Learning in Australian universities

Professor Richard Johnstone (Executive Director, Carrick Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, http://www.carrickinstitute.edu.au/carrick/go) presented his views on the role of the Carrick Institute and raised a number of issues and challenges (of many) that he sees facing the higher education sector.

Indicators that successfully demonstrate the quality of teaching: The Learning and Teaching Performance Fund has generated much debate about what are appropriate indicators of quality teaching. It comes back to the sector to suggest "more satisfactory, more fair, more convincing methods of measuring ... the quality of teaching ... in such a way that it recognises the vast diversity of the system and the vast diversity of the student population."

The relationship between teaching and research: "All universities are predicated on both the teaching enterprise and the research enterprise and its our obligation to do what we can to demonstrate that [the relationship between research and teaching] is at the core of universities and is not simply nice to have if you can get it."

Employability "Universities and university teachers [are] able to interact with employers in such a way as that our authority and our credibility, our judgment about what it is important to include in the curriculum is taken seriously, is valued, is even deferred to. We have to get better as universities, in fact as academics, as people who represent our disciplines in explaining why it is important, why innovation continues to be important and why simply sticking with what we know is not necessarily best."

The curriculum: "Now in many universities [there] is a really serious revisiting of what curriculum is all about. ... now you’ll find that a lot of reflection is taking place about whether the way in which we currently teach is most appropriate for the kind of student population, student body and foreign expectation that we currently have."

The nature of the student population: "The student population has changed so significantly in universities. Their expectations have changed, their notions of what the universities are all about have changed, their sophistication is so much greater, and their capacity and willingness to plan is so much more honed and refined than perhaps it was not so very long ago."

Controlling the agenda: "Universities really need to ... take back control of the agenda to some extent. To be, as it were, less reactive to social, political, economic change that we see around us, and to take advantage of the natural authority that the community still continues to invest in universities. The university is still regarded as a source of wisdom, a source of knowledge, a source of planning for the future. It is a shame that we have spent a little bit too much time reacting to what we see as social trends that are outside our control of the system and not spending a little bit more time in ensuring that we are ahead of those trends and predicting the future rather than reacting [to] what has just as has just recently happened."