Information Security Course

ABC Radio Darwin is interview me at 10:15 am about the hacking of medical records. This follws from an interview with ABC South East  . Since then there has been a report of 20,000 student records being obtained from ADFA and published. It happens that the ACS has an Information Security Course starting in the online CPE Program on 20 January 2013. Of course as I said on radio, business can take basic precautions themselves, such as regular backups, having systems software, anti-virus and spam software up to date.

Information Security takes you on a journey through governance, management of information, how to develop strategies, responses to incidents, and information risk management. It has been based on the Information Systems Audit and Control Association’s curriculum for information security, and developed to help you work towards an information security management credential.

It includes five modules, which explore:

• Governance and information security
• Developing an information security strategy
• Information security risk assessment and management
• Developing an information security development roadmap, common challenges and measuring success
• Incident management and response. ...

From:  Information Security Course, ACS, 2012

Join Online Discussion of ICT Skills at World Summit

Elearning practitioner Brenda Aynsley, will take part in an online panel at the World Summit on the Information Society, to discuss global professional standards for computer staff. Brenda is chair of the International Professional Practice Partnership (IP3), a not for profit organization, which has set a common standard for IT professional education, currently used by eight nations. The event in Switzerland will be available online at 12:15:00 AM, 17 May 2012, Australian EST (UTC+10).

How to Design a Higher Education Institution: Part 1

Greetings from Adelaide, where I am attending the annual joint academic and facility board meeting of Australian Computer Society Education. The ACS is a professional body, which carries out the usual accreditation of university courses suitable for membership. However, in addition it also runs its own postgraduate courses, to fill in gaps in the professional skills of members. The education is mostly online using part time tutors (who are from industry or academia). The organizing to the courses is also mostly does online using email, real time and store-and-forward online forums.

It is interesting to see how the same educational and administrative issues which come up at ACS and in my role as an adjunct lecturer at ANU. But as ACS done not have conventional face-to-face courses, lecturer theaters and bureaucracy and so can take some new approaches. As a result ACS is starting by introducing they type of techniques universities are struggling to introduce. The use of pure on-line education allows strong integration with practical skills, progressive assessment, student discussion and reflection.

Some challenging issues, to which ACS is looking for new solutions are dealing with are: plagiarism, student's marking expectations and coordination of content between separate units.

The ACS previously commissioned research on the practicalities of ethics in the ICT industry. This brought fresh insights to an area which has been looked at for thousands of years. Perhaps some research is warranted to the areas challenging education, to produce new techniques and software to implement it.

As an example the current approach to plagiarism in Australian universities is not sustainable, in my view. Students are told not to plagiarize, threatened with severe penalties, given some vague guidelines and then blamed when they go wrong. In my experience very few students are deliberately acting dishonestly, it is just that they have not been trained and tested in what to do. If academics believe how to write is important, then this must be given a significant proportion of resources in an education program, with formal teaching, assignments and testing. This would be an area where new online educational techniques could be applied. In my view the investment in this area would have large benefits.

ACS CPEP students have to communicate professionally online with their peer and tutor, and are assessed on this. Also most students do an introductory unit on professional communication and ethics. They have to write professional reports, which are assessed. This fits them better for a role in industry, or academia, than a student who has just passed an examination.

On-line Education Solution to Australian Skills Shortage

In "Professional work experiences of recent Australian information technology graduates" (Thesis, UTS, 2011), Srivalli Vilapakkam Nagarajan presents a very detailed case for work placements and “real life like” projects as part of the training of IT professionals. They argue that some professional skills must be developed outside university studies and must involve employers and professional associations to have "work ready" IT graduates. The Australian Computer Society (ACS) Computer Professional Education Program (CPEP) is mentioned as ways to provide a bridge between academia, employers and students.

What the thesis does not point out is that the ACS uses on-line teaching so that the student does not need to be taken out of the workplace for Work-Integrated-Learning (WIL). This constructivist approach to learning through an Outcomes Based Education (OBE) model is detailed in "The role of ePortfolios in mentoring adult learners seeking professional certification" (Jones, A., Barnes, P., Lindley, D., & Steinberg, A. 2010).

The academics, employers and students can work together to deepen the student's experience, through educational exercises which have workplace value. This approach should be broadly applicable for other professions and jobs. Industry can have a productive employee who is improving their skills at the same time. However, this will require retraining university academics in how to do this. How to re-train academics in this using those same on-line techniques is something I am looking into.

Emergencies in the Maritime Environment

Greetings from the Pacific 2012 Maritime Defence Conference in Sydney, where I am sitting in on the "Emergencies in the Maritime Environment" session. Lloyd Binks, Manager Policy
Co-ordination - Regulatory Affairs and Reform, at the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) discussed the new "Single National Maritime Jurisdiction". In this the topic of education and training for afters came up, with a national standard for certification being introduced. "Competency based" standards, rather than requiring personnel to undertake a course, they have to show they are competent. If they already know what is needed, then they do not need to do the course, just the test. The test need

Alan Steber, Steber International, in "Industry - Commercial Builders Perspective" pointed out that many small vessels need to be multi-purpose. Both government and commercial vessels will be used for routine work and also for emergency rescue purposes. In remote island communities the official government vessels and also commercial charter boats are used for routine transport of members of the public and goods, as well as being used for search and rescue. So the boats need to be equipped for dual functions and also be designed with redundancy built in so they can operate away from port for extended periods.

