The presentation The Long-term Picture: Exploring university completion rates by Julie McMillan and Daniel Edwards (ACER) presentation slides pack in a lot of useful information. On slide 9 National Level Findings ICT stands out as a discipline with the lowest completion rates.
(Reported separately in DET statistics, ICT has notably a high rate of “did not return after first year” so I conclude that this particular attrition cannot be readily attributed to later year students leaving for jobs before completing).

The research questions of the project include:

1. Do higher education completion rates differ for different groups of students?
2. Are disadvantaged students less likely to complete university than others?
3. What are the most reliable variables for determining the likelihood of university completion?
4. If there are differences in completion between equity groups and other students, do factors relating to student engagement, experience or satisfaction help to explain these differences?

• TEQSA announcement
• TEQSA Good Practice Note (pdf 3MB)
• Campus Morning Mail story

Outreach and engagement/knowledge application

The research (knowledge creation) and teaching and learning (knowledge dissemination) academic functions of the university have been well defined and generally well understood both within the institutions and outside. In contrast, how the institutions apply that knowledge through various outreach, extension and engagement activities is not nearly as clear. Engagement is sometimes defined as programs in health, law, policy, engineering, agriculture, and community development that utilize and apply the knowledge of the university to address issues in those areas. It is often expressed in terms of development of intellectual property, technology transfer, and commercialisation of knowledge in partnership with the private sector. Occasionally it is misinterpreted as the important, but nonacademic, service to the college, university, professional organization, and community. Several of the leaders commented on dimensions of this academic function and the ways in which it is rewarded. One government leader and former university researcher noted:

“We have reasonably innovative people in Australia, but yet we sit at the bottom of this league table of OECD countries with the interaction of the university sector and the business sector. The difference I think comes in the nature of the business sector and industry in Australia compared to comparative countries... You can put one of these centres down just about anywhere in England or southern Scotland or Wales, and within 50 kilometres you will have a network of industry that can meaningfully collaborate on just about any sort of thing you decide to focus on. If you did the same thing in Australia, the density and intensity is completely different. And so, models that might work, say, in the UK or the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe, just are not applicable here because the scale of investment at the right level of industry is just not here. You have to look at the profile of potential industry partners in Australia. We have some excellent large businesses such as mining companies that are world leaders... What we miss in this country is the mediums. There isn't the capacity in the small (business sector) to absorb what comes out of the university research system.”

The issue of developing appropriate incentives, and a reward structure for this function to complement the existing strong reward structure for research, was identified by a university institute director:

“Our funding system is a very complex one, but if you dissect it, what are the parameters that influence the volume of money that you get? It's research, and that is problematic. If an institution wants to get into the engagement agends... it needs to install an incentive system in the institution that actually drives people towards that engagement. That is an incentive system that is fundamentally different from the public allocation model that we have. We know from literature, that one of the hardest things to do is to have your own incentive model that is not mirroring what the national allocations are. That requires... strong management and very strong leadership at both the central and the faculty research institutes' levels to change behaviour because individual careers at Group of Eight institutions are based on research performance, as they should be in a research-intensive university. But the nature of that research is the classic blue skies fundamental research. That is not what an engagement strategy would entail. It's a huge challenge.”

The report, which drew from data of 600 Australian start-up founders, found top skills for founding team members were strongly tied to professional university-level qualifications.

Top skills were software development (64 per cent), business (61 per cent), marketing (37 per cent), scientific research (13 per cent), engineering (14 per cent) and legal skills (11 per cent).

The HECQN conference presentations are available on line.

Interesting items:

1. Measurement Changes What is Being Measured: What Does This Mean for the Measurement of Quality and Productivity in Higher Ed?, Alan Bain and Nick Drengenberg, Charles Sturt University.
   Discussing what we assume, hope for, expect: the flow from accreditation standards; practice; quality, productivity, to student/university outcomes. "Educational quality is the ����elephant in the room���� in most discussions of higher education productivity."

