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Speech
OPENING ADDRESS TO THE HIGHER EDUCATION RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT SOCIETY OF AUSTRALASIAMonday, 10 July Professor Alan Robson, Vice Chancellor of the University of Western Australia, Professor Kerry Cox, Vice Chancellor of Edith Cowan University, Professor Shelda Debowski, President of the Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia, Ladies and Gentlemen, over the next few days, you have gathered to discuss three critical issues in higher education:
You will enjoy perspectives from eminent academics and leaders in Australian higher education, and will hear many views on the challenges and opportunities open to us in further expanding our international education market. Just a week ago I returned from attending the meeting of OECD Education Ministers in Athens, where I had the opportunity to listen to 29 other Education Ministers about their higher education systems and their proposed reforms to higher education. As they spoke of issues such as greater autonomy, self accreditation, quality assurance and, in some instances, possible student contributions to tuition costs, I appreciated that Australia, in a number of respects, leads the world. We must continue to strive for a world class higher education system where our students are educated to the highest levels - equipped with those workplace skills which employers seek in this fast moving world. Our universities must create new knowledge, support innovation and become more competitive. Our universities must be accountable for their performance and transparent and efficient in their operations. And for our universities to remain competitive and attract students from both Australia and overseas they must embrace greater diversity. Today, I will talk about the future directions of research and teaching and learning, and in particular, our initiatives to identify, reward and promote excellence in these areas. Teaching and learning and research are the fundamental, essential and enduring foundation blocks of Australia’s education system and ultimately of our social and economic gains as a nation. The excellence of our schools, our universities and our research institutions is central to our capacity to engage globally. That’s why I am committed to pursuing further reform in higher education and in research to diversify our sector and promote excellence in teaching and research. Our sector must diversify for three principal reasons:
Universities are yet to respond to the need for greater diversity and are still, more or less, the same traditional comprehensive teaching and research universities, we see it all over the country. The University of Melbourne is the only university so far to step out of the mould. I am not expecting all universities to make the same changes to their degree structures as the University of Melbourne. Nor do I wish for them to do this. However, I do want to see higher education institutions carefully considering where their energy and resources could be best directed – for some universities this may mean they have to make the difficult decision to leave some things behind and concentrate their efforts on their strengths rather than trying to be all things to all students. I am strongly committed to furthering diversification through all instruments of Australian Government funding. Today, I will set out my intentions in relation to promoting diversity and excellence in both teaching and research. First, the research quality framework, which will recognise not only excellence in research, but its impact on our quality of life and its relevance to Australia and secondly, the $250m Learning and Teaching Performance Fund. This Fund was established as part of the Our Universities: Backing Australia’s Future reforms and under which the first tranche of $54m was allocated last year. Today, I will be announcing some significant changes to the future operation of this Fund. Research Quality Framework I believe that a Research Quality Framework (RQF) is vital for Australia. We need it to lift our overall level of research quality, and to shift our focus towards research which really does have an impact on day to day life. We must use the RQF as a tool for greater diversity in the higher education sector, focussing universities’ attention on their strengths, and moving away from the “one-size-fits-all” mould of universities. The overall objective of the RQF is to develop a broad assessment mechanism of research quality and impact that will be relevant across the full breadth of research organisations in receipt of public funding. The RQF will recognise and reward high quality and high impact research wherever and whenever it occurs. I propose that the RQF will come into operation in 2008, with the next RQF exercise to be undertaken six years later, that is in 2014. Under this timeframe, data gathering would take place in 2008, with financial consequences to flow from 2009. 2007 will be a year for universities to refine the processes and finalise the detail of the data gathering. I agree that this time is also necessary to do more of the hard work required this year in developing and testing models for an RQF. The Australian Government is developing an RQF to ensure that resources provided to support research are directed to areas of research excellence that generate wider benefit and impact for society. For example, such a framework will help business and industry to make decisions about collaboration; and it will provide more transparency allowing students to identify research excellence across all universities and assist in their educational decision making. Australian universities face their own challenges in teaching and research as education becomes globalised. Increasingly, we will need to meet international standards and build on areas of strength. By highlighting the very best research and its broader impact, through the RQF, universities will be encouraged to take a rigorous approach to developing and implementing their own research strategies that build on their identified strengths. This process will diversify purpose and content as institutions shift their research focus to those disciplines in which they are at the forefront nationally and internationally and for which they extract significant benefit for their communities. Teaching and learning Our focus on the learning and teaching side, is the $250m Learning and Teaching Performance Fund under which $54m was allocated last year and $82 million will be allocated to universities this year. Australian universities abound with highly qualified and dedicated teachers who are committed to excellence and innovation in teaching. However, while undergraduate teaching is core business for all universities, its importance often takes second place to performance in research. Unless the recognition and rewards for excellence in learning and teaching move more into line with those for research, there will be little incentive for universities to focus on these areas. For this reason, as part of the Our Universities: Backing Australia’s Future reforms and initiatives, the Government announced $250 million over three years to ensure that learning and teaching takes its rightful place alongside research. The Fund has already been successful on many fronts. It has raised the profile of learning and teaching in Australian universities – we don’t bat an eyelid at the title of a Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Teaching and Learning). Similarly we are starting to see initiatives in Australia’s universities directly targeted to lifting the teaching skills of lecturers and tutors. I am aware that some have introduced a requirement for teaching staff to gain teaching qualifications – a situation which has always existed in schools and long existed in TAFE and other vocational teaching. This approach in higher education will