Post by Katie Freund
Welcome to the final blog post for CSET2025! Please join us on Friday, 21 February from 5 – 7pm for our live event. Register using the link below.
It is a precarious time for hope in the education sector in Canberra. From my vantage point at ANU, I see challenging times ahead, with many education designers and other third-space professionals losing their jobs, budgets tightening, and teaching staff under increasing pressure. In these circumstances, finding and holding on to hope becomes a critical strategy for resilience. In this post, I will share a few projects and initiatives that have brought me hope in recent times.
Can we point to local instances of digital technology leading to genuine social benefits and empowerment?
The ASTUTE Program
Academic staff in the School of Medicine and Psychology at ANU (where I am based) were struggling with the increasing incidence of students with social anxiety, particularly where it intersected with giving presentations, undertaking group work, and completing assessments in their coursework. In response, Professor Elizabeth Rieger and her team of clinical psychologists created the ASTUTE Program (Anxiety Skills Training in University Education), a cognitive behavioural therapy program offered in-person and online for students to learn skills for managing their social anxiety.
Liz explains the program in detail here:
Now in its second iteration, this project is a lovely example of actively taking steps to improve student journeys at university using simple and accessible online modules with support from psychologists.
What are your colleagues and networks doing to improve the student experience at your place of work? Share some of the projects and activities in the comments below.
What local push-back and resistance against egregious forms of EdTech is evident?
Citizen Wellbeing Scientist project
Created by Professor Narelle Lemon, based at Edith Cowan University in Perth, the Citizen Wellbeing Scientist project invites all of us to explore how mindfulness can impact our daily lives, and document our experiences on social media. Every day, Narelle posts a short mindfulness prompt and encourages you to pause in your day and build healthy connections with your own thoughts. Many of these are particularly valuable for those working in education or feeling like things are outside your influence or control, and provide a way for social media platforms to move towards “hopescrolling”, rather than doomscrolling.
You can share your own journey and posts on this Padlet, and follow Citizen Wellbeing Scientist on Instagram.
How have you found your relationship with social media platforms of late? Are there any people or accounts that you follow that bring you hope? Share them in the comments.
What alternate imaginaries are being circulated about education and digital futures?
Indigenous Data Sovereignty movement
With corporate platforms scraping data from across the Internet to feed large language models (LLMs), consideration of what data and whose data becomes ever more important. Amidst reporting on inherent biases baked into algorithms and generative AI, it is critical to consider how these biases impact Indigenous peoples in Australia and New Zealand and their custodianship of Country, culture, and ways of knowing.
The growing Indigenous Data Sovereignty movement provides an alternative approach, where Indigenous peoples can exercise control over data and ensure it is used responsibly and ethically to benefit Indigenous peoples themselves. The Maiam nayri Wingara Indigenous Data Sovereignty Collective in Australia and Te Mana Raraunga Maori Data Sovereignty Network in Aotearoa New Zealand (among others) have been developing principles for the rights of Indigenous peoples to exercise control of the data ecosystem, work which will be continued here in Canberra at the upcoming Global Indigenous Data Sovereignty Conference in April 2025.
According to ACU academic and Wiradyuri Wambuul woman Jess Russ-Smith, the growing number of Indigenous-led data and AI projects show that, “technology doesn’t have to be harmful to people and Country in the way the dominant AI transformation currently is. Instead, by being First Nations-led, local, contextualised, purpose-built and sustainable, AI can help care for and preserve people and Country.”
What lessons can we learn from the Indigenous data sovereignty movement in relation to our own practice in education?
What brings you hope?
As hope is highly subjective, I invite you to share what brings you hope in the comments below and engage with those shared by others.
Further reading
Lemon, N., O’Brien, S., Later, N. et al. Pedagogy of Belonging: Cultivating wellbeing literacy in higher education. High Educ (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-024-01317-8
Russ-Smith, Jessica; Lazarus, Michelle (2024). The AI (R)evolution: Valuing Country, Culture, and Community in a World of Algorithms. Monash University. Monograph. https://doi.org/10.26180/27274938.v4
6 thoughts on “CSET2025 – Topic 4: What grounds for hope are there?”
