Academic literature on the topic 'Effective teaching Victoria Melbourne'

ABSTRACTBackground: In the next decades of the twenty-first century, the global aging of populations will challenge every nation's ability to provide leadership by qualified health professionals to reshape and improve health care delivery systems. The challenge for educators is to design and deliver courses that will give students the knowledge and skills they need to fill that leadership role confidently in dementia care services. This paper explores the ways in which a curriculum can develop graduates who are ready to become leaders in shaping their industry.Method: The Master of Health Science – Aged Services (MHSAS) program at Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia is applied as a case study to describe the process by which the concept of leadership is applied as the key driver in curriculum development, teaching practices and learning outcomes.Results: Evaluation instruments employed in a variety of purposes including teaching, curriculum planning and unit appraisal are discussed. Challenges for the future are proposed including the need for postgraduate programs in dementia to seek stronger national and international benchmarks and associations with other educational institutions to promote leadership and a vision of what is possible and desirable in dementia care provision.Conclusions: In the twenty-first century, effective service provision in the aged health care sector will require postgraduate curricula that equip students for dementia care leadership. The MHSAS program provides an established template for such curricula.

Working with stories of children’s relationships with place and technologies from an early childhood education pedagogical inquiry research project in Melbourne, Australia and Victoria, Canada, this article takes up the concept of “pedagogical intentions” to consider how educators and researchers might cultivate intentional teaching practices relevant to the complex worlds we inherit with children. We think with a common worlds pedagogies approach to extend conceptualizations of intentional teaching held in dominant Euro-Western early learning frameworks in Melbourne and Victoria. After situating our understanding of pedagogical intentionality as an ongoing, purposeful, answerable practice of shaping and caring with everyday pedagogical relationships, we share three stories of how we activate our Donna Haraway–inspired intentions with children. By questioning how our pedagogical intentions inform our work, we assert that sharing and putting at risk our intentions is a necessary practice for thinking collectively with children, more-than-human others, and technologies within early childhood education.

This year marks the first decade of operations for the Gene Technology Access Centre (GTAC). The decade has seen a grassroots initiative by a small group of eminent research scientists and dedicated personnel from the University High School in Melbourne grow into a specialist education centre in cell and molecular biology that attracts over 6000 students and their teachers each year. GTAC has not only refocused student and teacher attention on the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary biology, but has also highlighted how a ?centre model for learning?, based upon collaboration and partnerships, can exist within ?the school system? and meet the needs of students and teachers from across Victoria and beyond.

This paper aims to observe how the Australian COVID-19 restrictions influenced higher education, teachers’ and students’ lives. Before the pandemic, the higher education sector was the largest serviced based sector in Australia and overly depended on international students’ fee income. The academic year of 2020 started as usual with 141703 higher education enrolments of overseas students, mainly students from Asia. However, they did not arrive due to the strict border closure. Travel restrictions were put in place from China from 1 February 2020, later from other countries worldwide. That significantly affected international students' travel from Asia directly before the start of the new academic year. Consequently, many institutions have transitioned from campus-based courses to online delivery. Besides, numerous academic lecturers and professional staff have been invited to the expression of interest in a voluntary and, of course, involuntary redundancy program. Most vacant positions have been frozen, and various saving programs have been implied. Owing to the toughest rules and strictest restrictions, Australian borders remained closed for over 600 days. Melbourne was under six lockdowns totalling 265 days since March 2020, which resulted in the author’s experience of three semester-long remote teaching at one of the biggest and most prominent universities in Melbourne without any personal contact with international students. The author lived and worked in Melbourne during the COVID-19 era, so this study is based on her perspectives and experiences extended with a wide empirical evaluation of secondary data about the Australian academic sector between 2020 and 2021.

Objective: The aim of the study was to compare the efficacy of atypical and typical anti-psychotics in treating behavioural disturbance in people with psychotic disorders, in a naturalistic setting. Method: This was a prospective naturalistic study of 303 incidents of behavioural disturbance at Royal Melbourne Hospital, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Results: There was no significant difference between atypicals and typicals on two efficacy measures and some evidence on a third measure, that typicals are more effective. Conclusions: In the pharmacological treatment of behavioural disturbance in psychosis, typical and atypical anti-psychotics have largely comparable efficacy.