There are benefits for ship builders and commercial purchasers in equipping their ships for rescue, as they can then qualify for exemption from some government charges. However, Alan pointed out that the builder has to keep detailed records to show that they have met the required standards and been signed off by independent assessors. He suggested this be done even for pleasure craft, so that the builder has the option for offering them for rescue purposes later (and to meet general liability). One example Ian provided was provision for ballistic panels in pleasure craft to protect wealthy clients. The builder needs to also be able to provide a second owner of a boat with owner's manual and documentation.

In answer to an audience question on what were the most important new developments with standards, Alan nominated new requirements for watertight compartments and firewalls for commercial vessels to higher standards. He held up a sample of a lightweight metal-composite fireproof panel. He also discussed new fire resistant plastics, which will require special construction techniques.

ICT Specialists for Certification Advisory Groups

Australian Computer Society issued a call for "Expressions of Interest for ACS Specialism Advisory Groups", 27 January 2012. Initially experts in Enterprise Architecture and Internet Security are sought. The Terms of Reference for the Specialism Advisory Group are available.

The groups will advise on competency and skill requirements for certification, body of knowledge, educational and ongoing professional development, as part of the ACS Certification Scheme. Call for ICT Specialists for Certification Advisory Groups

It happens that I have just prepared a proposal for there to be an industrial reference group on "ICT Sustainability" for the Green Technology Strategies course I run as part of the ACS Computer Professional Education Program. Hopefully we can have just one advisory group covering both ACS certification and the education program.

Skills Framework for the Information Age Version 5

Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA) Version 5 was released 1 December 2011. SFIA provides a standard set of skills definitions for ICT professionals. It has seven levels of responsibility and skills in six categories:

1. Strategy & architecture
2. Business change
3. Solution development and implementation
4. Service management
5. Procurement & management support
6. Client interface

The Australian Computer Society uses it for designing training courses, including my course in Green ICT.

Kotter Process Applied to Learning

Dr Kim Blackmore is talking on "Findings from the Engineering Hubs and Spokes Project" at the ANU Educational Research Conference. Most interesting was the application of business change theory to education. Kim described adapting Kotter's eight steps to organizational change to the process of introducing blended learning:

1. Create a sense of urgency
2. Develop a guiding coalition
3. Develop a vision for change
4. Communicate the vision
5. Empower broad-based action
6. Generate short-term wins
7. Don't let up
8. Make it stick in the organizational culture

From: John Kotter, Wikipdia, 2011

Research for Excellence in Tertiary Teaching

Greetings from the Australian National University where Professor Lawrence Cram, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) is giving the Opening Address for the ANU Educational Research Conference. His theme was "lists". Professor Cram started with "How to Become an Excellent Tertiary-level Teacher. Seven golden rules for university and college lecturers" by HENRY ELLINGTON. He pointed to further education and conferences for lecturers, but suggested Ellington missed out on the point of lectures conducting research.

Professor Cram then looked at "What does Good Education Research Look Like?" by Lyn Yates (Open University Press, 2004). The question here was: who is our research for?

Lastly Professor Cramlooked at "What Makes a Concept Good? A Criterial Framework for Understanding Concept Formation in the Social Sciences" by John Gerring:

Nowhere in the broad and heterogeneous work on concept formation has the question of conceptual utility been satisfactorily addressed. Goodness in concept formation, I argue, cannot be reduced to 'clarity,' to empirical or theoretical relevance, to a set of rules, or to the methodology particular to a given study. Rather, I argue that conceptual adequacy should be perceived as an attempt to respond to a standard set of criteria, whose demands are felt in the formation and use of all social science concepts: (1) familiarity, (2) resonance, (3) parsimony, (4) coherence, (5) differentiation, (6) depth, (7) theoretical utility, and (8) field utility. The significance of this study is to be found not simply in answering this important question, but also in providing a complete and reasonably concise framework for explaining the process of concept formation within the social sciences. Rather than conceiving of concept formation as a method (with a fixed set of rules and a definite outcome), I view it as a highly variable process involving trade-offs among these eight demands.

From: What Makes a Concept Good? A Criterial Framework for Understanding Concept Formation in the Social Sciences, John Gerring, Polity , Vol. 31, No. 3 (Spring, 1999), pp. 357-393 Published by Palgrave Macmillan Journals

Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3235246

Why students learn a language at university

In the first session at the Australian National University Educational Research Conference on 'Language learning: motivation and student retention', Dr Gabriele Schmidt reported research which showed that students were selecting German language studies out of general interest for travel, not for vocational reasons. The details are published in her book "Motives for Studying German in Australia: Re-examining the Profile and Motivation of German Studies Students in Australian Universities" (Peter Lang Publishing Group, 2011).

In response to this the courses were changed by removing traditional classroom instruction and replaced with more interactive activities. The conclusion was that there was no need to separate students into culture and services courses. However, this seems to me to have implications for government support for language studies. The assumption has been that language studies are of value for furthering international trade. If students are not enrolling for vocational purposes, it would be tempting to cancel funding to schools and universities for language studies. However, a follow-up study might find that graduates do find their language studies of use later, even if it is not why they selected them.

