https://hdl.handle.net/2123/6341 2026-06-04T18:14:10Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/35302 Cohort Working Paper No.1 - The 'Midlife Collision': Insights into the working lives of mid-years women Hill, Elizabeth; Cooper, Rae; Churchill, Brendan; Young, Nareen; Williams Veazey, Leah; Segrave, Marie; Tan, Shih Joo; Gilbert, Josh Each year the Working for Women Research Partnership focuses on a specific population cohort. In 2025, the priority cohort is women aged 40–55 years who we refer to as ‘mid-years’ women. This working paper foregrounds the voices of mid-years women, capturing the conversations that occur every day around Australia at kitchen tables, in work lunchrooms and online. These conversations reveal a ‘midlife collision’ between mid-years women’s work commitment, capability and aspirations; the organisation and design of jobs; disproportionate responsibility for family care; and personal health and wellbeing. Caught between the competing needs of workplaces and family care, time pressure for women peaks during the mid-years. For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, time pressure is amplified due to expansive responsibilities for community, country and cultural care. Flexible work can be a ‘game changer’ for mid-years women. When done well, flexible working arrangements can support mid-years women to not only survive but thrive in their chosen occupation and career without compromising other essential parts of life. Based on extensive qualitative data collected from almost 400 Australian mid-years women, this paper highlights the current dynamics of the midlife collision, its impact on diverse groups of women, and how access to different types of flexible work across different industries and occupations shapes the mid-years work–life experience. The women whose experiences inform this paper come from across Australia, living and working in metropolitan, rural and regional areas and with varying levels of caring responsibilities. They work in frontline, onsite workplaces, and in hybrid and fully remote offsite settings. They include Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, refugees and migrant women, LGBTQIA+ people, women living with disabilities and chronic illness, single mothers, single women, and partnered women with and without children. We include workers across a range of roles and seniority, including those who are managers. 2026-05-12T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/35295 Thematic Working Paper No.1: How flexible working arrangements shape workplace experience across genders in Australia Churchill, Brendan; Cooper, Rae; Hill, Elizabeth; Young, Nareen This is the first thematic report of the Working for Women Research Partnership, a collaboration between the Australian Government Office of Women and researchers at the University of Sydney, University of Technology Sydney and the University of Melbourne. It focuses on flexible work. Drawing on the Australian Workplace Gender Equality Survey (AWGES), a nationally representative survey of Australian workers, the report details how flexible work is accessed, supported and experienced across industries, the gendered composition of workplaces and specific demographic cohorts from a gendered lens. The report examines whether workers have access to flexibility, and also the quality of that flexibility. We focus on two kinds of flexibility: temporal and spatial. Temporal flexibility refers to when and how working hours are organised, while spatial flexibility refers to where work takes place, capturing whether jobs are performed fully on-site, in hybrid patterns that combine home and workplace days, or in remote-first arrangements. The report finds that flexible work in Australia is widespread but uneven. Gender is a key factor shaping whether workers experience "good flex", flexibility that expands choice and autonomy, or "bad flex", flexibility that limits control, reinforces insecurity or intensifies pressure. From a gendered perspective, the findings show that gender inequalities in the workplace are not being addressed through the spread and uptake of flexible working arrangements and in some cases, new inequalities are emerging. Men are more likely to access high autonomy, well-supported hybrid and remote roles within secure, full-time jobs, while women and non-binary workers are more often channelled into flexibility that comes through reduced hours, casual work and tightly controlled schedules. For many women, particularly those in feminised frontline sectors, women with disabilities, migrant and language diverse women, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, flexibility is still tied to lower pay, weaker security and fewer opportunities for progression and influence. Flexible work has become a new axis along which advantages and disadvantages are organised, with "good flex" concentrated among men and "bad flex" disproportionately borne by women and gender diverse workers. Addressing these patterns will be critical if flexible work is to support rather than undermine the gender equality ambitions of the Working for Women Strategy. 