By DAVID MYTON Among the many thousands of words in the Melbourne Centre for the Study of Higher Education’s report Visions for Australian Tertiary Education 26 leapt from the page with startling force. The words, arranged in two sentences, formed part of Andrew Norton’s paper ‘Universities...
By DAVID MYTON Increasing demands from employers for digitally literate graduates are substantially driving changes in edutech and the way highered education is being delivered, according to a new report. Emerging new fields such as robotics, autonomous transportation, biotechnology, and genomics call for graduate skill-sets centred on...
By DAVID MYTON Western Sydney University’s free e-text initiative - launched in first semester this year - no doubt has been noted by the National Union of Students, which last year began a campaign to make textbooks cheaper while also calling for the removal of import restrictions on books. NUS national welfare...
By DAVID MYTON Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Stanford: for generations they have been names synonymous with university leadership around the world. But an apparently relentless ground-shift is taking place in the world of international higher education that may one day see them knocked off their lofty perches...
By DAVID MYTON People with a background in science could be far better prepared to run a business than those who study management, according to Dr Larry Marshall, Chief Executive of CSIRO, Australia's national science agency. In an article to coincide with National Science Week, which has...
By DAVID MYTON It is summer in the northern hemisphere and that means a lengthy holiday for university managers, academics and students. But just because the halls of learning are relatively empty that doesn’t mean higher education has slipped out of sight and mind. It hasn’t. As David...
By DAVID MYTON On any measure higher education today is a big enterprise. In Australia alone, the sector employs more than 100,000 staff, educates over a million students, total operating revenue amounts to around $27 billion, and conducts often ground-breaking research across diverse fields. The university “business model”...
By DAVID MYTON There are many fine examples of universities interacting with their local communities to drive access, boost employability and to help to stimulate economic growth. Here in Australia the University of Tasmania and Federation University, to name just two, are doing excellent work in...
By DAVID MYTON Much of the higher education discourse today is centred on the need for students to study “practical” subjects ranging from STEM to those such as accounting, commerce and business-related topics that segue into the needs and demands of employers. And why wouldn’t it be...
By DAVID MYTON Australia’s universities will be extra busy these next few months as they get down to work on developing new transparent and consistent student admissions requirements due to be put in place and operating from August onwards. They will be working from a new admissions transparency...