The promise was simple, but the idea couldn’t have been bigger. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) would make courses from Harvard and MIT available free to anyone with an internet connection. The world’s…
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Education – Articles, Analysis, Comment
Displaying 2751 - 2775 of 2778 articles
At the end of November, after 18 months of deliberations, the Australian Law Reform Commission will hand down its report on the appropriateness of existing copyright laws in the new digital environment…
Education guru Sugata Mitra and his colleagues — who have pioneered the “School in the Cloud” — are sending ripples through the world of education. Their idea is simple: provide learning spaces with ready…
Reading David Zyngier’s recent article in The Conversation — ominously titled “Can anyone teach? Fast-tracking our children to educational disaster” — one would conclude that Teach for Australia and other…
More than 90% of Australia’s Indigenous languages are critically endangered and two-thirds of those languages spoken a hundred years ago are now dormant. The seeds of the current situation were sown long…
With technology becoming cheaper, more powerful and more mobile, a new trend in education is emerging – bring your own device (BYOD). Borrowing from the business world, bringing your own device simply…
Across a student’s lifetime, their world will change and change again. They’re likely to see industry reshaped, medical advancements, and huge changes to technology. In their own life too, they will begin…
Melbourne University’s Vice-Chancellor Glyn Davis has called on the federal government to reform the university funding system and allow universities to “decide their own student profiles within the funding…
Early childhood education reforms, started under Labor, are looking increasingly shaky under a Coalition government. Despite a series of recent reports and mounting evidence that support the Labor reforms…
Governments in Australia are increasingly looking to “fast-track” professionals or high-performing graduates into teaching in schools. It’s a policy idea that has surface appeal. After all, you can get…
The use of drugs to improve academic performance goes by a number of names – “academic doping”, “cosmetic neurology”, “neuroenhancement”. A recent survey suggested that Australian university students are…
Most agree that it’s worth knowing more about the world and everything in it. Research, in that sense, is intrinsically valuable. But for pragmatic governments, intrinsic scientific or scholarly worth…
The next generation will be the ones to feel the increasing effects of climate change. But how much do they really know about it? After all, it’s one thing to say: yes, I believe in climate change. But…
For many educators, the dream feels tantalisingly close: free, quality education for everyone in the world. The arrival of Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCs led to predictions of a great new age of…
The latest Council of Australian Governments (COAG) reform council report released this week showing small improvement in the quality of Australia’s early childhood education comes as federal and state…
According to the budget papers, Australian students and former students could owe the government more than $40 billion in unpaid Higher Education Loan Program debt by 2017. Unsurprisingly, HELP, formerly…
It seems barely a week goes by without some commentary on falling literacy standards in Australia. Recently, Western Australian Labor MP Alannah MacTiernan weighed into the debate and laid the blame for…
Completing a PhD is no small feat. It requires both high intellect and a great deal of tenacity. But it can be lonely at the top, with many PhD students struggling with stress, feelings of isolation and…
Let us suppose for a moment that there is a magic bullet for curing illiteracy. In fact, what if we were able to take the global literacy rate from 84% worldwide to something closer to 90% or even 99…
Why is Australian higher education the way it is today? To answer this we must go back to Labor minister John Dawkins, who initiated a radical suite of reforms a quarter of a century ago. His impact on…
I admit it; I loved Ja'mie: Private School Girl. The new comedy series, which premiered last night on ABC1, fed all my prejudices and biases, unconscious or otherwise. The show’s writer, Chris Lilley…
Is publishing academic books a dying trade? And if so, are free e-books from universities likely to deal the final blow? The future of book publishing in general is hotly contested, but particularly so…
Mark Breary, a headmaster in the UK, recently sent a letter to parents asking them to invite the whole class whenever their child was having a birthday party. The headmaster’s goal is commendable, and…
For the next couple of months, young people across Australia will be sitting their final Year 12 examinations. For them, it’s the end of more than a decade of schooling looming large. Their soon to be…
This week’s A$65 million pledge by Nicola and Andrew Forrest to all five West Australian universities alters the philanthropy landscape in Australia. The Forrests’ donation comes less than a year after…