   The panel looked carefully at the prospects for developing the kinds of comprehensive learning quality measures needed...We would have liked nothing better than to propose such measures but, unfortunately, we were forced to conclude that this will not be possible anytime soon.����

   [Massy et al, Improving Measurement of Productivity in Higher Education, National Research Council Report, 2012.]

   [comment: this may contrast with the views of the recently published book by Hamish Coates (of ACER), The Market for Learning: Leading Transparent Higher Education, Springer 2016].

   Most of the variance in student performance is predicted by their characteristics at entry. The gains in performance from entry to graduation are small and there is much more variability in student performance within universities than between them indicating the lack of variance contributed by a university����s approach.

   Not surprisingly, after two or more decades of international study there is no body of evidence showing a discernable effect of quality assurance approaches on learning and teaching in higher education.

   Assertive Standards
   

   Teaching and learning activities are arranged to foster progressive and coherent achievement of expected learning outcomes throughout each course of study.

   VS

   Teaching and learning activities are evidence-based and demonstrate their effect on learning outcomes throughout each course of study.

    
    

2. Panel: The future of quality in higher education, Angela Carbone, Monash University; Marina Harvey, QUT [OLT National Teaching Fellow]; Nicolette Lee, LaTrobe
   Reliance (on sessional staff) will continue and even increase. The ����significant reliance on academic staff employed under casual work contracts���� (2012, p. 25) has been identified as a risk to students by the Tertiary Education Quality Standard Agency (TEQSA).
   "Know your sessional staff" [the BLASST tool]

Multiple Measures is a completed OLT project now on their roadshow round of dissemination workshops. Although this project is nominally focused on the design of assessment for interdisciplinary courses/subjects/units, I can see four broader uses for ICT Schools and faculties:

1. The project includes examples of a visualisation of the plan of assessment in a course. One can use their tools to create such diagrams for any course while ignoring their interdisciplinary aspects. A more annotated example is at MM3 example Summary for Benchmarking.
2. The project provides a library of example course descriptions, classified by the same assessment design criteria as in the design tool (indeed, integrated with the design tool, in a very neat exmaple of online tool design). This is an example of how we other disciplines might manage to organise an archive of shared library of course design examples for other disciplines such as ICT or engineering, as is frquently suggested but never achieved..
3. The same questions of scope, involvement and pedaqogy design for assessment in an interdisciplinary course should be considered for many courses in the one discipline such as ICT.
4. ICT is commonly stated to be the enabling discipline: there should be more interdisciplinary courses within ICT programs to realise that claim. If you are going that route, this tool will help to trigger the crucial conversations between you and collaborators from other disciplines, by exposing our different deeply held, unspoken attitudes to course design and assessment, long-learnt and unexamined while we stay inside the discipline.

To follow up and use the tool go to the project at multiplemeasures.org.au; for conversations contact Kit Wise (Tasmanian College of the Arts, UTas), Kate Tregloan (Monash Faculty of Architecture).

It is sometimes good to get a coherent package around the multiple pressures for tactical changes to courses, research directions, industry links, and teaching modes. Prof John Dewar Vice-Chancellor of LaTrobe has neatly framed the trend in universities in a neat packaging that combines graduate employability and industry relationships as “engaging and brokering relationships,” in a fourth generation of university model (“University 4.0” in modern shorthand)

1. universities will offer a seamless web of course delivery, in-person, on-line and a blend of both.
2. they will provide a range of qualifications, from full degrees to quick qualifications accrediting people for changing industries.
3. career building for students will become important, with universities providing advice on finding work and short courses to help stay in it.
4. universities will engage with industry and broker relationships between students and entrepreneurs, researchers and funders.

[summary from Campus Morning Mail 3/11/16]

For the full story see the report of the CEDA talk.

