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UCB Boulder report on ECR Computer Scientists indicates early career productivity is linked to university of employment rather than to place of PhD THE reports on research from UC Boulder on Computer Science ECRs that concludes Early career productivity ‘linked to workplace, not training’
(THE stories are behind a registration wall but are free.)
“A common assumption is that faculty’s scholarly productivity mainly reflects their scientific skill, which is often assumed to correlate with the prestige of their doctoral institution,” concludes the study, which was led by researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder.
“Here, we show that this assumption is false: for early career faculty, the characteristics of their working environment, and not the prestige of their doctoral training, drive their productivity, and the greater productivity of faculty in more prestigious departments cannot be explained by the preferential selection or retention of more productive scholars.”
Engagement and Impact report from ARC published March 2019 The 2018 Engagement and Impact reports from the ARC are published on the ARC website. The results are organised by institution under one tab and by field of research under the other tab. For ACDICT field 08 is most relevant: engagement & impact for FOR 08. The results may be subject to lots of arguments, but on the face of it they illustrate a different ranking than the usual and in some cases contrast with the ERA rankings released recently. (For example, Adelaide, Curtin, Monash, UniSA, UWA are the high impact institutions in FOR 08, other high-ERA institutions are in the medium impact set.)
To assist analysis and comparison a csv version of impact and engagement table of FOR 08 has been extracted and available here.
Three university schemes to improve retention Campus Review is offering a report entitled The Billion Dollar Question: How Much is Student Attrition Costing Australian Higher Education Providers? that describes approaches for increasing retention in three universities (LaTrobe, South Australia, Queensland). The report is introduced by on over-hyped “loss of billions of dollars” line that is thankfully not further developed.
I have edited a simple-formatted version of the report for members.
There is enough of interest that it may justify registering your contact details to get the report.
This is a lead-up to the Campus Review/IQPC Student Retention and Success conference Melbourne 27–28 June 2019.
The LaTrobe section is about student experience; UniSA about understanding the student psyche; UQ about building a student employability framework. The reporting is by various central administration directors.
Computer Science Was Invented to Teach Everyone About Everything Mark Guzdial was awarded the ACM SIGCSE Outstanding Contribution to CS Education award for 2019. He wrote up a two-page summary of his acceptance speech, claiming that “Computer Science Was Invented to Teach Everyone About Everything” which is published in Communications of the ACM (onine date March 17 2019). “Not computational thinking but everything thinking ”

The longer summary of his talk is behind the ACM paywall at Computing Education as a Foundation for 21st Century Literacy, Mark Guzdial, ACM digital library

Exemplar industry collaboration information booklet available for reuse Morri Pagnucco from UNSW has offered the UNSW CSE School's brochure Guide for Industry Collaboration [286KB] as a useful example that is available to be modified if you find it useful as a base for your own.
Computer Scientist elected as Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science This is something that happens very rarely: a computing person has been elected as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science.
Congratulations to Dacheng Tao, University of Sydney. The AAS short citation says he has made ground-breaking contributions in artificial intelligence, computer vision image processing and machine learning.
More detail at Newly elected fellow Dacheng Tao.

It's always time to think of nominating outstanding information and computing academics for honours and awards like this. There are surely many more also outstanding candidates.

Choice of teaching staff for introductory classes matters

American The Chronicle of Higher Education reports It Matters a Lot Who Teaches Introductory Courses. Here’s Why. by Beckie Supiano, April 15, 2018.
see It Matters a Lot Who Teaches Introductory Courses...

Correlating the number of full-time tenured vs part-time staff in four-year colleges (some equivalence to Australian universities) for "gatekeeper" introductory English and mathematics courses, comparing six institutions found that higher numbers of full-time staff doing introductory teaching led to greater retention of students to later-year courses.

Something to consider in the challenge of scaling up to greater numbers in Australian ICT courses: maybe the old strategy of putting your best senior staff in front of your introductory students still applies, even if the apparent gap of generations is large. (I remember best three of my introductory lecturers: one a senior physics professor who impressed me with untangling relativity for first year classically-minded physics students; one a not-yet-senior but stellar computer science professor; and one a junior dazzlingly enthusiastic maths lecturer on his way up. All impressive in different ways. I almost stayed with physics... but tripped up in quantum tangles in later years.)
Thanks to Lynette Johns-Boast of ANU for this article reference.

Contract cheating and the attractiveness of its website offerings

A recent paper on the attractiveness of contract cheating websites and some counter-interventions to increase academic integrity.

