About Us

Australia
Rob Cubbon Ltd – Graphic Design London” http://robcubbon.com

BMAF and Australia

Australia has a similar university style and structure to that of the UK and many academic staff have worked in both environments. There are also many project-based connections, with collaborations between individuals, schools and universities on topics of joint interest and supporting each other through membership of Reference Groups. In this context several BMAF-funded small project grants have involved partners in Australian institutions and both the Part-time Teachers and the New Lecturers projects had Reference Group support from universities in Sydney.

BMAF have been working with ALTC (equivalent to the UK’s HEA), particularly through Ass Prof Mark Freeman of the University Sydney who is currently Discipline Scholar for the ALTC Business, Management and Economics Learning Network. Mark is also an Editorial Advisor to the International Journal of Management Education and Australian business educators are regularly involved in both submitting and reviewing IJME submissions.

We have been delighted to meet colleagues who have travelled to the UK for our annual conference and as part of institutional or ALTC Fellowship programmes. Recently we have met colleagues from Sydney, New South Wales, UTS, RMIT, South Queensland, Deakin, Western Australia, Melbourne, Victoria, Canberra, and look forward to more in the future.

The organisations and projects mentioned here are just some of those that we have been involved with and have relevance to UK business education. If you have information about other useful and relevant projects, sites, documents and resources from HE in Australia (or anywhere else!) please send details to bmaf@brookes.ac.uk

Australian Learning and Teaching Council

The ALTC (previously the Carrick Institute for Teaching and Learning) is government funded and ‘aspires to enhance the student learning experience by supporting quality teaching practice'.

They achieve this by a number of means:

ALTC EXCHANGE

This is an online community for learning and teaching professionals in higher education and although the focus is on projects and activities across Australia the membership is international.

Themes include:

Discipline communities
Leadership and change
Learning and teaching
Technologies for learning

ALTC Business, Management and Economics Learning Network

The ALTC Networks were launched in December 2008 and funding for activities is placed with the Australian Business Deans Council. Each has a Discipline Scholar and Ass Prof Mark Freeman of University of Sydney fulfils this role for this network. Mark was keynote speaker at the BMAF 2010 Conference in Newcastle.

ABDC Logo Australian Business Deans Council

The ABDC is a national council comprising Deans, Heads and Directors of Australian University business faculties and schools. The council seeks to advance and promote business education and research and does this through collective representation of business faculties and schools and their needs to government, industry and the community.

ALTC/ABDC Report: Business as Usual?

In 2008 an ALTC-funded project lead by the ABDC published their report, ‘Business as Usual?' A collaborative investigation of existing resources, strengths, gaps and challenges to be addressed for sustainability in teaching and learning in Australian university business faculties. To address the needs for future provision of business education in Australia this report has had a significant impact and has resulted in a number of follow-on ALTC projects.

GraduateSkills - Learning and Teaching Graduate Skills

This ALTC-funded project followed on from the ABDC report, Business as Usual?, which identified one area of need as to assure the learning of generic skills in a discipline-specific context. Lead by Dr Leigh Wood at Macquarie University, seven universities have collaborated in the developing and testing of a wide range of resources, particularly focusing on four areas:

Teamwork
Sustainability
Critical Thinking
Ethical Practice

"Our vision is to transform the way that students engage with graduate skills by explicitly demonstrating the development and embedding of these skills in the business curriculum through appropriate assessment, learning tasks and feedback mechanisms that are formulated into a series of modules and resources."

The resources would be of value to business education and are available for use within creative commons licence limitations and the project ask that you offer both feedback on their use and suggestions for development.

Accounting for the Future: More Than Numbers

Another project resulting from ‘Business as Usual?', this focused on the so-called soft skills sought by employers to ensure that accountancy graduates could operate well and appropriately inn a workplace. Lead by Prof Phil Hancock, University of Western Australia, the project identified 18 different methods currently being used in accounting courses to teach non-technical skills. These included encouraging joint out-of-class tutorial preparation and asking students to compile a business plan for a real-life case study.

‘If you can make these generic skills content-relevant,' argues Professor Hancock, ‘students will use the services and programmes.' While the Accounting for the Future report supports this, the problem is that all of these programmes cost money. ‘Macquarie estimates that it spends half a million dollars on its programmes, and other universities even more,' says Professor Hancock. ‘For example, UWA would need three full-time staff to embed communication skills across all of our postgraduate programmes to help our Masters students improve their communication skills to the levels expected by employers.'