Re-examining the Profile and Motivation of German Studies Students in Australian Universities

Schmidt, Gabriele

Series: Duisburger Arbeiten zur Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaft - Volume 84

Year of Publication: 2011

Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Wien, 2011. 190 pp., num. tables, 5 graphs
ISBN 978-3-631-60791-6 hb.
ISBN 978-3-653-01092-3 (eBook)

Discipline

» Linguistics
» Germanic Languages and Literatures

Book synopsis

The last comprehensive study of the motives for studying German in Australia was conducted in the late 1980s. The main objective of this thesis is not only to fill the gap of recent data but at the same time to analyse the new data in the context of relevant theories of language learning motivation. The data analysis focuses on students' demographic backgrounds, their motivation to learn German, and on their expectations towards course content. Where possible, the new data is compared with former studies in order to investigate what changes have occurred over the last two decades. It will be shown that these changes are primarily a reflection of changes to higher education policies. Overall, the thesis establishes a theoretically informed and data-based platform for curriculum development which will assist German Studies programs in designing their courses for the future.

Contents

Contents: Analysis of the profile and motivation of German Studies students in Australian universities - Data to relevant theories of language learning motivation - Changes in Australian higher education - Data-based platform for course design.

About the author(s)/editor(s)

Gabriele Schmidt has been a lecturer in the German Studies Program at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra since 1996. She received her Masters degree from the University of Bielefeld, specialising in German as a Foreign Language. Before she joined the ANU she worked for six years at the Institute for International Communication (IIK) at the University of Düsseldorf (Germany).

Series

Duisburg Papers on Research in Language and Culture. Vol. 84
Edited by Ulrich Ammon, René Dirven and Martin Pütz

Emergency Warning Systems Inquiry

John Hilvert reports that concerns have been raised in the Queensland Floods Commission of Inquiry over the adequacy of Australia's telephone and broadcast based Emergency Alert System ("Tempers flare over national emergency warning system" (14 June 2011, ITNews). There is also a federal parliamentary inquiry underway into "The capacity of communication networks and e to deal with emergencies and natural disasters" by the Senate Standing Committees on Environment and Communications.

In the past I have criticized reliance on a telephone based emergency warning system and on the arrangements for warning to be issuer through radio stations. Phone based warnings are issued as voice messages to fixed line phones and as text messages to mobiles. However, increased used of cordless phones and IP phones (which need mains power) reduces the effectiveness of fixed line phones. The sending of text messages to customers with a billing address in an area misses out on visitors. However, in practice the system has worked well in recent disasters.

The recent Queensland floods stretched the capacity of the telcos to continue providing a service and Telstra have made a submission to the Senate Inquiry on this. However, it is not clear if the new NBN based phone system will have battery backup.

There are also problems with messages sent through broadcast radio, with the procedures unclear and an uncertain communication path. Canberra startup Advance Alert, propose to automate this process with their with their Yellow Bird Alert system. This would operate in a similar way to the USA Emergency Alert System (EAS), which transmits warning messages from the US Government through broadcast radio stations to specially equipped receivers.

However, EAS is a techncially complex and expensive system and one which does not take into account "social networking" aspects of emergencies. Australia would be better off building a simpler system which would get messages to radio stations rapidly, without an automated interface.

Assessment beyond the degree factory

Greetings from day two of the Faculty Board Meeting of ACS Education, the part of the Australian Computer Society which provides education to computer professionals. There are about 30 people around a table in the ACS South Australia Branch office.

Assessment

We started with a presentation on the role of assessment in academic integrity. What I found interesting about this was the idea that both the teacher and the student have mutual obligations and are partners in the education process. Both the teachers and students have obligations as well as rights. It is academic integrity, based on years of experience , as well as qualifications, which allows a teacher to say what grade a student gets, not some set of assessment rules.

Collegiality

Part of academic integrity is collegiality and peer review. That is the teachers are not just employees who do whatever the boss says. The staff work out jointly what is to be done and what is reasonable. Senior staff act as coordinators, rather than dictators. Contrary to popular wisdom, I have experienced this approach working in a military headquarters. Senior military officers are trained to take advice from their junior staff. They will listen to the debate, with even the most junior allowed to disagree with the most senior. The staff officers (much like executive assistants) judges what the consensus is and issues the formal orders in the name of the commanding officer. A similar process works in traditional universities.

Forms of Assessment

Assessment is usually divided into Formative and Summative. The formative assessment is to help he student learn, whereas the summative assessment measures what the student has learnt against some objectives. Bloom's Taxonomy, has three domains: Cognitive, Affective, and Psychomotor. Increasingly there are also social issues.

Learning Objectives

The modern fashion is to express what the course is trying to achieve explicitly in learning objectives for a course and to present these to the student. I have some doubts as to the value of this, as often these are expressed in such a complex way with educational jargon that the student can't understand it. Large multicoloured tables with pop-up boxes are, in my view, not useful.

Building the Course Design Workflow into the LMS

The obvious thing for IT professionals to do is to design courses with the same sort of systematic process they use to design software. IT based systems can also be used to support the development of courses and their peer review. In the past this would be done by a bespoke system specifically designed for entering course designs and then having a work-flow for review and approval. However, it occurred to me that the LMS could be used for this as rapid prototyping. Rather than filling out forms to detail what it is proposed to put in the course, the details would be entered directly into the LMS, creating the skeleton of the course. The discussion forums and assessment feature of the LMS would then be used for the peer review.

Skills Framework for the Information Age

The ACS uses the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA) framework for designing courses. This is mostly done at SFIA Level 5, the level of a person who has done an undergraduate course, been working for a few years and aspires to advancement needs.