'Just turn to us’: the persuasive features of contract cheating websites

Susan Rowland, Christine Slade, Kai-Sheng Wong & Brooke Whiting (2017) ‘Just turn to us’: the persuasive features of contract cheating websites, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 43:4, 652-665, DOI: 10.1080/02602938.2017.1391948

(this is a link to a paywall but your university may give you a tunnel)

In this study... we are interested in how a student might be persuaded to use a contract-cheating website to obtain assessable work. We take the stance that some students fall victim to the persuasive devices used by the sites and thus choose to purchase work they later submit for assessment.
We ask the questions.
  1. What persuasive features are present on contract-cheating websites?
  2. How do these features map to an established framework for website persuasiveness?
  3. What other persuasive offerings are made to students who engage with contract-cheating websites?
    1. In addition, we consider how these features may influence students to use contract-cheating websites, and how we can use our understanding of the sites to help students avoid the pitfall of website-mediated cheating.

For ICT the question is whether similar clever marketing also applies explicitly or implicitly in contract coding sites?

The paper has some insights that advanced my understanding. It's a situational ethics approach that would appear to have some bearing on programming assessments, despite the research only looking at text-based work.

After the analysis there is a list of interventions that academics might employ with their students to counter the attractiveness and increase integrity generally. One of them triggered with me the thought—we don't often “get our students to work together to critique” the quality of existing programs of the kind of scale they themselves produce: is this teaching method ever used in computing, as it could be as another aspect of improving students' critical thinking skills (a commonly claimed graduate attrubute)?

(3) Talk about quality. The sites all make claims about the expertise of their writers, but only one (...) allows a client to choose their writer and none of the sites shows examples of writing with the name of the writer attached. You may wish to ask your students ‘How do you know the writer isn’t an academic from your university who works as a mole?’ or ‘If you feel you need someone else to do the work for you, how are you going to know their work is good?’ Many sites have pieces of work displayed for perusal. It may be educationally valuable to download pieces and ask students to work together to critique the writing.

Australia-Europe ICT research and innovation EPIC agreement calls for expert visit proposals

Intersect Australia and eutema GmbH entered into a European Commission Consortium Agreement for participation in Europe's ICT innovation partnership with Australia, Singapore & New Zealand.

The Europe-Pacific Partnership for ICT Collaboration Project (EPIC) aims to improve the research and innovation collaboration in the area of information and communication technologies between Europe and partner countries. EPIC fosters cooperation in ICT research, technology development and innovation-related topics at policy and researcher levels.

Intersect Member researchers and the wider Australian research community will benefit from international expert exchanges, EPIC participation in Australian and international conferences and events, and greater awareness of European computing science programmes and initiatives. A call for applications for expert visits from Australia to Europe or Europe to Australia is now open for computer scientists in fields encompassing one or more of seven focus areas:

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Internet of Things (IoT)
  • Cyber Security
  • ICT in Transport
  • Digital Economy
  • Next Generation Internet
  • Spatial Intelligence

For more information see EPIC agreement: call for participation and proposals and the EPIC website and the Call for proposals for details, or contact Intersect.


Educating Next Generation Computer Scientists — or software developers, or software engineers
The IEEE Computer Magazine for January 2018 has a 9-page report of a virtual round-table panel that discusses whether “computer science education is leading technology forward”, or whether “commercial technology demands are leaving these programs in the dust.” They do get to some interesting points about theory, practice, ethical concerns and whether academic departments are going to split software engineering (development) off from computer science. The participants are known CS educators in the US: LaPlante, Lewis, Miller, Offutt, Rokne, and Shieh (from Taiwan). I recommend it.
The link is
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=8268012
Educating Next-Gen Computer Scientists, Jeffrey Voas et al, Computer, January 2018, p.80–88.


December 2017


Research on University Completion Rates reported at TEQSA Quality in Higher Education conference Dec 2017 Of note to ACDICT is the research on completion rates at the recent TEQSA conference. The conference included keynotes and panel sessions on policy, and a day of short paper presentations on all aspects of quality, students and success (the conference themes).

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 Good Practice Note on Academic Integrity
Oct 2017
TEQSA has picked up on Tracey Bretag's academic integrity work with a Good Practice Note. Although the Note does not address the specifics of computer programs or other non-text assessments as Simon and Judy Sheard have discussed at recent ALTA meetings, this is a useful practice guide on the issues of contract plagiarism, setting assessments, and processes for handling the educative and disciplinary aspects of work submitted by students.
Mastering the Cyber Security Skills Crisis An analysis paper by Adam P. Henry (UNSW Canberra) is of importance to ACDICT given the widespread interest in creating cyber security subjects, majors and programs around the country.
The paper is ACCS Discussion Paper 4, Mastering the Cyber Security Skills Crisis: Realigning Educational Outcomes to Industry Requirements https://www.unsw.adfa.edu.au/australian-centre-for-cyber-security/sites/accs/files/uploads/ACCS-Discussion-Paper-4-Web.pdf
Australia's Universities at the Crossroads Recommended: a new report released June 6 Australia's Universities at the Crossroads contains insights from a variety of university leaders. It presents useful nuggets encapsulating points of view, policy positions and challenges, well expressed, well organised, readable. Although the contributors are anonymised, the views presented here should be useful for policy arguments within universities.
On a topic of strong relevance to ACDICT members, student learning outcomes were considered important but they are not discussed, and the issue of employability is mentioned but not addressed.
The report is published by Berkeley and the University of Melbourne, authors William B. Lacy, Gwilym Croucher, Andre Brett and Romina Muelle.
Retrieve the report PDF from UniMelb CSHE.
An extract from one section (page 28) is an example of the flavour of this report, with relevance to the innovation and application of research associated with ICT.