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/35151 Chaos and calm in the lecture theatre: Transforming the lecture by creating and sustaining interactivity at scale Bryant, Peter The lecture remains one of the most enduring and contested pedagogical forms in higher education, despite sustained criticism of its limitations for student engagement and active learning. In the wake of the COVID‑19 pandemic, rising student disengagement, and renewed pressures on universities to teach at scale, this conceptual paper re-examines the lecture not as a failed pedagogy, but as an under-designed social and spatial form. Drawing on theories of social space, interactivity, and immersive learning, the paper argues that the central challenge of contemporary lecturing is not transmission, but the creation and sustainment of meaningful interactivity at scale. Using the metaphor of chaos and calm, the paper explores how learning oscillates between structured, performative moments and noisy, social knowledge production, and how purposeful pedagogical design can harness both states productively. It critiques common interventions such as flipped learning and audience response systems for often reproducing passivity or fragmented engagement and instead proposes a framework of six design challenges (architecture, audience, quiet/loud dynamics, systems, accessibility, and transitional space) that shape interactivity in large cohorts. The paper concludes by demonstrating how spatial, technological, and pedagogical alignment, exemplified through the CONNECTSpace case, can transform lectures into social learning environments that foster connection, agency, and transformative learning without abandoning the economic and institutional realities of scale. 2026-04-30T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/35150 Navigating the dissonances of authenticity in assessment: Redefining the value and impact of authentic assessment in an era of generative crisis Bryant, Peter Higher education assessment is experiencing a renewed crisis, intensified by the successive shocks of the COVID‑19 pandemic and the rapid emergence of generative artificial intelligence. In response, universities have reverted to familiar, compliance‑oriented assessment practices (most notably high‑stakes, invigilated examinations) often at the expense of pedagogical expertise, (student agency, and trust. This working paper interrogates the contemporary positioning of authentic assessment and argues that its value has been simultaneously overextended as a panacea and underdeveloped as a rigorous framework for assessment for learning. Drawing on philosophical conceptions of authenticity, liminality, and trust, alongside critical scholarship on assessment, marketisation, and managerialism in higher education, the paper reframes authentic assessment as a relational, meaning‑making practice rather than a fixed set of task characteristics or employability proxies. It contends that assessment systems have become increasingly shaped by fear, scale, and auditability, fracturing their capacity to support learning amid uncertainty and transition, conditions that define both student experience and contemporary professional life. The paper proposes a redefinition of authentic assessment grounded in three interrelated dimensions: epistemological authenticity, educational authenticity, and experiential authenticity. Together, these dimensions foreground learning through assessment, recognise students’ reflexive and ontological states, and situate assessment within the lived contexts of work, life, and play. The paper concludes that authentic assessment, when purposefully designed and enacted, offers a credible pathway for rebuilding trust between students, academics, institutions, and society in an era of generative crisis—without abandoning the legitimate demands of assurance, quality, and academic standards. 2026-04-30T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/35123 Good Flex, Bad Flex: Designing Flexibility for Gender Equality Cooper, Rae; Hill, Elizabeth; Churchill, Brendan; Young, Nareen This report presents findings from the first year of the Working for Women Research Partnership (the Partnership), a collaboration between a national consortium of academics and the Australian Government’s Office for Women. The first year of the Partnership focuses on flexible work, examining the experiences of women aged 40 to 55. Consistent with the Australian Government’s Working for Women: A Strategy for Gender Equality, the Partnership identifies flexible work as a key lever for reshaping the systems that structure work and care, so that people of all genders have meaningful choices and participate fully in economic and community life. This report focuses on this topic. 