A key question raised by the Australian Universities Accord is how the tertiary education system can enhance participation rates and align vocational education and training (VET) with the evolving needs of the labour market. However, the alignment between VET in Schools enrolments and local labour market needs remains unclear. This study investigates the alignment of VET in Schools offerings in Queensland, where participation is highest, with employment across all industries. We analysed the 10 qualifications accounting for over 50% of VET in Schools enrolments in 2022-2023, comparing enrolment data with industry workforce sizes and identifying sectors experiencing skills shortages. The findings reveal areas of significant misalignment, with high enrolments in areas such as fitness, where job opportunities are limited, while critical sectors like health care and social assistance face workforce shortages. We recommend shifting policy from broad educational attainment targets to strategic approaches that prioritise the relevance of qualifications.

Science teachers are increasingly using internet sources for lesson planning, science content, and designing classroom activities. With the prevalence of disinformation online, there is potential for school students to learn ineffective internet search strategies and integrate disinformation into their knowledge. Science education fit for the future requires teachers who can navigate online information effectively and develop these capabilities in their students. In this study, we address the ways in which Australian preservice science teachers engage their cognitions about knowledge and knowing when searching and evaluating online information. Using concurrent think-aloud protocols we studied preservice science teachers’ cognitions while completing internet search and evaluation tasks for science lesson content on socioscientific issues. Through subsequent interviews, we captured further dimensions of participants’ knowledge and understanding of search and evaluation processes. We contribute new knowledge by providing a novel conceptual framework used for data analysis and empirical evidence about the cognitions (aims, value, ideals, and relied upon processes) that preservice science teachers engage when searching and evaluating online information. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Assessing group work formatively in higher education poses a significant challenge. The complexity of evaluating individual contributions is compounded by the lack of efficient and effective methods for tracking, analysing and assessing individual engagement and contributions, which can impede timely feedback and the development of group work skills. This paper contributes to the growing body of research on collaboration analytics, which focuses on learning analytics (LA) in collaborative settings, and formative assessment while providing practical guidance for educators seeking to enhance formative assessment practices. The potential enhancement lies at the intersection between analytics technology and assessment design. In this paper, we present a conceptual framework that can harness multimodal data collection as well as LA to formatively assess and provide feedback on individual engagement and contributions to group work across physical and digital spaces. Drawing on research that considers design for learning, conjecture mapping, assessment design, multimodal LA and feedback, we outline a structured approach to developing formative assessment of group work skills in collaborative projects and higher education contexts. Implications for practice or policy: center dot Practical guidance is provided for educators to enhance formative assessment practices with LA. center dot The integrated framework and process offers a guide for formative assessment in group work scenarios, providing tools for monitoring student progress, informing pedagogical decision-making and enhancing learning experiences. center dot The integration of the activity-centred analysis and design framework and LA allows educators to harness the power of both data-driven decision-making and learner- centred pedagogical approaches to better support learner development in group work settings.

BackgroundConstructing shared understanding of complex interdisciplinary problems is one of the most challenging aspects of interdisciplinary teamwork. How this process unfolds is under-researched, making it esoteric and difficult to scaffold. This paper aims to provide an articulated and nuanced account of what is involved in student teams' construction of shared understanding of complex interdisciplinary problems.MethodsThe study combines the theoretical lens of epistemic games with an ecological analytical perspective. Drawing on the analysis of ethnographic cases, it explores how four graduate student teams construct shared understanding of complex problems during interdisciplinary projects.FindingsConstruction of shared understanding is a multifaceted and dynamic process that extends over the entire problem-solving activity. It relies on epistemic moves that explicate and juxtapose different perspectives and connect abstract ideas with knowledge grounded in students' experiences and contexts. The pursuits students engage in, when creating shared understanding, reveal epistemic differences related to formulation of the interdisciplinary problem and what constitutes trustworthy knowledge.ContributionThe paper contributes to the literature on the nature of students' construction of shared understanding of complex interdisciplinary problems revealing critical recurrent moves. It also extends earlier conceptualizations of epistemic games as primarily discourse games and demonstrates that they are profoundly multimodal and distributed.

In this chapter the authors explore the use of learning analytics (LA) to track skills acquisition in tertiary education environments, with a specific focus on group work skills. They discuss the importance of design for learning with regards to developing professional attributes and skills for collaborative group work projects, before considering the role of learning analytics in shaping educational experiences that relate to such skills and attributes. Finally, they outline a design process used to develop and implement an iterative learning analytics evaluation approach to the design for learning in collaborative team projects.

Appears in: ICERI2022 Proceedings Publication year: 2022Pages: 3651-3657ISBN: 978-84-09-45476-1ISSN: 2340-1095doi: 10.21125/iceri.2022.0889Conference name: 15th annual International Conference of Education, Research and InnovationDates: 7-9 November, 2022Location: Seville, Spain

The transition from education to employment is a pivotal point for students. Workplace experience can play a key role in a student’s transition to full-time work. Despite the important role in bridging the gap between education and employment, students’ participation in work-integrated learning (WIL) experiences varies significantly across disciplines. Through participant surveys, we examined students’ reasons for, and benefits of, undertaking WIL opportunities online through Forage: a platform facilitating access to virtual and simulated placements in partnership with employer organisations. Virtual and simulated WIL experiences have gained interest, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings show that virtual or simulated WIL experiences are inclusive opportunities that can assist students, including those studying in areas with a historically low prevalence of WIL, in both career and organisation exploration.

The COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly presented a multitude of challenges to the way education is delivered; its wide-reaching multidisciplinary impact has also presented a unique opportunity as a focus for real-world authentic learning. For some time now, technology has enabled interaction at a global scale, allowing students to connect with teachers and industry experts around the world. This paper reports on the innovative design of an intra-curricular program utilising COVID-19 as a focus for online, real-world connected learning, delivered to business students at a large Australian university during the pandemic lockdown. Implemented as an online intra-curricular initiative, ‘Leading in a Post-COVID World’ encouraged student engagement with the challenges of leadership to address issues on a personal, local, and global scale. Using a community of inquiry (CoI) lens we explore key features of the program and find that a CoI approach combined with principles of real-world learning and authentic experiences encourages student participation and engagement in this intra-curricular space.

The symposium seeks to advance an understanding of learning from an ecological perspective. The abundance of digital technologies and rapid changes in knowledge domains generate new epistemic and learning practices, drawing on heterogeneous sets of resources, actors, and forms of knowledge. Consequently, learners must navigate complex and unstructured landscapes to gather resources and structure activities. Little is known about these processes and how they can be studied and enhanced. This symposium argues for the necessity of a paradigmatic shift towards an ‘ecological understanding’ of learning, which takes into account the enactment of the learning ‘act’, the knowledge forms, contexts, relationships, digital technologies and infrastructures that shape learning practices in unbound landscapes. The four contributions in this symposium use empirical illustrations to build an argument leading towards a new learning research and design agenda. These contributions are complementary as they pinpoint practices students, teachers and institutions engage with in this unbounded landscape.

Many universities had to pivot their teaching into an online space in response to the COVID-19 health crisis. How can we leverage the lessons learned from our design of these spaces to provide superior student learning experiences? This study describes the development of a classification system to appraise our rapidly transitioned online units of study. Underpinned by active learning pedagogy, 234 online learning sites from a leading Australian Business School were reviewed and three types of sites emerged, content, student and teacher-centred. The quality of these online sites were evaluated using a modified framework from the literature focusing on elements of design across five domains. Findings indicated that the overall range of quality of sites was mirrored across all three types, with the majority categorised as ‘good’. Analysis of the design elements of this typology will help build capacity in the design of online learning environments and guide pedagogical practice in business education.

The SHEILA framework provides a policy and strategy framework informing the strategic implementation and use of learning analytics. However, as evidenced in several ‘ground-up’ implementations of tools, the institutional preparedness and the governance around use often comes secondary to the policy. In this paper we depart from familiar approaches and evaluate one such example of a tool's development (SRES – Student Relationship Engagement System). SRES' adoption and scaling across two institutions are evaluated using an auto-ethnographic approach scaffolded through the dimensions of the SHEILA framework, focusing on the individual perspectives of the institutional champions who have been central to this journey. This practical approach and the emerging insights may enable other institutions to identify areas of potential improvement and inform senior academic managers about the strategic requirements to scale the approach, accounting for aspects not considered in the initial ‘organic growth’ of the implementation.

The purpose of this symposium is to bring together several research programs that aim to advance the conceptual and methodological foundations for studying interdisciplinary learning and to provide empirical evidence for further development of this, currently undertheorized and understudied, field. The first paper embraces a sociological concept of academic hospitality to look at how different modes of interdisciplinarity are adopted in university courses. The second paper adopts an activity-centered framework to investigate the development of students’ competence during interdisciplinary learning. The third paper takes a linguistic perspective and examines connectedness as a measure of interdisciplinarity in students’ produced artifacts. The last paper adopts a multimodal blending lens to look at how students integrate their ideas and construct shared knowledge artifacts during interdisciplinary innovation meetings. Collectively, the contributions provide a broad conceptual and methodological ‘toolkit’ for studying interdisciplinary learning from different analytical perspectives and at different levels of granularity.

While there is a broad consensus around the potential for learning analytics (LA) to positively affect education, widespread adoption of LA in higher education is lacking. LA research has produced frameworks supporting policy development; however, many of these top-down approaches focus on managing resistance to change (Macfadyen, Dawson, Pardo & Gaševic, 2014). In this chapter, we view adoption as occurring at the level of individual faculty and staff who may use LA day-to-day, and diffusion as the higher-level group phenomenon that focuses on the ways in which an innovation spreads (Rogers, 2003). We examine bottom-up and widespread diffusion of an LA platform, the Student Relationship Engagement System (SRES), through an Australian university. Using two elements of Rogers’ model of diffusion of innovations, innovation and communication channels, we explore diffusion of SRES through the lens of teachers’ experiences. Our findings highlight the strength of a bottom-up approach based on LA fulfilling unmet teachers’ needs, leading to organic growth of champions that co-create value in use of LA.

The value of technology lies not only with the service or functionality of the tool, but also with its subsequent value to the people who use it. New learning analytics (LA) software and platforms for capturing data and improving student learning are frequently introduced; however, they suffer from issues of adoption and continued usage by stakeholders. Scholars have previously suggested that it is not enough to introduce stakeholders (e.g., teachers and students) to LA technologies; they must also be a part of the LA creation and design process. In this paper, we will continue the ongoing work to clarify and compare different approaches of human-centred design through an overview of participatory frameworks in LA (co-design, co-creation). We will also present a case study using an LA tool used and developed within several Australian universities that was utilized over six years as an example of how LA designers can co-create dynamic platforms with teachers. Implications of participatory design frameworks in LA will also be presented through a discussion of the costs, challenges, and benefits of adopting human-centred design.