One project I was introduced to this week is IDEATE (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity in Australian Technology Education), being run from “The Hive” at ANU:
“IDEATE aims to bring Australian universities together to collectively tackle the systemic barriers to diversity and inclusion in technology education that have persisted for decades.”
Emma Davidson just started as the IDEATE Program Director at ANU: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emmadavidsonau/
There is hope for the education sector in Canberra. In particular, I suggest there is room for new startup companies providing learning design and edtech support services. Our universities could then turn to these new local companies for support, rather than contracting foreign multinationals.
There is also scope for new private sector education providers. The Canberra Innovation Network (CBRIN) has been supporting some entrepreneurs in this area. What provided some hope was hearing from one of my mentees about their work at a private sector education provider, after being laid off from a public university.
What also brings me hope is the prospect of using tech as a tool to increase inclusion and diversity, to improve equity in education. Without the tech, and new teaching and assessment techniques, I would not have been able to complete my university studies and could not (or would not) be teaching at a university.
In 2016 I set out to be ready to help Canberra’s universities to teach online. This was in case a sudden emergency kept international students offshore. As a result I was able to help when COVID-19 struck. However, I had a second longer term aim: to help Canberra’s universities to be able to compete internationally for both domestic and international students through the use of better edtech. That is still a work in progress. Unfortunately the universities are still over-reliant on campuses, assuming that they have a captive market for domestic students and that international students will come to them.
Canberra’s universities will increasingly have to compete, not only with other Australian universities, but also with for-profit entities located in Australia and with institutions around the world. In seven years as a postgraduate student I made the transition from thinking of going to campus being normal, to study being something I do on my laptop and phone. I still like going to a campus, but it is a luxury most students can’t afford.
Lovely to see that Emma Davidson will be heading up that program! I really appreciate your point on the value and capacity of technologies to support inclusion and increase access to education. It will be interesting to see if local learning design providers such as you mention will get traction in the tertiary sector. Does anyone else have experience with this?
Thanks for sharing these great innovations and asking us to reflect back on successes and things that have given us hope for the future. Although I am relatively new to Canberra my source of hope is with the students. At my last institution at UQ I was involved in a series of Student Staff Partnership projects where students received small amounts of funding to work with university staff to co-design and collaborate. The message here is that small projects with virtually no funding and small goals can move us along and reap benefits for all. https://employability.uq.edu.au/ssp
These experiences led to a larger project, again funded by UQ, to work with medical students to focus on workplace-based assessment, digital dashboards etc. I have linked the website below (but not sure if it will come up as this is my first comment this week- I have been lurking around but time poor). As you will see (if you get time to review the final report), we encountered all sorts of road blocks to innovation, but having an opportunity to co-design with our wonderful students was like gold. We created a series of modules to support students as they transitioned from preclinical to their clinical years, and also harnessed the immense data set from their workplace-based assessments in their portfolios to share the type of feedback and types of clinical experiences they could expect in their placements. We need more opportunities to co-design and collaborate, funding or no funding 🙂
Cheers and thanks to the organisers and the Canberra community for these series of blogs and events.
Thanks for sharing this Helen! I have many examples of finding hope through projects that our team does with students – working with them is really the highlight of my work! Thanks for sharing those links.
Better late than never, here is the link I missed adding to the post https://medical-school.uq.edu.au/digital-footprints-learner-engagement-WIL
What gives me hope is how AI tools are leveling the playing field. I always had great ideas, but writing them down was my biggest challenge during my teaching studies. Now, students with dyslexia, non-native English speakers, or other learning difficulties can express themselves clearly. At the same time, it does raise questions about where to draw the line between assisted clarity and plagiarism.