On 21/01/14 11:08, Janet Hawtin wrote (was: Re: [LINK] Adverts on govt websites"):
> ... Schools and universities are short of funding > That puts us squarely in line for corporatisation of education? Australia's second private university, "Torrens University Australia", is offering courses from its Adelaide campus from 2014: http://www.tua.edu.au/about-us/our-mission/ Torrens is a for-profit institution, part of the Laureate International Universities network: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laureate_International_Universities Professor Jim Barber, UNE Vice-Chancellor, has been advocating changes to government regulations, to allow pure on-line universities to be established in Australia:http://blog.une.edu.au/news/2013/12/06/une-unbundles-student-services-and-amenities-fee/ The UNE students have a different view, warning of a resulting two-tier student experience: http://www.nucleus.org.au/articles/news/ But it appears Torrens has been able to meet the current regulations with a university which will carry out teaching on-line using using international resources and few Australian staff. A search of Torrens staff on LinkedIn found in only eight: Vice-Chancellor, Assistant Professor - Business (Project Management), Academic Director, Lecturer - Business, Enrolment Advisor, Student Administration Manager and a Coordinator of IT Services. In comparison, LinkedIn lists 3,416 current staff for the University of Adelaide, which has 25,000 students. Torrens will need more staff as it increases enrolments. But whereas the University of Adelaide has about one staff member for every 25 students, Torrens may only need one staff member in Australia for every thousand students. It will be interesting to see how full service universities respond to this challenge. -- Tom Worthington FACS CP, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150 The Higher Education Whisperer http://blog.highereducationwhisperer.com/ PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia http://www.tomw.net.au Liability limited by a scheme approved under Professional Standards Legislation Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Research School of Computer Science, Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/ _______________________________________________ Link mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
