TAFE NSW campuses close this Thursday – just three days after they opened after the summer break. TAFE NSW students face disruption this week – the first week of classes for 2010 – with no end in sight to the ...

Does it matter if VET practitioners don’t keep up with changing technologies, asks John Mitchell The worldwide fanfare that surrounded the launch of Apple’s new iPad makes it difficult for educators to calmly reflect on the possible educational implications of ...

Virtually every piece of university life is micromanaged beyond recognition these days. Joseph Gora advises just to get out of the house. One of my more genuinely learned academic colleagues once said to a gaggle of alleged social scientists – ...

Online intro Tasmania has upgraded its own version of the training guarantee, pledging government-supported places for all retrenched workers. Tasmania has taken a leaf out of the book of its northern neighbour, guaranteeing government-funded VET places for young people and ...

Vocational training may not provide much of a springboard for meeting the new higher education targets, with unmet demand rising in government-supported VET. Unmet demand in the government-funded VET sector rose by over 10 per cent in 2008, as funding ...

Could the government’s new higher education equity policy end up being unfair? It’s a risk we face, writes Andrew Norton. Under draft policies, for the first time a low-SES classification would deliver significant benefits to individuals. Partnerships funding would oblige ...

Western Australia is backing away from the TAFE brand, with the name discarded by four of its ten institutes. Western Australia is progressively removing the name TAFE from its public training system, as the state’s institutes respond to their training ...

Parental education is not a good proxy for measuring socioeconomic status, writes Trevor Gale. The long-awaited move to a new way of measuring the socioeconomic status of higher education students is gathering pace. Submissions in response to DEEWR’s recent discussion ...

Managing the demands of work-integrated intense higher education, by Stephen Billett. A growing concern for many universities is meeting the increasing demand to locate, organise and sustain their students’ workplace experiences for programs with work-integrated learning components. As one senior ...

There is very little difference between old performance measures and the new ones, writes Marcia Devlin. Except in one very important area. And so, round two of the national “debate” about teaching quality is on. The federal government teaching indicators ...