MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses, are gaining a lot of attention. Some commentators believe that these free internet-delivered courses are the future of university education. Others meanwhile argue…
Academic rigour, journalistic flair
Articles on Academics
Displaying 141 - 157 of 157 articles
The pressure is on. More and more universities and academics are working in a culture that is untenable and cracks in the ivory tower have already begun to appear. The work environment is now characterised…
Imagine that the editor of a widely-read magazine or, say, The Conversation has heard about your academic research and invited you to contribute an article. But you only know how to produce stodgy, impersonal…
When a friend showed me the blurb for Whackademia: an insider’s account of the troubled university, I immediately left the office to buy a copy, solely on the promise in the title. I read it in just two…
Australian higher education is often seen as a female-friendly industry, with overall numbers of both female students and academic staff outnumbering men. Yet women remain a minority as senior academics…
The University of Melbourne was founded in 1885 with five professors teaching 15 students. In 1952, at the start of the post-war tertiary boom, there were around 3,000 Australian academics teaching 30,000…
Fundamentally, there are two big motives for research. On the on hand there is intellectual ambition: the desire to know and understand the word, to appreciate the best that has been said and thought on…
Local history is one of the most popular forms of history in Australia. Yet there is a yawning gap between the enthusiastic amateur and the academic historian. While some academic historians engage with…
Australia desperately needs to invest more on research into Asia if we’re to better understand a part of the world so vital for our future economic prosperity. But not only do we need more research, we…
The collaborative spirit once embraced by universities in the pursuit of community service is giving way to confidentiality and secrecy as top-down managerialism takes hold, a conference on higher education…
Casual academics are deeply pessimistic about the prospect of ongoing employment, according to a study that shows only one in four are confident of taking on a continuing contract in the next five years…
Maybe it’s the lot of academics to be misrepresented, but when a single incident can nearly get you sacked it makes you reconsider whether to deal with the media at all. Last year, comments of mine about…
An analysis of the frequency of last names in Italian universities suggests the sector has a problem with nepotism. A study…
International education has become a vital industry for the Australian economy, in recent years rivalling coal and iron ore as one of our largest export industries. But the way we’re calculating international…
Raymond Da Silva Rosa’s article, also published on The Conversation, kindly refers to my recent piece in the Australian Literary Review, which examined why generally academics exert so little impact on…
The most important issue raised by Lord Monckton’s controversial appearance on two Western Australian campuses is not the limit of free speech or Monckton’s scientific competence. Rather it is whether…
The Australian government has dropped the contentious system of ranking academic journals and assessing academics based on their ability to publish in the top-ranked publications. Previously, journals…
Top contributors
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Director of research training, Australian National University
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Professor of Education and Social Justice, University of Birmingham
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Associate Professor of Hip-Hop, University of Virginia
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Lecturer in Law, Curtin Law School, Curtin University
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Distinguished Professor of History and Strategic Studies, University of Lagos
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Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Digital Marketing, Royal Holloway University of London
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Lecturer in the Faculty of Management, Law and Social Sciences, University of Bradford
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Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Social Policy, School of Applied Social Sciences, Durham University
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Associate Professor, Curtin Law School, Curtin University
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Senior Lecturer, Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, Australian National University
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Associate Professor of History, Australian National University
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Professor of Statistics, Queensland University of Technology
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Professor, Monash University
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Emeritus Professor, Monash University
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Chancellor, Western Sydney University