Assessment for the Real World

The question then is how to assess if the student has achieved this. Because this is professional training, in my view this is conceptually very simple to assess: just get the students to demonstrate they can do whatever the professional has to do. As an example, I get Green ICT students to assess the greenhouse gas emissions form ICT in an organisation and to make recommendations on reducing them, as this is what they will be doing in the workplace. It will be more difficult for students to demonstrate the skills in other fields, such as project management. However, this can be done with simulations, just as airline pilots are mostly trained and assessed in a simulator, not a real aircraft.

As well as specific skills for specific jobs, SFIA has "generic levels", which can be used for defining core competences. Unfortunately there is a level of confusion with these sometimes being referred to as "generic skills". Here are SFIA "generic skills" defined at Level of Responsibility 5:

• Challenge range and variety of complex technical or professional work activities;
• Influences organisation, customers, suppliers, and peers within industry on contribution of specialisation;
• Work requires application of fundamental principles in a wide and often unpredictable range of contexts;
• Maintains awareness of developments in the industry;

From: Enterprise Architecture (Elective Subject), ACS Education, 2011

The SFIA generic levels of responsibility are listed in
"Framework reference SFIA version 4: Skill definitions in categories, subcategories and skills" (SFIA, 2008). However this is a large and difficult to read PDF document. The HTML version, designed by Text Matters is much more accessible:

Autonomy

Works under broad direction. Is fully accountable for own technical work and/or project/supervisory responsibilities. Receives assignments in the form of objectives. Establishes own milestones and team objectives, and delegates responsibilities. Work is often self-initiated.

Influence

Influences organisation, customers, suppliers and peers within industry on the contribution of own specialism. Has significant responsibility for the work of others and for the allocation of resources. Makes decisions which impact on the success of assigned projects i.e. results, deadlines and budget. Develops business relationships with customers.

Complexity

Performs a challenging range and variety of complex technical or professional work activities. Undertakes work which requires the application of fundamental principles in a wide and often unpredictable range of contexts. Understands the relationship between own specialism and wider customer/organisational requirements.

Business skills

Advises on the available standards, methods, tools and applications relevant to own specialism and can make correct choices from alternatives. Analyses, diagnoses, designs, plans, executes and evaluates work to time, cost and quality targets. Communicates effectively, formally and informally, with colleagues, subordinates and customers. Demonstrates leadership. Facilitates collaboration between stakeholders who have diverse objectives. Understands the relevance of own area of responsibility/specialism to the employing organisation. Takes customer requirements into account when making proposals. Takes initiative to keep skills up to date. Mentors more junior colleagues. Maintains an awareness of developments in the industry. Analyses requirements and advises on scope and options for operational improvement. Demonstrates creativity and innovation in applying solutions for the benefit of the customer.

From: Levels of responsibility: Level 5, ensure, advise, SFIA Foundation, 2005

ACS and SFIA had room for improvement in settling on a clear and consistent title for this is. However, ACS and SIFA are far more consistent in their use of terminology than universities with "graduate attributes".

Graduate Attributes

The Graduate Attributes are an Austrlaian term, first required by the Austrlaian Government in 1998 for universities to include in the Quality Assurance and Improvement Plans submitted to government. In theory each unviersity defines its own attribuites, but as the Government says, most follow the same pattern:

• Knowledge attributes - in general, graduates are expected to have good literacy and numeracy skills, the ability to communicate and listen and appropriate discipline-specific knowledge.
• Thinking attributes - graduates are expected to have good conceptual and problem solving skills, the ability to question, be creative and to combine theory and practice.
• Practical attributes - emphasises the ability of graduates to use information technology and be proficient in any other technical skills appropriate to their discipline. The ability to initiate and respond to change is also considered an important attribute.
• Personal attributes and values - graduates are typically expected to have a commitment to learning, be flexible and able to work in a team, have leadership skills and understand the concepts of ethical action and social responsibility.

From: Higher education report for the 2001 to 2003 triennium, DEST, 2008

An example are the ANU graduate attributes:

• have an in-depth knowledge base and comprehensive understanding of the conceptual and theoretical underpinnings of their disciplines;
• are well acquainted with the broader contexts of higher learning;
• trained in computer based technology, and relevant discipline-based technical and methodological skills;
• are independent, critical and creative thinkers with analytical and problem solving skills;
• are competent in literary and oral communication;
• value intellectual rigour, creativity, curiosity, integrity and lifelong learning; and
• understand major issues facing Australia and the wider world

From: The Australian National University, Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs, 1999

While SFIA does not specify its attributes in great detail at least one standard set is provided unlike the Austrlaian unviersity system of a confusing and wasteful proliferation of non-standard terminology.

Short Courses

There were then two workshops, one for mentors on mentoring and one on teaching. I attended the teaching workshop on the topic of the human side of teaching. This reminded me of the issue of how to provide short professional development courses. The ACS is running an ACS Business Skills On-Line Pilot Program. I was unable to undertake a course due to technical problems but it struck me that the one on one for the course support was very good. Typically short online courses (of one to three hours) are solitary, with the one student reading prepared material, watching videos and doing multiple choice tests. One area I had difficulty with was selecting suitable courses and how these would form an overall plan.

The Open University short courses, differ from the typical audio slide-show course. These are more like shortened versions of the ACS CPEP modules. However, this requires a tutor and a a forum for the students to learn from each other. OU do provide a forum for each course, but not the tutor.

ACS might use the tutor, mentor and forum techniques from its longer courses and PPP for short courses. It is not feasible to set up the infrastructure used for a 13 week course for one lasting an hour. But ACS requires each 30 hours of professional development each year of its ACS Certified Professionals (CP). The ACS Computer Professional Education Program subjects each require 8-10 hours per week wrk from each student (as do typical tertiary courses). So the professional development each year requires the equivalent time to a three to four week course.