Congratulations to Mary O'Kane who has received the inaugural Ada Lovelace medal for an Outstanding Female Engineer. The award is by UNSW Faculty of Engineering. Mary O'Kane has a career as a computer scientist (speech recognition, AI) and chief scientist of NSW.

For details see Women In Engineering Awards

(as a long term fan of Ada Lovelace— a mathematician (and gambler) commonly known as the first computer programmer — I am puzzled why the engineers should have used her name, but it's good recognition for both of them.)

Morri Pagnucco (UNSW), took office as president of ACDICT at the Annual Council Meeting July 19 2016, for a period of 2 years.
New executive members include Simon (Newcastle) and Ghassan Beydoun (Wollongong). Katrina Falkner (Adelaide) was elected as deputy president/president-elect.
The full executive is listed at http://www.acdict.edu.au/executive.htm.

The workshops held around Australia in the last couple of months have released their collection of presentations.

Katrina Falkner (Adelaide) went to Science Meets Parliament in March 2016, an annual event organised by Science and Technology Australia (STA) of which ACDICT is a member.
Her description is in this report.

The Digital Careers program which was run from NICTA, managed by Karsten Schultz, in the past few years has moved into CISRO Education and Outreach, headed by Mary Mulcahy, from 1 July. Digital Careers runs a program of engagement and events with school students that has increased the awareness and career prospects of upcoming university students.
Mary Mulcahy wants "to assure all of you that the Digital Careers program is an important program for us and that these changes will not affect delivery of the program.  We will do all we can to ensure that there is no disruption to the delivery of the program.
We are currently looking at the governance and other operational aspects of the program and thinking about what the next iteration of Digital Careers might look like ���� especially in the wider STEM agenda."

from the Australian Mathematics Trust June 2016

Belinda Shi, a year 12 student from Methodist Ladies���� College in Melbourne, will be the first Australian female to compete at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI).
����I����m excited to be the first female on Australia����s International Olympiad in Informatics team,' she says.
Keen to counter the misconception that ����girls can����t code����, Belinda decided to establish a coding club at school. Her goal is to introduce other girls at her school to informatics, programming and robotics. ����I want to encourage girls to keep an open mind and give programming and technology a go, because learning to code is not only fun and rewarding but it����s a skill that����s useful in so many fields', she says.
Belinda will be joined by team mates Richard Gong, Year 11, Sydney Grammar School, NSW, Jerry Mao, Year 10, Caulfield Grammar School, VIC, and Declan McDonnell, Year 12, Normanhurst Boys High School, NSW. They will travel to Kazan, Russia to compete in the IOI from 12 to 19 August.

July 18-19th - see our Events page for the agenda.

ACDICT is a member of STA ���� here's their latest June 2016 newsletter.
Note the date for the Science Meets Business meeting will be 24 October 2016.

Reported in a formal peer-reviewed report in the journal CBE-Life Sciences Education. <http://www.lifescied.org/content/15/2/ar20.full.pdf>
and summarised in The Australian:

An eight-year study at the University of Texas at Austin has found that including postgraduate-style research in the first years of bachelor courses can dramatically improve students���� outcomes.

The study, considered the largest of its type, concludes that ����course-based research experiences���� boost the likelihood of graduating with science, technology, engineering and maths degrees by up to 32 per cent.

They also discourage students from switching into non-STEM majors or delaying completion of their degrees.

Just published June 2016 is the PRIANIT report Plagiarism and related issues in assessments not involving text (Simon, Minichiello, Lawrence, Sheard,  Carbone, Johnson, Cook). This includes assessments with computer programming and graphic design. Simon reported on this at ALTA forum in April 2016.

http://www.olt.gov.au/project-plagiarism-and-related-issues-assessments-not-involving-text-2012

The last set of OLT fellowships have been announced (16 May 2016).
Two are of particular interest to ICT education:

• Anne Gardner (UTS) Professional identity and agency: changing the way STEM students think about their learning and development
• Jo Coldwell-Neilson (Deakin)  Unlocking the code to digital literacy
  

• Contract cheating and assessment design: exploring the connection (project leader Tracey Bretag) University of South Australia, Griffith University, UNSW, University of Sydney, Swansea University (UK)
  

Employers are struggling to get workers whilst graduates are struggling to get jobs.

