Yesterday Julia Gillard promised a My School companion, a My University website. There are already similar websites operating in the US and in the UK.
A My University website is a far better idea that the ‘performance funding’ policy foreshadowed last year, which will use much of the same data but hand out cash according to the DEEWR bureaucracy’s definition of ‘performance’. As I argued at the time, many of these measures do not clearly measure ‘performance’, or involve trade-offs that universities and students should decide on, not bureaucrats. If would-be students are given the data, they can determine what weight if any to give it.
The My University website concept needs to expand to include private providers of higher education. Many of them do not currently participate in the surveys underlying the proposed data to be used on the site, but they could easily be included.
Leaving private providers out would undermine the value of My University, both because potential students should be informed of all their options and because competition from private providers is desirable to put performance pressure on public universities. Public university VCs were reported in The Australian this morning (not online as far as I can see) as supporting a My Higher Education website that included all providers of higher education. While I doubt they were doing this to facilitate competition, the idea itself is a good one.
Andrew Norton 
Except that for the majority of Australians it’s THEIR UNIVERSITY not Mine
LikeLike
On the 7.30 Report the other night I am sure I heard Gillard refer to ‘my education ministers’, ie the state education ministers. And indeed, when she already has ‘my schools’ and ‘my universities’ it would help to have compliant ‘my education ministers’ to look after the detail.
LikeLike
You’d have the latest figures – but I thought most Australians had never set foot in a Uni and even less had enrolled and even less had a degree.
LikeLike
ABS Education and Work has estimates. In the most educated age group, 25-34, about 35% have a degree.
But in this context, so what? It’s a site aimed at people thinking about university. ‘My’ university may be jumping ahead of things a little, but it’s an ok name for its target audience, especially as it builds on the very successful ‘My School’ branding.
LikeLike
I don’t mind the idea, but since universities have even less accountability than schools, since there are no standardized tests or anything real to compare with that you can’t get already (and it’s even worse at the individual subject level), the probability of it leading to unintended negative outcomes must fairly reasonable. In this respect, it seems fairly obvious to most people that work in universities that CEQ style things run for individual subjects have caused a fair bit of dumbing down and what might be called “complaint drive curriculum”, and I wouldn’t want to encourage that any more, so they should think reasonably hard about what they stick in.
LikeLike
Conrad – The government is trying to tackle claimed dumbing down via new centrally-determined ‘academic standards’, though I seriously doubt that this can be done in most disciplines, and even if it can be done I don’t think any Australian government has the necessary capacity.
LikeLike
Conrad – Most universities run end of semester tests reporting student responses to quality of teaching, work rate, fairness of assessment etc. Along with the Unis collecting data on pass rates, student satisfaction etc. Uni is too diverse to have standardised testing, but it can actually go one better and give real feedback from students rather than just their skill levels.
All this data is already taken in and compared privately and about once a year a cut down version of it comes out in some form in the press.
So I agree Andrew, though it should also be expanded to include Tafes as well.
LikeLike
Andrew C – Yes, I meant any provider of higher education. I think it should be voluntary for providers that don’t get any public subsidy, but it is likely to be in their commercial interests to participate if they are aimed at an individual student market.
LikeLike
Andrew C,
.
I’m well aware of the sort of stuff universities run. However, I’m also well of the problems it causes without any real proper outcome measures (in fact, lots of this stuff is already available on various sites already — so I imagine a lot of the work would just be in collating it).
.
If you want at look at the crazy outcomes caused by tables, then just look at the effect of the the research rankings tables like the SJT index or what universities are willing to do to get higher scores on the CEQ. Now some of these arn’t bad (it’s good students enjoy their courses), but many are exceptionally easy to cynically exploit, and most people’s management would be happy if most of the courses you ran taught students about the Telly Tubbies if it got a good rating.
.
If you want your subject to get a good mark but still appear hard to outside evaluators, for example, just give the same assignment out as the year before, and all the dull students will be able to copy their friend’s assignments from the year before and everyone will be happy. This will not only save you time (you won’t have to create a new assignment), but will get you a big tick in the teacher ratings stake.
.
The other reason I’m not so thrilled about the tables is that I have same complaint as for the high school tables. I think that the biggest possible positive effect they could have is going to be tiny, and so it’s simply used as a publicity stunt to hide more serious problems that no-one wants to deal with, like lack of funding, government rules Stalin would be proud of etc.
LikeLike
Student feedback sessions are a waste of time. I remember doing them at the end of a course – they were a tick, flick and forget exercise. Why? Because feedback is important only to prospective students. Past students do not care, and anything else assums a level of altruism that simply doesn’t exist at a broader student level.
Also, for those few students that did take care, the feedback surveys are usually “rate out of 10” questions. Studies have shown, the default response is to place 7 no matter what and that action biases the results. And Conrad is also correct. If you’re a student, your primary aim is good grades, not learning. Thus, students are more inclined to give the inept, easy grade lecturer who ‘is a good bloke’ a better rating than the tough marker.
LikeLike
Agree A-nort. But univeristy is more global than school. e.g. there is much more merit in studying o/seas for uni study. And in this respect, there are already international league tables in place. The original (I think chinese one) lists ANU and Melbourne in the top 50. Not much doing for the other unis (advanced academies) really.
LikeLike
Andrew,
There’s no comments / forum page – so would like to put two cents in here.
Seeing you’re from Carlton and that u often do stories on your local milkbars etc, was keen to know what’s doin on the carlton food front. e.g. I went to Melbourne the other day and thought I’d get some Lygon street action. Anyway, I thought the Italian resturants didn’t look as good as I remember. The place I went to was ok, but nothing special. Also, there were heaps of non-italian eateries. Which is all well and good, but its like putting french resturants in Chinatown – the area loses its identity. So Andy, what’s the future for Lygon?
LikeLike