So my thought is to treat the annual requirement for development as a three to four week course undertaken over on year. The student would be assignment a tutor/mentor and be part of tutorial groups online. The student would get help planning what they needed to learn and selecting courses to do. The actual courses could be provided by ACS and by other providers. Where the courses lack their own tutor and forums, the ACS would provide this. The student would produce an e-Portfolio.

Tutors Needed for ACS Education

The last topic for the ACS Education Faculty Board meeting was about how to obtain the needed staff. To me the obvious source is previous students, who can be come first tutors and then course designers. Because the ACS CPEP uses a different approach to most tertiary level courses, the average teacher will not have the needed experience for these courses.

ps: The meeting got a little surreal, where at one point I was typing this blog post as it got a mention as an example of something a professional could claim professional development hours for. ;-)

Reinventing Professional Education in the Internet Age

Greetings from the Faculty Board Meeting of ACS Education, the part of the Australian Computer Society which provides education to computer professionals. There are about 30 people around a table in the ACS South Australia Branch office. Each person has a laptop connected to the Internet to get the "papers" for the meeting from a Moodle web site. This is the same web site used for online teaching. While there is much hi-tech, the topics are as old as education: how do we make students partners in the education process, how do we make it relevant to the real world, how do we get useful feedback on student experience without lots of bureaucratic forms. Unique to these professional programs are how to balance the needs of professionals with the somewhat abstract academic requirements for tertiary institutions.

Professional Practice

Apart from e-learning courses using Moodle, which I help with the ACS proved a Professional Practice (PP) year. PP uses the Mahara e-Portfolio software. Students learning about "reflective learning" while filling in their online journal. This can be very difficult for students, as it requires the student to direct their learning and also reflect on what they do, rather than just answer questions from a teacher. There is a mentor for each student to help them, but like a Zen master, the tutor is not there to tell the student what to do.

The PP outcomes for a student are:

• Understand and appreciates the importance of career planning and continuing professional development;
• Completes an ePortfolio consisting of skill assessment and career plan used for personal development and career advancement.

From: Professional Practice (Core Subject), ACS, 2010

PP is a process I don't have experience of and would, like many students, feel lost with. One change propose is to give students some marks. Currently the students just complete, or not complete at the end. Also it is proposed to give the students more detailed training on reflective learning.

Another part is to provide an interactive tool for structuring their work using the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA). SFIA is a complex categorisation of skills in the IT area. I had to come to terms with it in designing courses and it must be very difficult for students to understand the complexity of it.

One daunting aspect of PP, is that it is something which few traditional tertiary institutions worked out how to do. By their nature, programs tend to break up into individual units and students concentrate on passing each unit separately. There is little time to think holistically about how all they are learning fits together. However, this creates difficulties for the students and mentors, in terms of motivation and resources.

Another interesting issue discussed was having student assignments submitted to their employer. The courses I design have assessment items written from the point of view of professionals preparing advice for their client. In some cases the students write official reports for their organisation and submit them. I get reports which have the organisation logo and file reference numbers on them. However, this is not possible for all students.

New Courses

The meeting then turned to proposals for new courses. This is an interesting challenge as the courses have to be useful and academically sound. One aspect which works well is using the SFIA framework for defining the skills for new courses. SFIA provides standard definitions of what IT professionals need to be able to do. These therefore become a very useful way to define what the students will learning (the "learning outcomes"). Rather than make something up, the course designer can use an agreed definition. What also is interesting is the depth of experience of the ACS course designers, with decades of experience working in the fields they are teaching, they re not just getting it out of some textbook.

Textbooks still help for courses and it is handy that these are now available in electronic as well as paper format. During discussion of a new course I was able to find and search through an electronic copy of the book. There also seems to be a trend for new e-books to be avialable at a lower price than the paper copies, which should help students.

An issue for students is the amount of work they have to do for a course. This particularly the case for those who have not done formal tertiary studies recently (or at all). There recent experience of courses will be short hour, half day or day slide show sessions. The students are shocked to find they really have to do ten hours work for the course each and every week, regardless of holidays and whatever is happening in their life. The students are also surprised that the tutors prompt them, instead of waiting to the end of the course.

The next topic was an induction process for students not familiar with study, particularly online study. The problem is how detailed to make such an induction process, without overdoing it.

The issue of keeping online courses up to date came up. It is very useful to be able to reference online and up to date materials online in a course. However, links change frequently and some materials are now being protected and require some form of registration or payment.

LinkedIn

ACS Education has set up a LinkedIn Group for Alumni. It will be interesting to see how this works. The group for the Australian National University Group has been in existence since 2007 and now as more than 1,000 members.

Assessment

The meeting took on the elements of Zen, with a discussion of the meaning of zero. The ACS Education assessment generally use two elements: a mark for weekly contributions to forums (usually worth 20% of the overall mark), and two assignments worth 80%. Using the educational jargon, the weekly assessment is formative and the assignments summative. The contentious issues were the limited scale used for the weekly assessment which is a mark of 0, 1 or 2 and the level of contribution needed at each level.

As an example of the scale used, this is the one for the ACS Information Security (Elective Subject):

0 = no contribution

1 = standard below expectation, and

2 = standard at or greater than expectation.