2026-04-22T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/35120 ATOM: A Pretrained Neural Operator for Multitask Molecular Dynamics Thompson, Luke; Guan, Davy; Matthews, Slade; Shi, Dai; Gao, Junbin; Han, Andi Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations underpin modern computational drug discovery, materials science, and biochemistry. Recent machine learning models provide high-fidelity MD predictions without the need to repeatedly solve quantum mechanical forces, enabling significant speedups over conventional pipelines. Yet many such methods typically enforce strict equivariance and rely on sequential rollouts, thus limiting their flexibility and simulation efficiency. They are also com- monly single-task, trained on individual molecules and fixed timeframes, which restricts generalization to unseen compounds and extended timesteps. To address these issues, we propose Atomistic Transformer Operator for Molecules (ATOM), a pretrained transformer neural operator for multitask molecular dynamics. ATOM adopts a quasi-equivariant design that requires no explicit molecular graph and employs a temporal attention mechanism, allowing for the accurate parallel decod- ing of multiple future states. To support operator pretraining across chemicals and timescales, we curate TG80, a large, diverse, and numerically stable MD dataset with over 2.5 million femtoseconds of trajectories across 80 compounds. ATOM achieves state-of-the-art performance on established single-task benchmarks, such as MD17, RMD17 and MD22. After multitask pretraining on TG80, ATOM shows exceptional zero-shot generalization to unseen molecules across varying time hori- zons. We believe ATOM represents a significant step toward accurate, efficient, and transferable molecular dynamics models. Poster: https://iclr.cc/virtual/2026/poster/10008346 Full paper: https://openreview.net/forum?id=e9cV4xSjbR 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/35005 Assessment design through co-design: reimagining assessment design practices in higher education Zeivots, Sandris; Sun, Jennifer Z.; Kennedy, Amanda; Cram, Andrew; Liao, Yuan Assessment design in higher education is often approached with a focus on assessment tasks and the processes of designing them, with instructors making decisions in isolation. Drawing on assessment design, co-design and practice theory as a conceptual framing, we recast assessment design as a relational, situated practice and examine co-design as a way to come to practise assessment differently. In a business school, 102 stakeholders participated across three courses through four interconnected interventions: Connect:In workshops, weekly student reflections, academic capacity-building workshops and student testimonial videos. Using practitioner inquiry and the Theory of Practice Architectures, we analysed how sayings, doings and relatings shaped changes to assessment practices. Co-design produced more inclusive and relational assessment practices, strengthened instructor design literacies, surfaced students’ lived experiences and agency, and supported shared ownership of design choices. This led to changes to assessment practice within the courses. Challenges centred on time, role clarity and negotiating divergent views, yet structured facilitation and distributed responsibilities enabled progress. The article offers three provocations that serve as implications for practice: (1) reposition assessment design as an ongoing educational practice; (2) embed relationality and distributed responsibility into assessment design and (3) institutionalise assessment design as a supported and shared professional practice. 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/34942 Active Learning in Higher Education: Inheriting Pasts and Emerging Futures Børte, Kristin; Zeivots, Sandris This paper examines active learning from a temporal perspective, reflecting on its historical influences, trajectories and future directions emerging in research. Rather than treating active learning as a fixed pedagogical approach, the paper situates it within longer educational traditions and ongoing debates about teaching and learning. Drawing on research in higher education, the paper discusses how active learning has been shaped by changing ontologies, relationships and understandings of activity and student participation. The paper concludes by identifying three interrelated matters of concern for future research on active learning: the conceptualisation of purposeful activity beyond mere “being active,” questions of agency and authorship and human–AI entanglements, and the need for critically curious approaches to imagining and designing futures of active learning. 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/34841 Undergraduate 2030 Reimagining our higher education landscape for the epistemological and technological youthquakes of Generation Alpha Bryant, Peter Generation Alpha, born entirely in the 21st century, is set to transform higher education through their distinct behavioural, epistemological, and technological traits. This paper critically examines how their expectation that are shaped by personalisation, digital immersion, and non-linear knowledge acquisition, challenge traditional undergraduate education models. Drawing on an informed critique literature review, the study explores the implications of Generation Alpha’s learning preferences and proposes a future-focused response through higher education learning design. The Adaptive Learning Ecosystem (ALE), developed at the University of Sydney Business School, is introduced as a model for reimagining curriculum, assessment, and student engagement. The model supports personalised, transdisciplinary, and socially connected learning, enabling students to navigate complex educational journeys with agency and purpose. The paper outlines three strategic horizons (program design, lifelong learning, and space spaces for innovation) through which higher education institutions can respond to the educational ambitions of Generation Alpha. We argue for a co-designed, human-centred approach to learning that prepares students not for today’s technologies and crises, but for the unknown and yet to be experienced challenges of tomorrow. In doing so, universities can remain relevant, resilient, and impactful in an era of continuous change. 