The Office of the Chief Scientist has released a communique following the industry-ICT education forum held in Sydney 21 April, which more than 90 people attended.
Thanks for all those who contributed to the survey: it was very useful to have concurrent views on very similar surveys from educators and industry.

Some of the specific actions that will be considered include:

• Developing a reciprocal exchange program between university academics and industry.
• Establishing a national annual review process between ICT faculties and industry that identifies the core and emerging issues in the technology sector.
• Setting out a common understanding of key graduate attributes.
• Collaborating on the implementation of for-credit work integrated learning at the national scale in ICT; aligning with the National Strategy on Work Integrated Learning.
• Developing best practice guidelines for the effective operation of industry advisory boards in universities.

Read more detail here.

For more information contact Professor Maurice Pagnucco, m.pagnucco (at) unsw.edu.au

The ARC has released a consultation paper on Engagement and Impact����see <http://www.arc.gov.au/nisa>.

Responses are requested by 24 June.
The ARC says:

The purpose of this consultation is to seek the views of stakeholders on the framework for developing the national assessment of the engagement and impact of university research. It provides an overview of the Government����s policy rationale, parameters, and key issues regarding university research engagement and impact.

Feedback is invited from all stakeholders including the higher education research sector, industry and other end-users or beneficiaries of university research. In addition, the perspectives of industry and other end-users or beneficiaries of university research will be addressed through additional consultation mechanisms.

Stakeholders are asked to provide their views on the questions listed in this document. Please use the feedback template provided at Appendix A. Feedback should be provided by emailing the ARC at ARC-EI_consultation@arc.gov.au. The due date for stakeholder feedback is 24 June 2016.

This "scientists and mathematicians" program includes ICT. Claudette Bateup spoke on this program at our ALTA forum in April.
The Scientists and Mathematicians in Schools (SMiS) and ICT in Schools: a partnership program (ICTiS) is a major national program involving teachers, students, scientists, mathematicians and ICT professionals. It not only has presence in a large number of schools but is significant as an exemplar for a national agenda in bringing schools and STEM professionals together in collaborative arrangements. The program is funded by the Australian Government and CSIRO, and managed by CSIRO.

"An evaluation report of the CSIRO Scientists and Mathematicians in Schools program shows that it's a highly effective program in terms of the scale of its operation, the multiple significant benefits for students, teachers and STEM professionals, and the clear return on investment of resources."

See <http://www.csiro.au/en/Education/Programs/SMiS/SMiS-partnerships-report> for an introductory description, a link to the executive summary (1MB PDF), and an address to get the full report.

The Office of the Chief Scientist, AIIA, ACDICT and ACED jointly held a one day forum at Women's College, Sydney University on Thursday 21 April.
Actions and conclusions will follow. In the meantime, Morri Pagnucco's analysis of the comparable surveys of industry and academics on the readiness of graduates is informative.
Here is a copy of the combined and analysed Survey Results.

It's described as bad news for most of the job market, but salaries are best in ICT. The employment website Adzuna report on vacancies, salaries and job-seekers for the first three months of 2016 says:

"Unsurprisingly, the IT industry offers the highest average salary of $118,753, closely followed by Healthcare and Nursing ($117,251) and Legal Services ($90,438)."

The report is at https://www.adzuna.com.au/blog/2016/03/30/average-salaries-drop-and-sa-the-worst-place-to-find-a-job/
Its headline is Average Salaries Drop and SA Ranked as The Worst Place to Find a Job (note that Canberra is the best place). Year on year, average salaries overall rose in NSW, Qld - and South Australia.

