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Background An understanding of anatomy, physiology and pathophysiology is considered essential for graduate nurses, but many nursing students find such courses difficult and anxiety-provoking. This was contrary to the authors' experiences, so student perceptions were studied at the survey institution. Objective This paper examines nursing students' satisfaction with bioscience and nursing courses in the first two years of a Bachelor of Nursing at an Australian university, in order to suggest strategies for effective bioscience teaching. Design Quantitative data for student satisfaction, measured on the Likert scale, were collected for three bioscience and 11 nursing courses from 2010 - 2012. Mean satisfaction was compared among courses and offerings by ANOVA, with offerings nested within courses, and correlation analysis was used to examine the relationship between student satisfaction and pass rate. Qualitative data were sourced from open questions, emails and forum posts and examined for recurrent themes. Results Students rated the three bioscience courses in the top four of the 14 courses. There was no relationship between satisfaction and pass rate. Qualitative responses showed satisfaction with the course content, the learning materials, the delivery style and lecturer support. Conclusion It is possible to deliver bioscience courses that are appreciated by nursing students. Four principles are suggested in this paper that may improve student satisfaction with bioscience courses and, therefore, result in more effective learning and better prepared nursing graduates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper closely examines factors affecting students' progression in their engineering programs through fieldwork conducted at three Australian universities. To extract clues on how specific teaching methods can be used to maximise learning, the investigation considered factors such as understanding how students take in, process and present information. A number of focus groups were conducted with students, and the data gathered was combined with survey results of students' and academics' learning styles. The paper reports on the process followed and provides some analysis of the gathered data, as part of an Australian Learning and Teaching Council Associate Fellowship program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much is made of the potential of lifelong learning for individuals and organisations. In this article we tend to make much less of it, certainly with respect to its use in universities to discipline academics. Nevertheless, we argue that academics now need to re-learn the positions they occupy and the stances they take in response to the marketisation of Australian universities. In particular, we suggest that the position of (pure) critique no longer commands attention in Australian contexts of higher education, although the paper does not suggest a disregard for a critical stance purely for the sake of participation. It is in understanding the interconnections between position and stance , and how they might be strategically performed during the everyday practices of academics, that a more promising way of engaging with the venalities of the market is envisaged; a strategy that could be described as 'sailing into the wind'. In discussing these matters, the paper draws on semi-structured interviews with academics located in university faculties/departments/schools of education along Australia's eastern seaboard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the way that learning technologies frame teaching practice in higher education using both autoethnography and discourse analysis (interpretative repertoires). The analysis juxtaposes our own experience in the form of data from two interviews, with teaching and learning policy documents from the group of five Australian Technology Network universities, as a means of investigating the centrality of these technologies in the reconfiguring of teaching practice in higher education for the networked university. The data yielded three distinct discourses: technology as a bridge to globalised opportunity; technology as delivery of learning; and technology as communication and building relationships for learning. The first repertoire provides a utopian vision which glosses over the complex practice of implementation. The second repertoire also omits details of implementation, presenting learning technology unproblematically. The third repertoire, not present in the policy documents, but central to the autoethnographic accounts, focusses on both the possibilities and challenges of learning technologies in practice, and points to the potential for a complementary approach which foregrounds the student-teacher relationship. How these discourses can be reconciled is a central issue for academic teaching practice in higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Universities should be developing female middle-managers for reasons of gender balance (Aitkin in The Last Boilerhouse Address, Canberra University ), the skills shortage, pending mass retirements (Chesterman in Not doable jobs?’ Exploring senior women’s attitudes to leadership roles in universities. Women’s Higher Education Network Conference, Bolton, ) and sustainable, post-bureaucratic organizations (Kira and Forslin in J Organ Change Manage 21(1): 76–91, ). Investigating the learning and development of women managers is timely. Research assumes that women in academe have the qualifications, experience and skills for management. Is this the case? The paper provides the first national demographic and development profile of women middle-managers in academic and the research-neglected administrative streams in Australian universities, with a sample of 342 women (46% response rate). Age is a particularly notable demographic with the majority of academics within 5–10 years of retirement. Nearly 60% of academics experienced few current development opportunities and their discipline-based qualifications did not prepare them for management. However, a greater number of administrative managers received relevant preparatory training. Once in their current management roles women experienced markedly fewer development opportunities. If higher education institutions are learning organizations, continuous learning should be evident (Watkins in Adv Dev Hum Res 7(3): 414, ). Our research shows this is far from the case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changed funding arrangements and views of education have resulted in a re-prioritization of activities and practices in Australian universities. While considerable research attention has been given to the consequences of these changes for university policies and the activities of academic staff, less attention has been given to how students perceive these changes. In this paper, undergraduate students’ experience of the commodification of higher education sector are explored. The evidence suggests that the changed context is beginning to affect how students perceive university priorities and their effects on teaching and learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One way in which universities have sought to articulate the outcomes of a university education is through a description of the attributes of their graduates. Recent calls for universities to demonstrate the quality of their outcomes and processes have prompted a re-examination of the generic graduate attribute outcomes many Australian universities have espoused for the past decade. As university communities struggle to identify what combination of skills, attributes and knowledge to include in these statements of graduate outcomes, and begin to come to terms with how to develop curricula to effectively achieve such outcomes, the fundamental nature of these is a vital preliminary question to address. What are these things that universities call generic graduate attributes? This is a more fundamental question than what combination of skills, attributes and knowledge should be included on the graduate ‘shopping-list’, it is about the nature of the things on the list, and the nature of the list itself. In seeking to further our understanding of the meaning of generic graduate attributes, the research described in this paper used phenomenographic analysis to explore academics’ conceptions of generic graduate attributes in the context of contemporary teaching and learning practices at one Australian university. A way of describing the key aspects of the variation in academics’ understandings of the concept of graduate attributes is presented. The contribution of discipline background to conceptions of generic attributes is considered and the implications of the observed variation for universities’ current curriculum reform initiatives discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we describe a study of learning outcomes at a research-intensive Australian university. Three graduate outcome variables (discipline knowledge and skills, communication and problem solving, and ethical and social sensitivity) are analysed separately using OLS regression and comparisons are made of the patterns of unique contributions from four independent variables (the CEQ Good Teaching and Learning Communities Scales, and two new, independent, scales for measuring Teaching and Program Quality). Further comparisons of these patterns are made across the Schools of the university. Results support the view that teaching and program quality are not the only important determinants of students’ learning outcomes. It is concluded that, whilst it continues to be appropriate for universities to be concerned with the quality of their teaching and programs, the interactive, social and collaborative aspects of students’ learning experiences, captured in the notion of the Learning Community, are also very important determinants of graduate outcomes, and so should be included in the focus of attempts at enhancing the quality of student learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]