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.”

Trends in commencing enrolments by field of education 1989-2015 Fairfax media has an article 2 May 2017 by Inga Ting
The most and least popular university courses since 1989
The first chart— commencing student numbers since 1989—has computer science (not labelled on my screen until I hover on it—it's the yellow area). The Media and Communications category is also shown magenta (is this journalists heading straight for the dole queue, or web designers?)
Chart 2 has CS picked out “In most fields of study, demand rises or falls gradually. Demand for computer science degrees reflects the dramatic boom then bust of the dot-com bubble.”
ALTA forum 20–21 April 2017 The ACDICT Learning and Teaching Academy forum was held at the University of Adelaide, 20–21 April 2017. The presenters' slides are available at ACDICT Events— ALTA 2017.
One ICT scholar in the most cited Australians The Spanish Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientficass Ranking Web of Universities has released a new list of the worlds most highly cited scholars. In the Australian list there appears to be only one ICT scholar in the top set (H-index > 228).
That's Rajkumar Buyya, University of Melbourne in cloud computing (1133).
(information via Campus Morning Mail 13/4/17)
Important fraction of attrition is actually students who withdrawn and come back years later Attrition and retention are in the political air this year, and ICT schools need better understanding of the phenomenon as statistics are measured and from the students' view. Reported in The Australian Higher Education 15 March 2017, with the headline Undecided students need a degree of care.
The story highlights the number of students who apparently drop out and (using simple measures) may be counted as attrition, but come back to study within a few years: many to the same institution. The story highlights the apparent lack of support for the students as they withdraw and in attracting them back.
The report has analysis of reasons why students left (mostly personal or mixed personal/institution, rather than institution alone); academic difficulties were among several reasons of similar frequency (change of career plans, mental health, employment, financial); but the most common reason was to enrol at another institution. More than half changed discipline when they re-enrolled. Three-quarters of those not studying believed that they would return to study in future.
This is noteworthy for ICT Schools: how many of our lost students would come back to study with a little more re-recruiting encouragement?
The report is available online: Harvey, A., Szalkowicz, G. & Luckman, M. (2017). The re-recruitment of students who have withdrawn from Australian higher education. Report for the Australian Government Department of Education and Training, Melbourne, La Trobe University.
Start-ups report shows software development skills are a key ingredient The Startup Smarts: universities and start-up economy is a joint report between Universities Australia and Startup Muster, launched 1 March 2017.
According to a (paywalled) story in The Australian, “Start-ups are projected to create more than half a million jobs over the coming decades and are already contributing more than $160 billion to the Australian economy,” Universities Australia boss Belinda Robinson said.
“This report confirms universities are the key ingredient in this promising part of our economy. They provide the skills, training, support and the physical space to nurture the next generation of entrepreneurs.”

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).

Draft Guidelines for Improving Student Outcomes in Online Education Online learning in formal courses has notably lower completion rates than face to face learning. Many universities encourage their Schools to offer online learning for the whole or part of their students' experience, and rates of successful completion are under scrutiny. Techniques for better managing online students and adapting teaching to their needs are of value.
Cathy Stone at the National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education (NCSHE) at Curtin University will soon release a report on Improving Student Outcomes in Online Education. She has released a summary as Ten Draft Guidelines.
Mind that employment gap: the future of coding is blue-collar jobs A story in Wired Business (Clive Thompson, The Next Big Blue-Collar Job is Coding) argues that computer coding is becoming routine, and that the future of many jobs is for skilled, trained blue-collar workers rather than needing graduates — like the displaced mining workers who are already used to keeping focus, working with engineering technology, working in teams.
Is this where Australia will look to fill the huge gap between the number of IT graduates and the number of job vacancies? What opportunities for universities and other training organisations?
The form of the academic faculty for the 21st century A recent posting to Tomorrow's Professor is an informative review by Colleen Flaherty of a book Envisioning the Faculty for the 21st Century by Adrianna Kezar and Daniel Maxey. It is particularly concerned with the mixture of tenured and untenured staff, and their effect on student retention—relevant to Australian conditions.
A direct link to the review.
One form of appointment that they consider is the clinical medical faculty appointment, who continues to practise and also to teach. Could this be fruitfully applied to ICT and systematically, sustainably bring current practioners from the workplace into education? Does ICT workplace employment have the conditions of being as stable, as strongly filtered for quality, as strongly related to an established education program in a practising setting, as medicine? Do we have suitable forms of academic employment and suitable remuneration and other rewards to match medical faculties?
Report from the frontline: the first year out experience of a graduate Breanne Boland has posted her experience of her first year out in the workplace. Is this what we prepare our new graduates for?
11 Lessons from My First Year in Software Engineering
Breanne works in Oakland (or Seattle?), describes herself as A software engineer with a lot of interests, including shell scripting, devops and infrastructure, Python and Python and Python, team processes, and beautiful documentation