undoubtedly improve teachers’ competence and professionalism and have a positive impact on student learning. I think there’s much to be made of the support given to teachers at the institutional level, particularly for those in the early stages of development, and I commend those universities that have been making an effort to address teacher professional development. The availability of information for students and staff has also been very valuable. To be eligible to participate in the Fund, universities must ensure that their current learning and teaching plans and policies and student evaluation of subjects are publicly available on their websites. While many have pushed for some funding to be attached to this stage, this is, in my view, just the entry hurdle to the Fund’s potential rewards. This information, once collected, should be a valuable resource to universities using negative results to drive reform and improvement, and positive results to market to potential students as we have seen the University of Wollongong promote - quite unapologetically. In just one year of the Fund’s operation, the increase in the amount of information available for students and staff on universities’ learning and teaching policies and practices has served to shift the focus onto this essential part of a university’s reason for being. The 2006 results were useful for us to mark our spot: the Fund’s measures of excellence showed that, on the whole, students are highly satisfied with their learning experiences at Australia’s universities and that many have been well rewarded, as a result of their studies, with further opportunities for study or full time employment. This is what excellence in learning and teaching is all about. Fourteen universities shared the funding for 2006 – some $54 million in total – all of them demonstrated outstanding achievement in these areas. This year the stakes are even higher, there is $82 million to be allocated for universities to use as they see fit. But following from the announcement of last year’s results, the sector argued strongly for a review of the methodology behind the Fund’s allocations – a review which the Australian Government agreed to undertake. To my mind, it was inevitable that there would be some “teething problems” in the first year of the Fund’s operations – there’s no doubt it came as something of a rude shock to the sector when tools such as the Course Evaluation Questionnaire which had existed for years but had been happily ignored by most institutions all of a sudden had serious financial benefits attached to them. The debate over the Fund’s methodology is welcome. It shows that the sector supports the Fund’s policy objectives and is strongly committed to its continuation. Throughout this year, my department has worked closely with the sector to review the Fund, to see what changes might be made to improve the Fund for 2007 and for the future. The review has been supported by an advisory group and made up of representatives from universities, the Carrick Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, Teaching Australia and the Australia Bureau of Statistics. The advisory group has made a number of recommendations to the Australian Government, all of which I have accepted. Today, I am announcing the changes we will be making to the Learning and Teaching Performance Fund for 2007. Importantly, the changes sit firmly within my broader views on the need to diversify the sector. I suggest that not all universities can, nor should, teach across the breadth of disciplines. Some should work out what they are good at, and stick to it. As a first change to the operation of the Fund, we will move from a broad classification of excellence across all teaching and learning to the recognition of excellence in, at first, four discipline areas. The broad discipline areas will be:
Rewarding achievement in these discipline areas will support and encourage diversity, recognising and rewarding the areas in which universities teach best. The changes can be expected to have a positive marketing effect for universities – enabling them to promote their teaching expertise in certain areas. At some stage, I think we may wish to focus on discrete discipline areas rather than broad ones. This year’s decision to focus on broad discipline areas, rather than on field of education or particular course, reflects the limitations of the current data we have available to measure universities’ performance in teaching and learning. I am advised that disaggregating beyond broad discipline areas is just not possible from a statistical viewpoint at this stage. The limitations of the data are, in large part, a reflection of the poor response rate to the Course Evaluation Questionnaire. I look forward to a time when the response returns on a much improved Course Evaluation Questionnaire reach the 60% or 70% mark, if not more. With more reliable data over time, the Fund can become more targeted to specific disciplines, encouraging institutions in their areas of strength. As in 2006, the 2007 Fund will include ‘participation requirements’ to determine universities’ eligibility to participate in the Fund. However, as part of my general commitment to minimising red tape in the sector, to satisfy the requirements for 2007 universities will be invited to check and update the information they provided for Stage One in 2006 rather than reinvent the wheel. For 2007, there will be some minor changes to the performance indicators, namely in respect of the use of further full-time and part-time study as indicators of learning and teaching success, and in the use of progress data for all students, not just first year students. The 2007 Fund will also use equal weighting across all the performance indicators and standardised scores. I am disappointed that we are unable to change the indicators in any significant way for 2007. The performance indicators we are using those being the Course Evaluation Questionnaire, the Graduate Destination Survey and the attrition and progress rates collected by my department are still the only feasible ones available at a national level. However, I look forward to the outcomes of further work between the advisory group and my department to undertake more work on the performance indicators so that we can ensure we’re using the best measures of learning and teaching success into the future. While acknowledging the sector’s concerns about the adjustment methodology, the advisory group did not recommend making changes to this aspect of the underlying methodology for 2007. They consider that this is a complex undertaking, which will require considerable time and further analysis. However, in the interests of transparency and to address universities’ concerns, this year my department will be providing the sector with more info about the adjustment process. The 2007 Fund will also be overseen by an expert panel with the additional responsibilities of ensuring that the results for any one university have not been unduly distorted by either the function of the model or other factors, and of providing institutions with feedback on both their individual performance and on the performance of the sector as a whole. There will be no requirement for universities to submit ‘statements’ in 2007. I will be announcing the membership of the panel soon which will comprise eminent members of our community with combined expertise in learning and teaching and statistical analysis. I look forward to announcing the results of the Fund in November. I expect we’ll have a very good news story about the quality of learning and teaching in the higher education sector in Australia. I hope that many of your universities will benefit from the Fund in its new discipline-oriented format this year. It is now my great pleasure to open the conference of the Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia.
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