Over the Threshold—Setting Minimum Learning Outcomes (Benchmarks) for Undergraduate Geography Majors in Australian Universities

Abstract

The Australian federal government is preparing a new higher education quality assurance framework under the leadership of the recently established Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA). Groundwork for this framework included a major national demonstration project to develop outcome-based graduate standards in a selected range of disciplines. This paper describes this project, focusing on the process by which threshold learning outcomes for Australian Bachelors level graduates majoring in Geography were determined; setting out outcomes of the work and pointing to some of the issues and implications flowing from the project.

Keywords:

• Quality assurance
• standards
• benchmarking
• learning outcomes
• Tuning
• Australia

Acknowledgements

Support for the original work on this project was provided by the ALTC Ltd, an initiative of the Australian Government's Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations. The views expressed in this material do not necessarily reflect the views of the ALTC or the Australian Government. Elements of this paper overlap with various locally circulated ALTC documents and with the final ALTC report on Geography Standards (Hay, 2010) and they are reproduced here with permission. I would like to acknowledge the support and work of Dr Carol Nicholl, Prof. Christine Ewan, my fellow Discipline Scholars and Mrs Jill Rashleigh in the LTAS project. Thanks too to Karl Donert and Mick Healey for valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Notes

¹ Though the Bologna process concluded in 2010, continuing moves to European educational harmonization are still often understood to be part of that process.

² In its discussion of qualification types, the Framework also includes some reference to the Senior Certificate of Education (for schools), though this is not included in Levels 1–8.

³ ALTC was wound up in 2011 as part of Federal government measures to pay for flood damage in Queensland. Some of the Council's activities were moved to DEEWR.

⁴ The emerging framework is likely to have five components, adding provider, information, research and qualification standards to those associated directly with learning and teaching.

⁵ Broad discipline areas were defined according to Australian definitions of Field of Education from the Australian Standard Classification of Education. These correspond to the most common broad structural arrangements of faculties or aggregates of departments within Australian universities.

⁶ The year-long appointment accords with the evaluation of the QAA pilot benchmarking project which concluded that each benchmark report might be expected to take 1 year to produce, though in the UK each member of the panel was expected to contribute up to 3 weeks work (Williams, 2010, p. 164).

⁷ For an interesting discussion of standards and standardization, see Timmermans and Epstein (2010).

⁸ Key stakeholders encouraged a focus on the Bachelors degree level only, believing that dealing with additional award levels would be too great a task for a single year project.

⁹ Although Geography was included within the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities Discipline Group, all aspects of the discipline (e.g. physical, human–environment relations, GIS) were considered in the establishment of Geography standards.

¹⁰ Over the period of the LTAS project, three different versions of the draft AQF were released: September 2009, July 2010 and September 2010.

¹¹ These colleagues included Prof. Michael Bradford, Prof. Mick Healey and Mr Karl Donert. Bradford is Joint Leader of Change Academy for the Higher Education Academy and the Leadership Foundation and a member of the original QAA benchmarking group for Geography (2000). Donert is the coordinator of the large and influential Socrates Thematic network for Geography in higher education (HERODOT) and President of the European Association of Geographers. Healey is former Director of the Centre for Active Learning; Director Geography Discipline Network, Senior Advisor Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences Subject Centre, Honorary Professor University of Queensland and a member of the original QAA benchmarking group for Geography.

¹² This was a sound response which compares very favourably with the 111 submissions received by the AQF for the deeply controversial July 2010 version of Strengthening the AQF: A Framework for Australia's Qualifications.

¹³ On the advice of ALTC, DASSH and the National Forum, no Standards Statements were produced for Geography or History postgraduate qualifications (including Honours) as part of the LTAS project. The complexity of the ASSH disciplines was thought to make that work difficult to complete within the timeframe available. However, this is an area for prospective work. And indeed, the articulation of Honours and postgraduate Standards might encourage useful reflection on the level at which the existing undergraduate standards are pitched.

¹⁴ Over the past 15–20 years many university Geography departments and programmes across Australia have been wound down (e.g. Edith Cowan University in 2011) or merged into larger entities from which a clear and distinctive geographical identity is masked or removed (e.g. Australian National University, Flinders University, Sydney University and University of Wollongong). A similar trend is evident in New Zealand.

¹⁵ Individual academics (and other stakeholders) are typically so pressed by the growing individualized focus on research output, teaching performance … that little time or energy is left for broader, sustained community action. Indeed, some are actively discouraged by supervisors from pursuing such work.