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/34826 Designing meaningful student engagement with course readings Zeivots, Sandris Course readings are central to student learning, yet they’re often treated as a routine, grudging task rather than a designed learning experience. On average, only 20-30% of students engage with assigned readings, which impacts class interaction, development of ideas and assessment quality. This post discussed a framework that brings together six dimensions that help educators design purposeful, relational engagement with course readings. These dimensions operate as an entangled assemblage rather than discrete elements and draw on the lenses of what, how and why. 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/34815 Walking the tightrope of quality assessment: balancing perspectives and priorities of stakeholder groups Zeivots, Sandris; Wright, Sue; Harris, Lynne; Cram, Andrew; Huber, Elaine; Raduescu, Corina; White, Amanda; Brodzeli, Andrew The ongoing evolution of digital technologies, particularly Generative Artificial Intelligence, continues to shape and challenge assessment design in higher education. Given the complex and sometimes competing factors that contribute to assessment design, and the evolving digital landscape in which assessment is placed, this study examines the perspectives and priorities of five key stakeholder groups – educators, students, employers of graduates, accrediting bodies, and institutional policy-makers – regarding the defining characteristics of quality assessment. Using a mixed-methods approach, we conducted interviews, focus groups, and a national survey to extend a framework for designing quality digital assessments in business education that was originally developed using educator perspectives only. The findings highlight the importance of balancing academic integrity, feedback quality, student experience, and authenticity in assessment design to address stakeholder perspectives. They also extend the framework by including two additional design elements: purpose and technology, and by emphasising the value of dialogue about contrasting interpretations of assessment quality. The study provides a refined framework that incorporates nuanced differences in stakeholder priorities, supports educators in designing digital assessments that respond to stakeholder needs, and encourages co-design and shared accountability. 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/34761 Big Sister: Advanced Mentoring SA/WA Rapid Literature Review Dawson, Niamh; Cooper, Rae; Eastlake, India; Avery, Nicholas; Galea, Natalie Women remain significantly underrepresented in Australia’s skilled trades, including the electrical trades. Gendered expectations, limited exposure to trade pathways, and constrained access to relevant information from early schooling reduce women’s confidence and interest in these careers. For those who do enter training or employment, exclusionary workplace cultures, inadequate facilities, limited flexibility, and systemic bias in recruitment and progression contribute to high attrition. Together, these factors sustain women’s low participation in the trades. This rapid review synthesises academic, government, and industry evidence to inform the design and evaluation of the Big Sister Program, an initiative aimed at increasing women’s access to, retention in, and progression through the electrical trades. Where trade-specific evidence is limited, insights are drawn from research in other male-dominated sectors. The review examines five interrelated areas relevant to program design: school-based pre-vocational initiatives, vocational education and training environments, apprenticeship and worksite experiences, mentoring programs, and collaborative partnerships for workplace change. Findings suggest that early engagement, visible female role models, inclusive VET systems, structured mentoring, and transparent recruitment processes can improve women’s participation and outcomes. However, few interventions have been rigorously evaluated, particularly within trade-specific contexts. The review highlights the need to address systemic and cultural workplace barriers through partnership-based approaches rather than relying solely on women-focused initiatives. The Big Sister Program is well positioned to generate robust evidence to support sustainable and scalable change across the electrical trades and related sectors. 