In the early 1890s, David Orme Masson, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Melbourne, invented a new way to display the periodic table of the elements, in which the transition elements were arranged on a flap that projected from the plane containing the main group elements. He shared the idea with his mentor, Sir William Ramsay, at University College London, who published a similar model in his 1896 book. The ?flap' arrangement was an outcome of Masson's research interest in the periodic classification of the elements, to which he also made contributions in the 1890s about the placement of hydrogen and suggested to Ramsay that a new main group was needed to accommodate the rare gases such as helium and argon then being discovered in London. Although it was not widely adopted elsewhere, Masson's ?flap' model was a research and a teaching tool that was used at the University of Melbourne and in school chemistry teaching in Victoria for over half a century.

Policy-makers have always found it problematic to formulate fair and consistentcounting rules for public hospital outpatient activities. In the context of output-based funding, such rules have consequences which can affect patient care. This paper reviews the rationale for organising multidisciplinary clinics and reports on a series of focus groups convened in four Melbourne teaching hospitals to consider funding policy for such clinics. It discusses issues of targeting outpatient services, along with implications for payment policy. It evaluates counting rules in terms of intended andunintended consequences in the context of Victoria?s introduction of output-basedfunding for outpatient services.

Alfred Ewart was Government Botanist in the service of the Victorian Government from February 1906 to February 1921. He was concurrently foundation Professor of Botany at the University of Melbourne, both positions being part-time. As Government Botanist he was in charge of the National Herbarium of Victoria, which had fallen into a slump after the death of the first Government Botanist, Ferdinand von Mueller, in 1896. Ewart was determined to restore the Herbarium to its former position as a leading centre of research on the Victorian and indeed the Australian flora. In doing so he enlisted the aid of the many capable botanists who were members of the Field Naturalists' Club of Victoria. The Herbarium being in the Department of Agriculture, Ewart had duties in relation to the business of that Department. These had mainly to do with weeds, impure seeds and providing advice to departmental officers. Of particular importance was his taxonomic work as Government Botanist. He published a series of papers and books on the flora of Victoria and the Northern Territory, and engaged in debates with colleagues both interstate and overseas. Ewart ceased to be Government Botanist when the professorship was made a full-time appointment in response to increased teaching loads.

Purpose The purpose for this paper is to share jurisdictional knowledge on local law-making theory and praxis, an area of law not well represented in the literature despite its involvement in day-to-day life. Design/methodology/approach The paper not only shares knowledge about the local law-making process in Melbourne, Australia, but also explores attitudes to local law-making gathered through semi-structured interviews from a sample of relevant stakeholders. Findings The paper reports on findings from a study undertaken in Melbourne, Australia. Stakeholder perceptions and attitudes were canvassed regarding local law-making in the areas of land use planning and waste management. Overall, stakeholders were satisfied that Melbourne is a robust jurisdiction offering a fair and transparent local law-making system, but they see scope for more public participation. Research limitations/implications The findings suggest that even though the state of Victoria offers a fair and transparent system of local law-making, there is still significant scope for more meaningful involvement from the community, as well as space for more effective enforcement of local laws. The stage is set for greater cross-jurisdictional reciprocal learning about local law-making between cities. Originality/value This paper offers meaningful and utilitarian insight for policy and law makers, academics and built environment professionals from relevant stakeholders on the operation and transparency of local law-making.

An evaluation of pre-hearing conferences in the Children's Court of Victoria was carried out during 1994 by five members of staff from the School of Social Work at the University of Melbourne. An interesting theme which emerged from this evaluation is the role of the convenor as pivotal to the process of the pre-hearing conference. The convenor has emerged as a critical figure in the success of the mediation process, and the knowledge, skills, and values they are equipped with are seen as essential to their effective operation. This article describes the role of convenors and the many responsibilities they must juggle in fulfilling their role, and the characteristics which make for an effective and successful conference. As conferences become a more frequent method of resolving conflict between individuals, families and society, it is hoped that the principles which emerge from this article will be applied to other conference proceedings. It is clear that we are moving away from conventional adversarial methods, to mediative and conciliative modes, and in doing so we need to become clear about the characteristics which are required for such processes. This is one exploratory study of a pilot project in Victoria which should be of interest to other conferencing and mediation mechanisms.

