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The Australian Federal Government's Office for Learning and Teaching (OLT) has built an important collection of learning and teaching resources for the higher education (HE) sector, a product of the many projects OLT and its precursors, including the Australian Learning and Teaching Council and the Carrick Institute, have funded over the past two decades. Although these resources are freely available on its website, the OLT considers them underutilised. Hence it has commissioned a project to reorganise the collection using more accurate and consistent metadata. This paper presents the results of the initial phase of the project, in which a new metadata schema for the OLT's repository was developed through a systematic analysis of the collection, users' and prospective users' search needs, and the domain of HE learning and teaching. While the methods used to develop controlled vocabularies, such as subject thesauri, are well established, there has been far less discussion about how schemas for describing particular kinds of information resource should be constructed. This article contributes to this discussion by showing how methods used to build controlled vocabularies can be applied, and combined, to the development of a schema used to support effective access to a scholarly repository of national importance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article reports on activities undertaken by Australian universities to support academic staff to provide inclusive teaching. The findings of two lines of inquiry are reported - a desktop audit of the presence of inclusive teaching or universal design for learning (UDL) in publically available policies and procedures documents, and a survey of the methods adopted to build staff capacity to provide inclusive teaching and learning. Just over a third (34.21%) of Australian universities referred to inclusive teaching or UDL in their policies and procedures. A wide range of current practices in professional development for inclusive teaching was reported, with the most frequent being one-off workshops focussing on accommodating specific groups of students. Improved institutional support through policies, procedures and professional development would enable Australian higher education teachers to provide quality inclusive teaching to all students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on a study of academic staff perspectives on disciplinary communities and skill development in disciplinary contexts. Fifty-five academic staff were interviewed across eight disciplines in four Australian universities. Responses of historians and mathematicians are the focus of this article. A socio-constructivist framework informed analysis of academics' views about disciplinary cultures and skill development in disciplinary settings. Findings highlight discipline-based patterns in staff views about the value of generic skills in the curriculum. However, there was no apparent disciplinary effect in academics' views about belonging to a teaching community. Rather, sociocultural forces, particularly at the department level, appear to play the strongest role in this regard. The article argues for the influence of sociocultural factors on academics' perceptions of disciplinary tribes and territories in a changing policy environment. It has implications for institutional leaders and academic practitioners, highlighting challenges for supporting academic staff in disciplinary teaching communities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In Australia, the Government has called for a national set of learning and teaching standards against which to regulate for quality assurance in the higher education sector. In 2010, eight discipline groups were sent out into the community; their task was to gather the threshold set of academic standards defining their profession. After a year of stakeholder consultations, the Engineering and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) group arrived at 5 threshold learning outcomes necessary for inclusion in ICT curricula. It is expected, but not yet mandated, that these threshold learning outcomes will be used by Australian academics to design and align their ICT curricula and by accreditation bodies to measure against. In anticipation of future regulatory constraints, this paper proactively attempts to assess the Network and Systems Computing degree at Victoria University with respect to the published threshold teaching and learning outcomes. This paper highlights the difficulty in applying these outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As performativity within the academy continues to escalate, this paper considers the place for building research capacities through a scholarship in teaching and learning initiative at an Australian university. While the tensions that exist between discipline research and scholarship in teaching and learning remain, evaluation data for a central higher education research group suggests that an alternative research pathway is possible through collegial structures. The drive towards performativity is not unique to Australia and the evidence presented provides insights that may be useful for a broader audience that may be considering research capacity building. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper argues that values education has moved from being associated most heavily with the religious agenda of faith schools to being central to updated research insights into effective pedagogy. As such, it represents a vital approach to education in any school setting. The paper draws on an array of values education research and practice in making the case but centres especially on findings from a number of recent publicly funded projects in Australia with which the authors have been associated. Of special importance is evidence from the Values Education Good Practice Schools Project and the Project to Test and Measure the Impact of Values Education on Student Effects and School Ambience that provide both anecdotal and empirical evidence that high quality values education contributes to holistic educational development, including academic advancement, of students across all school sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research into, and discussions on, the relationships between teaching and research activities in universities and other tertiary education institutions have been gathering momentum for a number of decades in many parts of the world. The foci of these researches and discussions have varied greatly. At one end of the spectrum are the publications which were the result of large-scale projects, generally commissioned by a national body or an institution; these projects often had a broad focus. At the other end are the products of pursuits by an individual with a personal interest in the field, exploring a specific aspect of practice. This paper initially explores some key publications based on commissioned projects in the US, UK and Australia in order to gain a 'big picture' view of the teaching-research (TR) connection, then looks at TR relevant discussions emanating from the work of prominent scholars, and finally provides an insight into strategic initiatives for promoting TR connections at an institutional level. The paper provides evidence for the widening of discussion base for TR connections, while narrowing the discussion focus to student engagement, in different parts of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]