2026-01-23T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/34647 Boosting Retention of Women in Construction: Improving Transitions in and out of Parental Leave: Rapid literature review Hanna-Osborne, Sally; Galea, Natalie; Hamilton, Myra Australia’s construction sector continues to struggle to attract and retain women workers. A key area of strategic importance is how women are supported in the workplace before, during and after taking parental leave. Research has found that these periods are pivotal in a woman’s career, and the decision to remain in or return to work. There has so far been little research into the experiences of women in construction before, during and after pregnancy and parental leave, and how to help employers and workers navigate this critical time. This review provides an overview of the literature on how women “transition” between the workplace and parental leave, as pregnant workers taking leave as new parents returning to work. It identifies examples of leading policies and practices within construction and other industries and it highlights areas where more research is needed. The review is part of a broader project investigating how to assist women to remain in frontline construction roles in NSW during pregnancy and after taking parental leave. Construction is Australia’s most male-dominated industry. Despite numerous efforts to improve gender equality in the sector, women make up only 13.6% of the workforce (ABS 2024). Among trades workers, women comprise only 3% of workers (ABS 2021). The barriers to women staying and progressing in the sector are well known. The working culture can be harmful and hostile to women. Women in construction have experienced sexual harassment, discrimination and bullying. They are excluded from workplaces by a lack of female facilities and belittled by male colleagues who question their competence. Work practices in the industry are another obstacle to women’s participation. Construction workers are expected to be available for long and inflexible work days, driven by pressures to complete projects on tight timelines and budgets. These work practices are incompatible with other responsibilities that many women have, such as caring for children. Parental leave entitlements in the sector are patchy. According to the National Employment Standards, all employees who have worked with their employer for at least 12 months, including casual employees, can take unpaid parental leave and have their job protected for at least 12 months. The Australian Government Parental Leave Pay scheme currently provides 22 weeks of leave paid at the national minimum wage to parents who meet the criteria. However, employer provided parental leave schemes in the sector are limited, and many employees do not experience the full benefits of the statutory provisions, such as having their job protected for 12 months. 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/34565 Leading and Practising GenAI Care-fully Vallis, Carmen This thought piece explores how the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) can guide educators to lead with curiosity, collaboration, and care in the age of generative AI. Here we reframe leadership as relational rather than hierarchical, anchored in inquiry, reflection, and shared learning. The chapter traces a co-designed research project that used metaphors to explore how educators and students conceptualise GenAI’s role in higher education. This creative and critical approach foregrounded the ethical, pedagogical, and emotional dimensions of AI while amplifying diverse voices through collective authorship. Framed by contemporary SoTL research, echoing calls for pedagogically grounded and ethically aware AI practice (Fitzgerald & Curtis, 2025), the piece positions care-based leadership as central to shared understanding in times of technological disruption. Leading and practising GenAI care-fully means moving beyond control and certainty to cultivate inclusive, reflective spaces for inquiry and educational transformation. 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/34513 Reshaping Higher Education Designs and Futures: Postdigital Co-design with Generative Artificial Intelligence Zeivots, Sandris; Casey, Alison; Winchester, Tiffany; Webster, Jack; Wang, Xin; Tan, Linus; Smeenk, Wina; Schulte, Frank P.; Scholkmann, Antonia; Paulovich, Belinda; Muñoz, Diego; Mignone, Joanne; Mantai, Lilia; Hrastinski, Stefan; Godwinn, Rebecca; Engwall, Olov; Dindas, Henrik; van Dijk, Marieke; Chubb, Laura Ann; Rapanta, Chrysi; Jaldemark, Jimmy; Hayes, Sarah This article examines how collaborative design practices in higher education are reshaped through postdigital entanglement with generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). We collectively explore how co-design, an inclusive, iterative, and relational approach to educational design and transformation, expands in meaning, practice, and ontology when GenAI is approached as a collaborator. The article brings together 19 authors and three open reviewers to engage with postdigital inquiry, structured in three parts: (1) a review of literature on co-design, GenAI, and postdigital theory; (2) 11 situated contributions from educators, researchers, and designers worldwide, each offering practice-based accounts of co-design with GenAI; and (3) an explorative discussion of implications for higher education designs and futures. Across these sections, we show how GenAI unsettles assumptions of collaboration, knowing, and agency, foregrounding co-design as a site of ongoing material, ethical, and epistemic negotiation. We argue that postdigital co-design with GenAI reframes educational design as a collective practice of imagining, contesting, and shaping futures that extend beyond human knowing. 