A lot of decisions probably look straightforward from the outside, but the people dealing with them day to day can see the practical issues pretty quickly.
Sometimes a small bit of staff input could save a lot of confusion, extra work and frustration later.
Received this announcement for a class I’m taking next semester. Not feeling great about this, what does everyone think?
For those who finally made the jump out of the sector into corporate or government roles: how hard was the transition, and do you look back?
Hello,
Is anyone else getting sick of writing about AI for assignments? I am not talking about those little AI academic quizzes you do at the start of a subject, I am talking about essay topics and stuff.
In my psychology subject this semester we have to write about emotions and AI (worth 40% of my grade) and my psych essay last semester was about cognition and AI (34% of my grade).
Even in my physiology class this semester, we had to write an abstract in groups during class time and the teachers actively encouraged us to use AI for the assignment. She said it would be suspicious if there was more than half of the class that didn't use AI. So my group felt pressured to use AI even though we didn't want to.
I hate how much money La Trobe has spent on implementing AI into education and how much more time teachers have to take to teach us about the ✨benefits✨ of using AI instead of understanding what students actually want to learn
Has anyone else had that experience?
It feels like policies change fairly regularly, but the reasoning behind them doesn’t always make its way down to the people who actually have to work with them. You get the new process, follow the updated rules and move on, even when it’s not really clear what problem the change was meant to solve. Would be interested to hear how this works in other universities.
After several years of grant hunting, contract uncertainty, and mounting administrative expectations, a few colleagues in my department recently made the jump to private industry or government research agencies. They mention better pay, structured hours, and far less bureaucracy. For those currently working in Australian higher education, do you see yourselves staying in academia for the long haul?
Higher education policy has moved significantly across funding models, international student dependency, research incentive structures and institutional governance in ways that have produced outcomes that weren't always what the policy was designed to create. Would love to know which change people here think has had the most significant gap between what it was supposed to do and what it actually produced and whether the sector has had an honest conversation about that gap or whether it's been absorbed into the background of how things now are without anyone officially acknowledging what went wrong.