Communication skills are essential to the practice of medicine, and are now included in most medical curricula. Training in communication skills requires an experiential approach to teaching and assessment that focuses on mastery of performance. Simulated patients were introduced to the Communication Skills course for third year medical students at The University of Melbourne in 1995. This thesis describes the evaluation from the first two years of their use, and is set within the body of literature regarding this innovative educational method. The fundamental research question was: Did the introduction of simulated patients represent an improvement and enrichment in the teaching of communication skills to third year medical students? A qualitative evaluation was undertaken by focus groups with students, tutors and simulated patients, and by student questionnaire. (For complete abstract open document)

When Australian law teaching began in 1857, few lawyers in common-law systems had studied law at university. The University of Melbourne's new course joined the early stages of a dual transformation, of legal training into university study and of contemporary common law into an academic discipline. Victoria's Supreme Court immediately gave the law school what was known in America as 'diploma privilege': its students could enter legal practice without passing a separate admission exam. Soon university study became mandatory for locally trained lawyers, ensuring the law school's survival but placing it at the centre of disputes over the kind of education the profession should receive. Friction between practitioners and academics hinted at the negotiation of new roles as university study shifted legal training further from its apprenticeship origins. The structure of the university (linked to the judiciary through membership of its governing council) and the profession (whose organisations did not control the admission of new practitioners) aided the law school's efforts to defend both its training role and its curriculum against outside attack.
Legal academics turned increasingly to the social sciences to maintain law's claim to be not only a professional skill, but an academic discipline. A research-based and reform-oriented theory of law appealed to the nascent academic profession, linking it to legal practice and the development of public policy but at the same time marking out for the law school a domain of its own. American ideas informed thinking about research and, in particular, pedagogy, although the university's slender financial resources, dependent on government grants, limited change until after World War II. In other ways the law school consciously departed from American models. It taught undergraduate, not graduate, students, and its curriculum included history, jurisprudence and non-legal subjects alongside legal doctrine. Its few professors specialised in public law and jurisprudence, leaving private law to a corps of part-time practitioner-teachers. The result was a distinctive model of state-certified compulsory education in both legal doctrine and the history and social meanings of law.

This research project examines perceptions and attitudes towards science of a group of Technical and Further Education students studying Beauty Therapy at Victoria University. Many members of this group displayed a high level of science anxiety as described by Mallow, (1978). They lacked confidence in their science ability and were very anxious about passing the science units in their Beauty Therapy courses, despite having successfully passed science subjects at school. Previous observations on Beauty Therapy students showed that most succeeded in their science units but still lacked confidence in their ability to apply their knowledge. The science units in Beauty Therapy are complex and require a detailed knowledge of Human Biology, Anatomy, Physiology, Skin Biology, Cosmetic Chemistry, and Microbiology. The participants in the study were interviewed using a semi-structured interview working together with a questionnaire to establish background information. The probes covered the participants’ experiences in science at school together with their attitudes towards science and influences from other areas. The aim was to identify factors which undermined the confidence of these participants. The interviews were recorded and the transcripts were analysed for themes using a progressive coding process. The themes were grouped into clusters. The study showed clearly that the participants’ confidence in their science ability was undermined by their school experiences in science. It related to attitudes and pedagogies employed by a particular science teacher in their secondary school. Participants described enjoying science previously. Particular aspects identified were an inability to get help when they needed it; the use of sarcasm or derogatory remarks to discourage questions; boring lessons mostly composed of copying notes from the board or textbooks; lack of relevance and a lack of enthusiasm displayed by the teacher. This led to a situation where participants dreaded their science lessons and in some cases truancy.

