there is a wide gap between the rhetoric and reality. The reasons for this are complex, but one factor, not often discussed, is the role academics play in study abroad. This paper explores academics' perceptions of study abroad in universities within two higher education systems: Australian and Czech. Findings from both countries are considered across four themes: academics' perceived value of study abroad; ‘internationalising’ academic staff; academics' concerns about student equity and integrating study abroad into the curriculum at home. The implications for practice and further research are discussed.  相似文献   

14.
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15.
Teaching,research and scholarship in different disciplines   总被引：2，自引：0，他引：2  
Teaching and research are the primary functions of academics in all academic disciplines in all Australian universities. Scholarship is expected of all academics whether in the university or college sector. Under a new policy Australian higher education institutions have to develop educational profiles that will describe their strengths in teaching and research. The federal government, and indeed, institutions, are developing and using performance indicators to distribute resources. Some of these, e.g. number of publications, number of research grants, and number of Ph.D. graduates are disadvantaging the Humanities. This paper addresses differences in four disciplines, Chemistry, Engineering, English and Law as they are described by other researchers and emerge from a questionnaire study at an Australian university.  相似文献   

16.
In this paper, the author reports on an analysis of an Australian university’s assessment procedure. The procedure – a major governance document of the university – is deconstructed by way of a Foucauldian discourse analysis in order to consider how students and academics are governed. There were three major findings. The dominant discourse operating in relation to student assessment was that of administration; a finding consistent with previous work in this area and at other universities. The main subject position in this discourse of administration is one of silence for the academic and of a performer for the student, one who is rewarded with the award of a degree if the performance is satisfactory. The passion to learn and to teach is nowhere to be found in this administrative discourse, one not unique to the said university, indeed one that flourishes in Western universities today.  相似文献   

17.
Abstract

Casual academics form the backbone of learning and teaching practice in higher education in many developed countries and in many respects can be considered the norm around which academic policy and practice might be formed. Yet a narrative inquiry into the lived experience of women casual academics within Australian universities reveals that recruitment and management of casual teaching staff is generally ad hoc, and although they are committed to and enjoy teaching, casual academics rarely engage in professional and career development. Consequently, recommendations to contemporise recruitment and professional development policy for casual academics are made.  相似文献   

18.
A manifestation of globalisation as an economic imperative has occurred at the national level in Australia.This manifestation is in the form of political policies, administrative practices and funding distribution ostensibly aimed at creating a more competitive national economy.Philosophy of Education, as a practice and product of some employees in the higher education industry in Australia, is being influenced by this manifestation of globalisation.Reflection on ways in which established concepts are being reshaped to suit the agenda of globalising political policies may assist those engaged in philosophising about education to enhance their practice in ways they desire.It is argued here that such reflection should lead many academics in Australian universities to the conclusion that they should not undertake research and that research should not be part of the job specification for most academics employed in Australian universities.
The argument in this paper is based on a set of epistemological assumptions about the nature of academic practices or traditions (cf.Toulmin, 1972).Philosophy of Education is one such academic tradition or practice.A university may be conceived of as a community of academics engaged in a range of traditions or practices.A university may also be conceived of as a quasi-governmental administrative entity employing workers to value-add to customers intending to maximise personal economic rewards from future engagement in a more competitive national economy.  相似文献   

19.
This paper reports views of academic staff from five Australian institutions of higher education on a number of issues relating to teaching and research and changes affecting their work since the introduction of the unified national system. While most academics are satisfied with their jobs, staff morale is given a low rating. Academics cite a number of limitations experienced in carrying out their research and teaching. The academic work week is just under 50 hours, but there are clear differences between the established and newer universities in the apportioning of time to research and teaching related activities. This pattern is repeated in the publication record, grant success and perceived pressure to upgrade professional qualifications. The data suggest that the newer universities feel under pressure to emulate the structure and organisation of the traditional “elite” universities rather than seeking a legitimate niche for their particular type of operations within the unified national system. This means that for some years they will find considerable difficulty competing with traditional universities using the standard measures of research performance.  相似文献   

20.
League tables that rank universities may use reputational measures, performance measures, or both. Each type of measure has strengths and weaknesses. In this paper, we rank disciplines in Australian universities both by reputation, using an international survey of senior academics, and with actual performance measures. We then compare the two types of measures to see how closely they match. The criterion we use for both sets of measures is ‘international academic standing’. We find a high correlation between the survey results and the various measures of research performance. We also find a correlation between the quality of student intake and the survey rankings, but the satisfaction levels of recent graduates do not correlate well with the rankings by academics. We then construct an overall measure of performance, which gives very similar rankings to the survey results, especially for the top-ranked institutions.
Ross WilliamsEmail:
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