2016


Notes for ACDICT on the Higher Education Compliance and Quality Network Conference, November 2016

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 universitys 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 course design and design benchmarking 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:

assessment tasks key and example
  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).

University 4.0: course delivery, qualifications, career building, brokering relationships

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.

Ada Lovelace medal awarded to Mary O'Kane

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.)

New ACDICT executive elected, new president takes office

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.

Peer Review of Assessment Workshop presentations

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

Science Meets Parliament - descriptive report

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.

Digital Careers program update

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."

International Olympiad in Informatics Australian team includes first female member

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).
Im excited to be the first female on Australias International Olympiad in Informatics team,' she says.
Keen to counter the misconception that girls cant 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 its a skill thats 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.


ACDICT Annual Council meeting for Deans or their representative

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

Science and Technology Australia Newsletter

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.



Welcome from the President


Welcome to the website of the Australian Council of Deans of Information and Communications Technology (ACDICT). The Council which was formed in July 2008 represents all Australian universities and the many disciplines comprising Information and Communications Technology (ICT):

  • Computer Science
  • Information Systems
  • Information Technology
  • Software Engineering
  • Electronic Engineering
  • Computer Systems Engineering
  • Telecommunications Engineering
  •  &bnsp;and any other ICT related discipline

On behalf of the Australian universities and ICT disciplines, the Council seeks to promote ICT education, research and scholarship by liaising with all relevant stakeholders including government, industry and professional bodies. Our Mission and Objectives elaborate on this role. This website provides information and records of Council activities. If you have any comments, suggestions or queries please feel free to contact the Executive Officer who is a member of the Executive.

The Council is grateful to the Australian Computer Society for hosting this website.


June 2016


Undergraduate research experience in early years improves STEM degree outcomes - including those for computer science

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.
The improved outcomes were those that we would relate to retention in Australian higher education - but not to final GPA.
"Using propensity scorematching to control for student-level differences, we tested the effect of participating in FRI [Freshman Research Initiative] on students probability of graduating with a STEM degree, probability of graduating within 6 years, and grade point average (GPA) at graduation. Students who completed all three semesters of FRI were significantly more likely than their non-FRI peers to earn a STEM degree and graduate within 6 years. FRI had no significant effect on students GPAs at graduation."
--------
OLT project report published - plagiarism and programming assignments

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

(declaration of interest: I was one of the authors - ACDICT Executive Officer Chris Johnson)


May 2016


Office of Learning and Teaching Fellowships 2016

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
The Seed and Development Grants announced January 2016 included (among several projects of interest across all disciplines)
  • 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)
Building productive industry-university collaboration in ICT
- the Office of the Chief Scientist, ACED, AIIA, ACDICT

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.
There was strong support for the establishment of a standing national-level body of ICT leaders from industry and universities.

Read more detail here.

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

ARC Consultation Paper on Impact of Researchresponses invited 2/5/16

The ARC has released a consultation paper on Engagement and Impactsee <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 Governments 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.

Building Productive Partnerships - CSIRO Scientists and Mathematicians in Schools Program 2/5/16

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.


April 2016

Industry-university collaboration for work-ready graduates

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.

Employment market update report from Adzuna

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.

TEQSA statistical summary report for 2014 - release 2016

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>


ALTA forum 31 March - 1 April 2016, University of Technology Sydney

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

Decadal Plan for Mathematical Sciences in Australia

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:

The cyclical nature of ICT student numbers: lessons to remember

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 Associations 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?]

Australia's Digital Pulse report 2016

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


March 2016
ICT Education Statistics update

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


Report on the future of work in Australia  29/2/16


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 were creating a lot of traction in promoting STEM and ICT but we dont create the employment." said Patrick Maes from ANZ Bank.

ACS Employment Survey for 2015 29/2/16


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.

Breaking News: Work Integrated learning in STEM 24/2/16

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 undergraduates 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.

Teaching coding in schools — Infographic on the USA issues

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/"

Breaking News

 

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).


Members Newsletter update November 2015

Newsletter Nov 2015