As Higher Education increasingly moving towards a plethora of blended and fully online learning, questions are raised around the space and place of Work-Integrated Learning (WIL). This chapter reports on one institution's efforts to design and deliver a WIL course in a Teacher Education program adopting an open and distributed framework. The redesigned course, Orientation to Teaching, was a first year course in a Bachelor of Education (Primary) program at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. The redesign of the course was underpinned by a Distributed Open Collaborative Course (DOCC) design and as the workplace also became the site of learning, the theory of effective WIL curriculum (Orrell, 2011) also informed the design. This chapter examines the complexity of DOCC design in WIL contexts and uses Khan's 8 dimensions to frame the discussion.

The Australian Catholic University (ACU National at www.acu.edu.au) is a public university funded by the Australian Government. There are six campuses across the country, located in Brisbane, Queensland; North Sydney, New South Wales; Strathfield, New South Wales; Canberra, Australian Capital Territory (ACT); Ballarat, Victoria; and Melbourne, Victoria. The university serves a total of approximately 27,000 students, including both full- and part-time students, and those enrolled in undergraduate and postgraduate studies. Through fostering and advancing knowledge in education, health, commerce, the humanities, science and technology, and the creative arts, ACU National seeks to make specific and targeted contributions to its local, national, and international communities. The university explicitly engages the social, ethical, and religious dimensions of the questions it faces in teaching, research, and service. In its endeavors, it is guided by a fundamental concern for social justice, equity, and inclusivity. The university is open to all, irrespective of religious belief or background. ACU National opened its doors in 1991 following the amalgamation of four Catholic tertiary institutions in eastern Australia. The institutions that merged to form the university had their origins in the mid-17th century when religious orders and institutes became involved in the preparation of teachers for Catholic schools and, later, nurses for Catholic hospitals. As a result of a series of amalgamations, relocations, transfers of responsibilities, and diocesan initiatives, more than twenty historical entities have contributed to the creation of ACU National. Today, ACU National operates within a rapidly changing educational and industrial context. Student numbers are increasing, areas of teaching and learning have changed and expanded, e-learning plays an important role, and there is greater emphasis on research. In its 2005–2009 Strategic Plan, the university commits to the adoption of quality teaching, an internationalized curriculum, as well as the cultivation of generic skills in students, to meet the challenges of the dynamic university and information environment (ACU National, 2008). The Graduate Diploma of Education (Secondary) Program at ACU Canberra Situated in Australia’s capital city, the Canberra campus is one of the smallest campuses of ACU National, where there are approximately 800 undergraduate and 200 postgraduate students studying to be primary or secondary school teachers through the School of Education (ACT). Other programs offered at this campus include nursing, theology, social work, arts, and religious education. A new model of pre-service secondary teacher education commenced with the introduction of the Graduate Diploma of Education (Secondary) program at this campus in 2005. It marked an innovative collaboration between the university and a cohort of experienced secondary school teachers in the ACT and its surrounding region. This partnership was forged to allow student teachers undertaking the program to be inducted into the teaching profession with the cooperation of leading practitioners from schools in and around the ACT. In the preparation of novices for the teaching profession, an enduring challenge is to create learning experiences capable of transforming practice, and to instill in the novices an array of professional skills, attributes, and competencies (Putnam & Borko, 2000). Another dimension of the beginning teacher experience is the need to bridge theory and practice, and to apply pedagogical content knowledge in real-life classroom practice. During the one-year Graduate Diploma program, the student teachers undertake two four-week block practicum placements, during which they have the opportunity to observe exemplary lessons, as well as to commence teaching. The goals of the practicum include improving participants’ access to innovative pedagogy and educational theory, helping them situate their own prior knowledge regarding pedagogy, and assisting them in reflecting on and evaluating their own practice. Each student teacher is paired with a more experienced teacher based at the school where he/she is placed, who serves as a supervisor and mentor. In 2007, a new dimension to the teaching practicum was added to facilitate online peer mentoring among the pre-service teachers at the Canberra campus of ACU National, and provide them with opportunities to reflect on teaching prior to entering full-time employment at a school. The creation of an online community to facilitate this mentorship and professional development process forms the context for the present case study. While on their practicum, students used social software in the form of collaborative web logging (blogging) and threaded voice discussion tools that were integrated into the university’s course management system (CMS), to share and reflect on their experiences, identify critical incidents, and invite comment on their responses and reactions from peers.