The TEQSA statistical summary report for 2014 university statistics
<http://www.teqsa.gov.au/sites/default/files/publication-documents/HEStatisticsReport2016_WEB.pdf>
amalgamates statistics across the whole sector. It does not enable institutions to be distinguished, but some sector wide numbers are significant:

1. EFTSL student loads by field of study shows a 10% increase in IT from 2013 to 2014, to 37,992. This is the strongest growth rate of any field of study of any sizeable base.  (page 4)
Other fields have at most 5% or 6% increases.
This counters the impression of the previous year's figures, as used by the last Chief Scientist at ACDICT 2015 Annual Council to conclude that ICT enrolments were lagging.
Anecdotal reports from Deans and Heads of Schools this year show general increases to have continued through 2015 and 2016.

2. The proportion of international IT students was 52% EFTSL - updated.
The first version of the report had an extraordinary claim that the proportion of international students and domestic students in the total (figure 4) showed  90% international enrolments in IT (as noted by Stephen Matchett in his Campus Morning Mail 20/4/16). TEQSA quickly corrected this when asked.
The spreadsheet figures are at
<http://www.teqsa.gov.au/sites/default/files/publication-documents/StatsReport2016Spreadsheets.xlsx>

The ACDICT Academy of Learning and Teaching forum for all Associate Deans (L&T) or equivalents ran just after Easter for two intensive days of updates and discussion on perspectives, policy and practice in university ICT education..
  Details of the program and copies of the slides for this forum

The Academy of Science Mathematics committee has launched its Decadal Plan for mathematical sciences in Australia for 2016-2025 today 17/3/16 at Parliament House. The Minister for Education Simon Birmingham and the Deputy Minister for Science Karen Andrews both spoke up in support and urged continuing action to continue to persuade parents to support students taking harder options like maths, and pressure industry and other parliamentarians to express support, more frequently than once a year.
The report is at <https://www.science.org.au/files/userfiles/support/reports-and-plans/2016/mathematics-decade-plan-2016-vision-for-2025.pdf>

Comment: Can ICT faculties afford to stiffen the prerequisite for bachelor entry? can we afford not to in the mid- to long-run? If commerce and science have the same requirements then there would be less danger of losing those averse to mathematics from ICT. The currently increasing demand for computing enrolments could be an opportunity to improve student intake and outcomes.

Major recommendations include

1.1 Australian governments, schools and universities should urgently increase their provision of professional development for existing out-of-field school teachers of mathematics and enhance their commitment to the recruitment and retention of new, properly qualified staff.

2.1 Australian universities should immediately plan for the staged reintroduction of at least Year 12 intermediate mathematics subjects as prerequisites for all bachelors programs in science, engineering and commerce.

3.1 Australian universities should collaborate with the discipline to source seed funding for a new national research centre in the mathematical sciences with the objective of enhancing connectivity with industry and strengthening the international collaboration and visibility of Australian research in mathematics and statistics.

Some universities have responded to (or anticipated) the issue:

• University of Sydney: Mathematics to become a prerequisite for University of Sydney admission
  

With the anecdotal reports of strong increases in ICT undergraduate enrollments at many Australian universities, this very important analysis on A History of Capacity Challenges in Computer Science [for USA] by Eric Roberts of Stanford. Thanks to Alan Fekete for pointing this out.
<http://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/CSCapacity/>

One of the implications: Australia's claimed "over-production" of ICT PhDs may have a ready market in USA jobs:

Although the precise number is impossible to determine because many of the listings use imprecise phrases like ����several positions���� or ����multiple positions,���� it appears that the number of open computer science faculty positions [in USA] in 2014-15 was around 1000.

According to the Computing Research Association����s most recent Taulbee survey, North American institutions produced 1,651 computer science Ph.D.s in 2014.21 Of this number, 244 (15 percent) accepted faculty positions at North American institutions. By this calculation, the current rate of Ph.D. production is sufficient to fill about one of every four open positions.