So each week, a student gets a mark of 0, 1, or 2. What does a student have to do for that mark? Are only three levels sufficient? This is a topic which created a lively debate. I had some initial doubts about this system, but found it worked very well in practice: A small mark each week helps encourage e-learning students to keep working. This is also an effective way for the tutor to give feedback, as that feedback comes with a mark which counts to the final result. The limited scale is appropriate as this does not count much to the final mark.

After these heavy academic issues, we changed to talking about course marketing. This is a major issue for e-learning courses. There is a need to explain the mode as well as the quality of the results. ACS has created a short Vodcast on ACS Computer Professional Education Program.

Improvements to the Software

The ACS' LMS provider Brightcookie, then described the upgrade of the ACS e-learning system from Moodle 1.9 to Moodle 2.0. There is not much change in the way the system looks to the student, but the software has been rewritten to allow better access to external resources. This allows extra pieces of software are being used with Moodle.

The new ACS Education "Landing Page" will be provided with Webpress. To provide a way to share materials between Moodle courses, Alfresco will be used as the repository. There will be a better interface to Mahara, allowing the student's e-Portfolio contributions there to be visible in Moodle.

Conditional activities will allow the tutor to require the student to have completed some part of the course before they can move on to the next. Cohorts will allow groups of students to be defined across courses.

One feature I welcome is that Alfresco provides facilities to convert documents from word processing to HTML formats automatically. What I would like to be able to do is have a hierarchy of folders with WP documents in them which are converted into a Moodle book. The book is much easier for students to manage, rather than many separate documents and is more efficient in the use of system resources.

Some future possibilities worth exploring later with Moodle 2 are interfaces to other open source software, such as OJS (for students accessing academic papers) and AContent.

Higher Education for Professionals

Professions Australia and Universities Australia are holding a Workshop on "Higher Education and the Professions in 2011 and Beyond", 8 April 2011 in Canberra. The Program is available. The Austrlaian Computer Society is leading the way with internationally accredited tertiary level professional education, in conjunction with universities (such as my Green ICT course).

The Professions make up around 20% of the Australian workforce and they are a fast growing sector. They are vital for the health and wellbeing - economic, social and environmental - of all Australians. The Australian Higher Education system is the main source of professionals for Australia and manages around one million enrolled students per year. ...

... from 2012, public higher education will be funded on the basis of student demand. The Government is investing funding of $491 million over 2009-10 to 2012-13 to fund a Commonwealth supported place for all undergraduate domestic students accepted into an eligible, accredited higher education course at a recognised public higher education provider.

... the new Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) will oversee the development of strengthened quality assurance arrangements and protect the overall quality of the Australian higher education system. It will accredit providers, evaluate the performance of institutions and programs, encourage best practice, streamline current regulatory arrangements and provide greater national consistency. ...

From: Higher Education and the Professions in 2011 and Beyond, Professions Australia and Universities Australia, 2011


Program
9.30 – 9.40 am Welcome and Introduction to the Program for the day: Don Larkin, President, Professions Australia / Glenn Withers, CEO, Universities Australia
9.40 – 9.55 am David Hazlehurst, Group Manager Higher Education, Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR): A brief overview of the Higher Education reforms in the policy context...
9.55 – 10.20 am How is it envisaged that the student demand model will work? ...

• Professor Elizabeth Deane Pro Vice Chancellor (Students) ANU ...
  
• Professor Nick Shaw, Head of Pharmacy School University of Queensland ...
  

10.20 – 10.35 am Philip Bullock, Chair Skills Australia: Public interest oversight of the student demand model from a skills perspective ...
10.35 – 11.15am The Questions So Far: Discussion Facilitated by

• Alex Malley CEO of CPA Australia
• Terry Aulich CEO Australian Institute of Quantity Surveyors
• Professor Elizabeth Deane
• Professor Nick Shaw
  

11.15 – 11.30am Morning Tea
11.30 – 11.50 am Professor Denise Bradley, Interim Chair of TEQSA: Where are we up to in the implementation phase? How it is proposed that TEQSA will work in practice...
11.50am – 1pm The role of others in the accreditation sphere:

• Martin Fletcher CEO Australian Health Practitioners Registration Agency (AHPRA) and the Accreditation Councils for the health professions
• Professional bodies: Alex Malley, Terry Aulich, Professor Nick Shaw

1.00 - 2.00pm Lunch
2.00 – 3.30pm Discussions: How does it all fit together to produce the next generations of professionals?
3.30 – 4.00 pm Wrap up. We should have at least worked out all the questions, even if we do not have all the answers just yet.

From: Program, Workshop on Higher Education and the Professions 2011 and Beyond, Professions Australia and Universities Australia, 2011

Online Student Conferences for Assessment

Michael Nycyk, Curtin University talked on "Online Student Conferences as Assessment Instruments" at at CCA-EDUCAUSE Australasia 2011 in Sydney. The Internet studies students were required to organise and run an academic online conference as part of their course "Debating Communities and Networks Conference 2010". They had to write their own paper and review others and were assessed on this.

Michael commented that the students were excessively polite in their online discussion. Also there were a limited number of postings by students. Michael commented that ACS with its ACS Computer Professional Education Program take a firmer approach to requiring students to contribute to forums (I use the same approach at ANU). Curtin will likely take this approach for next year.

The idea of an online conference by and for students is one which could be adopted more widely. It requires less resources than the type of face-to-face symposia organised for PHD students and would provide this experience for a wider range of students. Also real conferences will be moving to this online format and so students will need experience of this.