In this paper we will relate some of our experiences in building and using simple Decision Support Systems (DSS) for use in two postgraduate subjects at Victoria University in Melbourne. These subjects are not about Decision Support Systems, but are Information Systems (IS) subjects that introduce, amongst other things, concepts of decision support and DSS. It has been our experience that the complexity, an inability to examine the logic behind decisions that have been recommended, the proprietary nature and the cost of commercial DSS make their use in teaching less than ideal. Our solution was to produce our own simple systems using Excel, Visual Basic and Visual Basic for Applications, and this has proved to be quite successful. The paper reports on building and using Decision Support Systems in this way.

EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF MICROWAVE SLOW WAVE COMB AND CERAMIC APPLICATORS FOR SOIL TREATMENT AT FREQUENCY 2.45 GHZ. G. Brodie and G. Torgovnikov University of Melbourne, 4 Water St, Creswick, Victoria 3363, Australia; e-mail: grigori@unimelb.edu.au Keywords: ceramic applicator, comb applicator, microwave, slow wave, soil microwave treatment In many cases in industry it is required to heat or treat surface layers of different material (soil, timber, concrete, plastics and so on) with microwaves (MW). Traditional MW irradiators (antennas) cannot provide heating only in the surface areas and energy penetrates deep into the material, where it decays exponentially due to normal attenuation. Therefore, energy losses, if a heating depth of 20 - 40 mm (for example to heat soil for killing weed seeds) is all that is required, are very significant. Therefore, it is required to develop special MW applicators for surface treatment to increase process efficiency. To address this problem, a slow wave (which is sometimes called a "surface wave" applicator) comb and ceramic structures, was studied. The main property of slow waves is that the energy concentration is very near impedance electrode – comb or ceramic plate surface. Previously, slow wave structures were used mostly as delay lines and as interaction circuits in MW vacuum devices, and their properties were explored only for these specific applications. The work objectives of this study were: design slow wave, ceramic and comb structure applicators for soil treatment at frequency 2.45 GHz;experimentally study the energy distribution from slow wave applicators in the soil;study of opportunities to use slow wave structures for surface soil layer heating; andrecommendations for practical use of new slow wave applicators. Comb and ceramic slab applicators for frequency 2.45 GHz operation were designed for the soil treatment on the bases of theoretical studies and computer modelling. The comb applicator was made from aluminium and the ceramic slab applicator was made from alumina (DC=9.8, loss tangent=0.0002). A 30 kW (2.45 GHz) microwave generator was used for experiments. Containers with soil were placed on the applicator surface. An auto tuner was used in MW system to provided good impedance matching of the generator and applicators (with soil on top). This resulted in practically no power reflection. The soil “Potting Mix Hortico”, with moisture content range 32-174% and density range 590-1070 kg/m3, was used for the experiments. Energy distribution in the soil was determined by temperature measuring in the soil using thermocouples, after MW heating. Distribution of temperature measuring points covered the whole volume of the soil along and across the applicator. Results of the experiments showed that the comb applicator provides maximum energy release in soil in the central vertical plane. The ceramic alumina applicator forms two temperature maximums in two vertical planes at a distance of about 40 mm from the central applicator plane and a minimum in the applicator central plane. The ceramic applicator provides better uniformity of energy distribution across the width of the applicator due to the two temperature maximums. It reduces overheating of the soil surface and energy losses. The depth of energy penetration provided by ceramic applicator is lower compared with the comb applicator. It means that the ceramic applicator provides better energy localization and more energy absorption in the soil surface layers compared with the comb applicator. To provide better uniformity of energy distribution across the ceramic applicator it is recommended to use ceramics with higher dielectric constants, such as in the range of 15-25, which will allow more energy to be released closer to the applicator surface. It will increase efficiency of MW energy use. The ceramic applicator is more effective for MW treatment of the soil surface areas and is recommended for practical use in machines for thermal treatment and sterilization of surface layers of the soil and other materials.