Graduate Attributes

The National Graduate Attributes Project: integration and assessment of graduate attributes in curriculum

Lead by Dr Simon Barrie of the University of Sydney, the project report and other dissemination have already had an impact in Australia, and also in Scotland linked to their current Enhancement Theme of ‘Graduate for the 21st Century'.

Facilitating staff and student engagement with graduate attribute development, assessment and standards in Business faculties

Professor Tracy Taylor of Queensland University of Technology lead this project to promote and support strategic change in advancing Graduate Attribute development in Business Education through engagement of staff and students with learning and assessment processes that embed Graduate Attribute development.
This is of current importance as many Australian Business schools have obtained, or are seeking, international accreditation such as EQUIS (European Quality Improvement System) or AACSB (Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business). The quality assurance process of AACSB, for example, requires each degree program to specify learning goals, derived from graduate attributes, and demonstrate the student's achievement of learning goals for key management-specific knowledge and skills. Through use of a pre-existing online assessment system, ReView staff engaged in the graduate attributes they are fostering in their subjects by developing criteria to assess them within the set assignments. Students were then encouraged to engage with these attributes by self evaluating their performance for each criteria in these assessment tasks.

The B factor project: understanding academic staff beliefs about graduate attributes

Professor Barbara de la Harpe of Murdoch University lead an analysis and comparison of survey data gathered from academic staff at 16 Australian universities about their beliefs around graduate attributes. To provide the basis for a common framework for use across disciplines to integrate and assess graduate attributes.

Graduate Employability Indicators - Stakeholder perceptions of graduate employability and potential benchmarking partnerships

Professor Beverley Oliver, 2009 ALTC Teaching Fellow of Curtin University of Technology, Western Australia, is leading this ALTC project and is using online surveys to canvas opinions. There is an opportunity for us all to participate in the survey through the website above and follow the link to Graduate Employability Indicators. The team is willing to share resources and set up and report data for courses within and beyond Australia which will potentially enable benchmarking with a focus on graduate employability at the discipline level.

Initial and Continuing Professional Development of Academic Staff

Tutor Training - Small Group activities:

Universities of Melbourne and Sydney
This site is the result of collaboration between the two universities and is specifically designed to support tutors and sessional academics within the Faculties of Economics and Commerce and of Economics and Business. It incorporates video-clips of authentic and simulated scenarios with ‘real' tutors facilitating small group tutorials.

The RED Report - Recognition, Enhancement, Development - The contribution of sessional teachers to higher education

These resources include a report of the current status and treatment of part-time and sessional staff, together with a resource which offers approaches and tactics to consider to improve their support.

Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations

Professional Development for University Teaching in Australia: A Discussion Paper

"A survey of 32 universities shows that the provision of both preparation programs and ongoing support for academic staff for their teaching role is uneven and unsystematic. Almost one-quarter of universities do not conduct any initial teaching preparation programs for their staff. Although two-thirds of the universities responding to the survey offer a formal award in teaching in higher education, academic staff enrolment in these courses is low across the sector. The number of universities reporting any systematic training for sessional staff was very low. While these data cannot be interpreted as a comment on the quality of teaching in Australian universities, they reveal a variable level of formal and informal professional development of teaching within institutions and a reluctance among the majority of university staff, especially sessional staff, to engage in the many programs available in the practice and theory of higher education."

This report has learning points for all in business education and the findings are to some extent reflected in recent BMAF project reports:

Supporting part-time teaching staff: lessons from business and health
The 21st Century Business Academic

Transforming Australia's Higher Education System (2009)

"The Australian Government's goal is for this country to be amongst the most highly educated and skilled on earth, and in the top group of OECD nations for university research and knowledge diffusion. The Bradley Review affirmed that the reach, quality and performance of this nation's higher education system is central to Australia's economic and social progress. To be globally competitive and to secure the high skilled jobs of the future, Australia needs an outstanding, internationally competitive higher education system with increased participation and higher attainment levels. Australia also needs a quality higher education system to sustain the international education industry which is Australia's third largest export."

The Bradley Review is available at: http://www.deewr.gov.au/HigherEducation/Review/Pages/ReviewofAustralianHigherEducationReport.aspx

Assessment

Assessment Futures website

An outcome of the ALTC Fellowship received by Prof David Boud of University of Technology Sydney. As well as the recent Assessment 2020 report, this website includes a range of ideas and approaches from across the world relating to key aspects of assessment:

Engaging students
Authentic activities
Student designed assessments
Integrative tasks
Learning and judgement
Modelling and practice
Working with peers
Giving and receiving feedback