Computer Professional Education Program

I will be speaking about how I teach Green Technology Strategies, at the ACS Computer Professional Education Program Information Evening in Canberra, 14th December 2010. The event is free, but please register for catering purposes:

Information Evening

Computer Professional Education Program

Thinking about postgraduate education? Want to learn more about what the ACS Computer Professional Education Program has to offer?

Come along to our Information Evening and meet tutors, mentors and students who will explain how the CPe Program is structured. Get a first hand account of what being a student in this world- class online program is all about - the time commitment - the content - and the assessment.

You can enrol in the whole Program or just a single elective subject, so come along to find out more.

There will be ample time for questions and answers plus one-on-one discussions.

If you are looking to further your career opportunities, postgraduate education can help you achieve your goals.

Light refreshments will be provided.

Who should attend:

ACS Members and non members interested in postgraduate study with CPeP. Entry requirements are a dgree in ICT (or equivalent) and at least 18 months work experience in the ICT industry.

For further information contact pam.barnes@acs.org.au or call 1800 671 003.

About this Event

Venue: University House, The Australian National University
Cnr Balmain Cr & Liversidge St, ACTON Map
Date: Tuesday 14th December 2010. 6:00pm registration for 6:30pm start to 7:30pm

Registration: Register

IT Professionals Role in Content

Last night, Associate Professor Craig McDonald of the University of Canberra presented "Do We Care about Content?" at the ACS Canberra Branch Monthly Forum. He discussed the February ruling that ISP iiNet was not responsible for copyright infringements by customers

Craign argued that the iiNet case was one where the ICT infrastructure was separate from the content carried. He suggested that where there is more processing of the data by an application on the network, the IT professional who designs the network has more responsibility for the content. That is a view I agree with, but I disagree with Craig on the extent of the responsibility of the IT professional.

IT professionals design systems for other individuals and organisations. Provided the IT professional designs what the customer wanted, then it is the customer who is primarily responsible for what the system does. In addition, the IT professional has to rely on the expertise of other professions in deciding on what the system should do.

The IT professional cannot become an expert on all things and a dictator to all people. The extent of the IT professionals responsibility depends on the nature of the system and the extent of the relevance of their expertise. The IT professional needs to design the system well, so it works with an adequate level of reliability. But it is not possible to design perfect systems and the level of reliability depends on the application.

In the case of a content management system, records management system, or a user interface design, the IT professional can be expected to know a reasonable amount about how such a system should work. So they have a large part of the responsibility for that system working correctly. In the case of a medical system, they could be expected to have less subject matter expertise.

As an expert witness I am called on to advise courts and other bodies on if a failed system should have worked. Such cases typically happen years after the system was built and I need to put myself in the mindset at the time. It is not enough to say "now we know what to do", I need to look at what was known and what was reasonable then. Also it is necessary to consider what should be the extend of the IT professional's knowledge and role.

An IT professional cannot simply assume that providing accurate information, or more information is better. At the Australian Bureau of Statistics, part of my job was to make sure that some of the information provided was inaccurate by introducing random errors. There are so few individuals in some categories of data the ABS provides that individuals could be identified from the data. To protect privacy, this data has to be modified. In this case providing correct and accurate information is the wrong thing to do.

A similar example is the case of Synthetic vision systems for aircraft. These show an artificial view of the terrain, generated from mapping data. It might be assumed that providing a more detailed view, using more data, would be better for the pilot. But more information makes the image hard to interpret. In this case more accurate data is harmful.

In 2000 I gave evidence in the case of Bruce Lindsay Maguire v. Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games in the Human Rights & Equal Opportunities Commission. My role was to assess if the website for Sydney 2000 Olympics was accessible to someone who is blind. My conclusion was that it was not, which the commission agreed with. However, it was decided that the Sydney Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (SOCOG), a NSW statutory corporation, were responsible, not IBM who designed the web site.

Following the SOCOG case I was asked by the Australian National University to help teach web design. I decided that accessible web design should be a basic part of such training and incorporated that in the course. Due to such courses and advice by HREOC, it would be difficult today for an IT professional to argue it was not part of their responsibility to make web sites accessible. An IT professional who claims expertise in web site design can be assumed to know about accessible design and know it is part of their job to implement this.

ACS Certified Professionals Register

The Australian Computer Society sent me a handsome "Certified Professional" certificate, which I have framed and put on my office wall. This is to say I have met the requirements of the International Professional Practice Partnership (IP3). The ACS was the first national body to be accredited to this international program.

As an existing professional member of the ACS I was certified the easy way: by transition from the old scheme. New members have to undertake further education (such as with the ACS Computer Professional Education Program (which I wrote the Green ICT course for).

The certificate looks good on the wall, but on its own a paper certificates of little value. My clients never visit my office and so will never see the certificate. I communicate with them online and so need to be able to present my credentials online.

What is of more value that the paper certificate is the online ACS Certified Professionals Register which allows you to check my certification is current. You can also get a link to my web site and send me a message to verify I am the person listed in the register.

Some improvements could be made to the register:

1. Register Web address: Give the register a simple web address, such as http://register.acs.org.au and include that address on the certificates. This way clients can verify the details of the paper document online.
2. Member Web Address: Provide a unique web address for each entry in the register. At present you have to do a search to find me in the register. Instead a web address for my entry could be provided (such as http://register.acs.org.au/?no=7675474). I could then link from my online CV to my entry in the register. That would impress my clients, promote the scheme and allow verification.
3. Online more like certificate: The register has a good simple web design. But it could be made to look more impressive, like the paper certificate, so that those reading it will be impressed that this is important information. One of my students did research on how to make a web page credible and an important factor is using organisation logos. So having the IP3 logo on the register page would increase its gravitas. Including the web address of the entry prominently on the page would also be useful. I can then append a copy to a job application, tender or expert witness statement to a court.

