LATEST ARTICLES

Unscripted: Griffith’s assessment plan to combat cheating

Unscripted: Griffith’s assessment plan to combat cheating

The winners of all seven categories in the AFR Higher Education Awards 2023, which recognise and celebrate the outstanding efforts of Australian universities during the past year, have now been announced. These are the finalists in the Teaching and Learning Excellence category of the AFR Higher Education Awards.

QUT partnership fuels renewables expansion

QUT partnership fuels renewables expansion

The winners of all seven categories in the AFR Higher Education Awards 2023, which recognise and celebrate the outstanding efforts of Australian universities during the past year, have now been announced. The categories include community engagement; emerging leadership; employability; industry engagement; equity and access; research commercialisation; and teaching and learning excellence.

Helping western Sydney girls and women overcome stereotypes for a STEM career

Helping western Sydney girls and women overcome stereotypes for a STEM career

Sandy Lindsay has been fascinated by chemistry since she was a child in Sydney’s outer west and her science teacher poured two clear liquids into a flask. “They lit up bright yellow,” she remembers, “it was like magic”. Yet a lack of family and community support meant she dropped out of a university chemistry course …read more

As Widodo nears his tenure’s end, will an Australia visit burnish his reputation?

As Widodo nears his tenure’s end, will an Australia visit burnish his reputation?

Following a brief working visit to Australia, Indonesian president Joko Widodo will return to Jakarta with a substantial farewell gift in hand: easier visa rules for Indonesian business travellers. Indonesia has long chafed at the current visa inequality. Australians travelling to Indonesia enjoy $50 visas on arrival but Indonesians coming to Australia usually have to fork …read more

Preserving flexibility is key in gig economy

Preserving flexibility is key in gig economy

Gig work is valued by consumers, employers and workers across Australia. The numbers tell the story: More than eight million consumers use Uber services, from food delivery to transport and 50,000 Australian restaurants and retailers are partnered with the Uber Eats platform. Now more than 150,000 Australian Uber drivers are waiting for the government’s final word …read more

High costs drive shift to sustainable travel

High costs drive shift to sustainable travel

Australia’s love affair with the family car is getting more and more expensive and less and less sustainable: it’s time for a Dear John letter to the four-wheeled machine that gobbles up so much cash, time, pavement space while eroding the atmosphere. Cars cost big money to keep on the road: registration, repairs, fuel, insurance and …read more

Limited mobile phone use during school hours now a fact of life

Limited mobile phone use during school hours now a fact of life

Toongabbie Christian College in Sydney’s west has restricted students’ mobile phone usage during school hours for the past decade and the policy is now deeply ingrained in school life: a simple matter of distancing students from their phones, rather than introducing internet signal restrictions. The school, which has 1100 children and teenagers in classes from Kindergarten …read more

Sharing boosts community spirit

Sharing boosts community spirit

Inspired by the success of sharing their facilities during the pandemic, independent schools across Australia are continuing to keep their doors open to their local communities, says Melbourne University’s Dr Ben Cleveland, who has been studying school-community connections for more than three years. “There’s a propensity for independent schools to want to be seen to be …read more

Chemical weapons remain a concern

Chemical weapons remain a concern

With an Oscar for best feature documentary now linked to his name, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is one of the world’s better-known victims of a chemical weapons attack. Poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok in 2020 by Russian operatives, Navalny was airlifted in a coma from Russia to Germany where he spent months recovering.

Social media platforms are the new battlefields

Social media platforms are the new battlefields

Ballooning suspicion has pushed TikTok onto the back foot across much of the western world with increasing concerns the popular video-sharing app could double as a platform for disinformation as well as data gathering tool for China. Social media disinformation campaigns have been favoured by certain nations for years; deployed to push a range of agendas: …read more