Although the ratio of applicants to open positions is less than the one-in-seven shortfall of the early 1980s, the number of unfilled positions is significantly larger in absolute terms. If the number of Ph.D.s is sufficient to fill only a quarter of the open positions, then the number of positions that cannot be filled from this pool is around 750. Unlike other fields, computer science has no reserve labor force in the form of Ph.D.s who received their degrees in prior years but who have been unable to find positions.

[Roberts part 4: What is the nature of the enrollment expansion today?]

The  ACS / Deloitte Access Economics report on Australia's digital economy and workforce is released 16 March 2016
Australia's Digital Pulse 2016

http://www.acs.org.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/96698/PJ52569-Australias-Digital-Pulse-2016_LAYOUT_Final_Web.pdf

Australian Information Technology Higher Education Student and Staff Statistics ���� now available, an ACDICT report presenting statistics on ICT higher education updated to cover 2009-2014. The report shows the start of the recent growth trend in undergraduate enrollments, and shows student numbers broken down into types of degree, gender, and domestic/international across the Australian universities. The report includes some analysis.

Link above, or at
www.acdict.edu.au/documents/ACDICT%20IT%20Education%20Statistics2014-v4.pdf

Tomorrow's Digitally Enabled Workforce is a seriously written 90+ page report by the CSIRO-NICTA group Data61, supported by the ACS, ANZ Bank, Australian Government Department of Employment, and Boston Consulting Group.
joint report on the future of work on Australia. Not a policy document but projected futures to inform the discussion about the future, in an attempt to get a smooth transition as the nature of work changes.
The launch of the report was reported in ACS Information Age, and included succinct points made by some of the sponsors: "I think the biggest risk is we����re creating a lot of traction in promoting STEM and ICT but we don����t create the employment." said Patrick Maes from ANZ Bank.

A separate ACS report is just published on its Employment Survey 2015.
This report gives a picture of the current ICT workforce that can inform universities' positions on ICT workers' patterns of employment - and unemployment - in the past few years, breaking the figures down by gender, area of industry, hours worked (academics are not the longest working hours in ICT)...
 and some indication of job prospects. Age, gender and ethnicity discrimination. and towards the end, qualifications - at what level and whether in ICT or other.

An article in the Australian Higher Education section Weds 24 February describes the ACER report for the Office of the Chief Scientist on WIL in STEM. ICT is the "stand-out field" in the sciences. Reporter John Ross writes

A new report finds that barely one in 20 Australian science under��graduates experience work- integrated learning placements during the course of their studies.
And just over 10 per cent have any sort of industry exposure.
At the other end of the spectrum, three out of four information technology students are involved in industry-oriented projects while one in three agriculture and environmental science students enjoy some kind of industry placement.

The report is not actually new. It dates from June 2015:  Edwards, Daniel. Work integrated learning: A lesson in good WIL, Research Developments, ACER. http://rd.acer.edu.au/article/work-integrated-learning-a-lesson-in-good-wil
which refers to the full report for the Office of Chief Scientist, published in Work Integrated Learning in STEM in Australian Universities.

Shane Ryan <sryan@datascience.smu.edu> "recently published a graphic with our online data science program, DataScience@SMU. We explored computer science and coding education for grades K-12 in the US and across the world. You can check it out here: https://datascience.smu.edu/blog/kids-and-computer-science-infographic/"

School mathematics, university prerequisites, and the study of STEM science technology engineering and maths

The dilemma is of having too much choice of subjects perceived to be interesting but some seen as less difficult.
The NSW Chief Scientist and Engineer, Mary O'Kane, and Prof Ian Burnett, Dean of Engineering and IT at UTS, both commented on the desirability of studying maths at school for students' future careers. [At the ACS Reimagination 2015 conference, reported in the ACS Information Age.]
Geoff Prince from Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute develops his view on prerequisites at more length, in the AMSI Update ed. 2. with contributions from Ian Chubb and Alan Finkel (outgoing and incoming Australian Chief Scientists).

Newsletter Nov 2015