Censorship Not Part of the Future of Thinking in the Information Age

Professor Cathy N. Davidson (Duke University) is speaking on "The Future of Thinking in an Information Age" at the Australian National University in Canberra. She started by quoting web originator Tim Berners-Lee as saying that the web is not done yet (there is more design to be done) and that it is a web of human knowledge and social phenomenon. Also she emphasised the importance of mobile devices in the future of the web. She drew a distinction between the Internet and the Web, which many fail to understand. She argues that the web should not be centrally controlled by government.

The professor argued that the Information age has a new Epistemology. Perhaps proving the point, as I was looking up the word "Epistemology" in the Wikipedia, she used the Wikipedia as an example. However, it was not clear to me how the Wikipedia is different to what came before, as it is simply the translation of an encyclopedia to the online environment. While the Wikipedia allows for many people to compose entries, it still assumes there is only one definition for each term: it assumes the old fashioned notion of one view of the "truth".

Also as I was typing the above there was an SMS message telling me there is a 6pm Public Lecture "Beyond the Spin: Leaders, parties and politics, Beyond the Spin: ANU / ABC Federal Election Discussion Series". This was taking place a few hundred metres away on the campus. The political process also seems mired in the idea that society needs to have a competition where one view wins and the rest loose.

The professor argued that many current ideas of knowledge and education are from the previous machine age and not the new "webby" age. The professor seemed to assume that the normal way education was done at a university was with very large classes of students doing rote learning, followed by multiple choice tests. Perhaps Duke University is behind when it comes to education, compared to places like ANU. As an example I have attended today a seminar at ANU on Blended Delivery, answered some queries from my online students, met with someone from Iceland who wants to research how to use the Internet for international relations. That is a normal day: no large classes, no multiple choice tests.

The professor gave examples of new pedagogies where the students are consulted on what is in the course. However, I assume this is normal part of any course at a genuine educational institution. As an example, today one of my Green ICT students argued that the government carbon emission standard I asked them to use was not appropriate, so I replied they could meet an alternative standard, provided they could justify it.

While I agree with Professor Davidson there is scope for more student input on assessment, I do not agree that external standards can be abandoned. Where universities are training to do a job, such as engineering, the community is entitled to expect external standards to be met, otherwise lives will be lost as a result.

Professor Davidson asked (rhetorically) how we train people to be good online citizens. This seems a very easy question, with an obvious answer: we teach the students how to read and write online as part of courses. In my Green ICT course there are weekly online forums. In the first few weeks, I spend most of my time helping the students learn to communicate professional in this environment.

Unfortunately Professor Davidson used the example of coordinating orders for pizza as an example of a collaborative application online. The ordering of pizza has been an example used since the dawn of the Internet and it is about decade past where this is a useful example.

It may be that I am being a little to harsh on Professor Davidson as the ANU is a relatively well equipped university and hosts institutions which helped develop Internet technology. As a result I can tend to take access and knowledge of the technology, particularly for education, for granted. But it seemed a little odd for the Professor to be standing in a fully Internet connected teaching room, with several of the audience reporting live online using the university WFi system and telling us how universities are not using the Internet.

Much of what Professor Davidson had to say seemed to reflect a very narrow US-centric view of education and the use of technology. The Professor was assuming that Australia had an education system like the USA using techniques such as multiple choice tests for testing. It is unfortunate that the Professor did not look at how education is done in Australia and other parts of the world, to see what lessons could be learned from it.

Professor Davidson argued that most current education systems were invented in the last 100 years to support the industrial age. On the face of it, this sounds like nonsense. Perhaps after I look at what evidence the Professor has collected I will change my mind, but I suspect not. I have walked the ancient way at Delphi, used Cybercafes in Mapusa Markets in India and seen a gold auction in the Grand Bazaar of Istanbul what struck me was that much has not changed in thousands of years. New technology has been added to ancient ways of working.

As you can perhaps tell, I was not very impressed with Professor Davidson's prepared presentation. However, question time was much better. One point which came out was that Professor Davidson is opposed to the US system for assessing each k-12 student with a standardised test. This is essentially the system adopted by the current Australian Prime Minister with "MySchool".

Professor Davidson pointed out that email tends not to be productive, as there is a mass of undifferentiated material. However the Professor was incorrect in saying that systems to fix this have not been built. There are systems routinely used, such as for Learning Management Systems, which provide ways to handle messages.

Policies for higher education online

The Australian Computer Society has developed a set of postgraduate training courses in its Computer Professional Education Program. Part of this is course development (I designed the Green ICT course) but there is also the policies and procedures needed for running an education institution.

In this case the institution is virtual, having no campus, classrooms or offices (but an advanced e-learning system) and no full time staff (administrative staff are in ACS offices and teaching staff are distributed around the world). A set of ACS Education Policies and Regulations has been developed, broadly based on what is done at other Australian educational institutions. These might be of interest to others:

1. Academic Appeals Policy
2. Academic Credit RPL and Transfer Policy
3. Academic Misconduct Policy
4. Development and Review of Learning Policy
5. Grievance Policy
6. Refund of Fees Policy
7. Student Assessment Policy
8. Regulations