Abstract: The higher education environment in Australia has undergone a radical change since the
1980s with the phenomenal increase in the intake of international students, particularly from what are referred to as Confucian Heritage Cultures (CHC): China, Korea, Japan, Malaysia and Singapore. Students from these countries view the Australian higher education system very favourably. The present increase in the proportion of full-fee paying students at Australian universities is also a result of decreasing government funding to the Australian higher education sector, which has now risen to be one of the most important elements of the Australian economy.
These push-pull factors have drawn more Australian tertiary institution providers into the market place, as they seek more international student enrolments for their domestic campuses and also establish campuses overseas. Potential higher education students are becoming more discerning in their choices and are choosing learning environments that offers them both relevant and stimulating educational experiences and good qualifications, along with a range of both IT and academic support services that cater to their individual learning needs. Increasing competition, both within Australia and internationally, calls for a focus on student satisfaction in order to sustain the existence of the providers.
This paper addresses the issue of what international students seek in terms of academic support and demonstrates that present levels of cost efficient services by Australian higher education providers, generally characterized by IT and language support services, are inadequate and do not meet the specific needs of the students.
Keywords; Educational support; International students; Higher Education
Abstract: At the ISANA Victorian Branch State Conference in October, 2005, Heather and Mary, together with our esteemed colleague, Lila Kemlo, presented our ‘students at risk’ project, designed to identify and provide an holistic, integrated program to enable Business Portfolio students to gain essential skills for academic and social success. A major feature of this program was the collaboration between members of academic staff of the Business Portfolio, the Learning Skills Unit, the Business Library, Student Services Group and the Student Union. United by a common goal – the empowerment of students – investigation of skills needed to succeed in assessment tasks in a number of business courses (subjects) was undertaken through co-operation between lecturers and learning skills advisors. Members of the project team also undertook to examine reasons students with whom they worked on an individual basis gave for finding themselves ‘at risk’ of academic failure and possible exclusion from their program of study. The object was to determine skills which, if they could be taught, might assist students to improve their rate of success in the future. What started out as a ‘remedial’ exercise, during the course of the first semester of the project, changed focus to that of a ‘preventive’ measure for current and future students. Dissemination of the current findings and changes to timing and methods of delivery of essential skills throughout this project form the basis of this presentation.
Key Words: Empowerment of students, Learning Skills, Social Skills, Students ‘at risk’ project
Abstract: Student academic literacy and learning support at Victoria University is an integral part of the educational experience offered to students by Student Learning Unit (SLU) lecturers. Good practice in student language and learning support includes a shift from prevailing ‘remedial’ approaches that imply service provision from outside the curriculum towards systemic approaches involving embedding support material in curriculum through collaboration with mainstream staff (Skillen et al., 1998).
The compulsory first-year undergraduate management subject Management and Organisation Behaviour (MOB) is taught across three campuses in Melbourne, and at partner institutions in Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong. Seventeen staff, including 10 sessional staff, are involved in the delivery of the subject. Students in MOB come from a diverse range of degree specialisations including Applied Economics, Accounting, Tourism and Hospitality and Management.
The team, which consists of the SLU lecturer and the subject lecturers, has developed a model to foster academic skills and deep learning (Biggs, 2003, Biggs and Telfer, 1987) within the very diverse student cohort enrolled in MOB. This partnership is innovative in that it involves the skills of both discipline and SLU staff onshore, and of offshore discipline staff in a way rarely seen in Australian tertiary institutions. The offshore lecturers are guiding the team to understand issues unique to their environments, and, with the team, building a response to offshore students’ needs which is culturally appropriate. The inclusion of offshore partner staff in such teams acknowledges the expertise of staff from partner institutions and was one of the key recommendations in Victoria University’s Australian Vice Chancellors’ Committee (AVCC) project report entitled Improving Language and Learning Support for Offshore Students (Dixon, 2005).
Assessment, central in forming students’ perceptions of learning, has been restructured and redesigned to include learning materials using Biggs’ concept of constructive alignment; two of Victoria University’s Core Graduate Attributes (CGAs – written and oral communication and group work); the unpacking and scaffolding of assessment tasks and the provision of flexibly accessible multimedia learning materials including linguistic models. There are practical, operational and cultural differences between the different locations which have led to the current developments.
Abstract: Many people involved in Higher Education in Australia are currently discussing the many issues related to the quality of the large and complex field known as ‘international education’. This is not surprising, given that in 2003, a total of 136, 807 international students were studying onshore in Australia with another 73, 590 students enrolled offshore (Morris, 2004). Of particular importance to the students and their families, as well as to Australian academic and support staff, are the students’ perceptions of the quality of the teaching and learning experiences provided for them in Australian universities. In the project described in this paper – the QUEST Project – the research on the approaches to learning of both local and international students detailed by such writers as Ramburuth (2000) has been given a curriculum focus as the issues surfaced by students are translated into teaching and learning strategies.
The paper describes the ways in which focus groups were used to gather undergraduate students’ perceptions of their Semester 1 experiences of learning at an Australian university. An overview of the ways in which staff members have worked together in a collaborative model to make adjustments to the program in order to address the issues raised by the students has also been provided.
Key words: QUEST, teaching and learning, curriculum, student perceptions, first year experiences
Abstract: Ideally, the student experience of internationalisation in higher education is to become part of an intellectual environment which values diversity, fosters mutual understanding and respect and is responsive to diverse needs. From the perspective of higher education institutions across the world, international success depends on an institution’s ability to develop globally competent citizens who are comfortable with diversity both at home and abroad (Gilbert, 1995). This chapter focuses on student experiences of learning in another culture and its implications for academic skills development.
Key words: cultural diversity, student experiences, globalisation, student learning, academic skills development