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/34456 Gender Equality @ Work Index: Index Report, November 2025 Hill, Elizabeth; Cooper, Rae; Seetahul, Suneha; Bedi, Anya Despite decades of effort by government, employers, unions and education institutions, gender inequalities are an intractable feature of the Australian labour market. Stubborn gaps in participation, pay and career progression are holding women, business, and the national economy back. Many of the unequal features of the Australian labour market, such as the concentration of men and women in different industries and occupations, have barely shifted in three decades. The Gender Equality @ Work Index, developed by the Australian Centre for Gender Equality and Inclusion @ Work at the University of Sydney, offers a comprehensive, national, and longitudinal snapshot of gender equality at work. It provides insights for the community, policymakers, and employers on Australia’s progress and highlights areas requiring urgent action to address the root causes of inequality. 2025-10-31T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/34324 A Horizon-Scanning Report on the Changing Demographic and Pedagogical Profiles of Current and Emerging University Students and the Responses of the Global Higher Education to the Generational Challenges Bryant, Peter This report critically examines how the demographic and socio-economic composition of the current and near-future post-compulsory student community intersect with technological, pedagogical, and governance challenges in higher education. Informed by the intersecting epistemic, policy, strategic and financial crises created by technology-led disruptions such as generative AI and organisational and marketisation complexity, the report will provide exemplars and experiential insights into the structures and approaches higher education institutions will need to enable to create and sustain alignment with the pedagogical, graduate employability and technological needs of the generations of potential undergraduate and postgraduate students. 2024-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/34189 Women in profit-to-member superannuation funds Westcott, Mark Andrew; Nguyen, Tien A research report examining the representation of women in leadership and management positions in 59 Australian profit-to-member superannuation funds 2025-08-05T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/33983 Sensing Ethics in Postdigital Future Classrooms Wardak, Dewa; Zeivots, Sandris In this paper, we introduce and develop the concept of ‘sensing ethics’ as a relational approach to thinking about postdigital future classrooms that is informed by our material realities, social and institutional structures, and our responsibilities as educators towards our students. A postdigital lens on ethics emphasises the importance of relationships and interconnectedness in ethical decision-making, moving away from a focus on individual autonomy. It considers how actions affect relationships between humans and non-humans. This perspective moves beyond rule-based ethics, and towards an approach that is more relational, situated, and decentralised. We explore sensing ethics through three examples drawing on the theory of practice architectures. We analyse these examples through the entangled ‘doings’, ‘sayings’, and ‘relatings’ to unpack the complexities emerging in how educators and students enact sensing ethics and how ethics materialises in their human and non-human relationships. Sensing ethics does not require a fixed definition or definitive solutions; rather, it is a proactive and intentional practice situated in the present that shapes the near future of postdigital future classrooms. 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/33980 Critical studies of education and technology … reasons to be hopeful? CSET collective The past couple of decades have seen the steady rise of digital technologies as a prominent element of education around the world. Digital technologies are now a key feature of education provision in the global north from pre-schools through to tertiary and community education – touching the educational experiences of young children through to seniors. In these regions, education provision now increasingly takes place through platforms and other large systems - dependent on cloud providers and the data industry in ways that were scarcely imaginable a few years previously. At the same time, ed-tech continues to grow in prominence in global south regions as governments, NGOs, philanthropic and industry actors look to implement various digital education innovations to help low-income and middle-income countries address fundamental problems around failing teacher workforces and lack of universal basic education. While there continues to be much practitioner enthusiasm, financial investment and commercial hype around such technological developments, we are currently living through particularly unsettled times for the use of digital technologies in education. The worldwide school shutdowns triggered by the COVID pandemic and subsequent periods of ‘emergency remote schooling’ at the beginning of the 2020s have since been renounced in a detailed UNESCO report as ‘an EdTech tragedy’. This has been followed by pronounced regulatory turns in many countries – from Ireland to Indonesia - against student use of smartphones and other digital devices, accompanied by e_orts in countries such as Denmark and France to curtail the educational reach of ‘big tech’ corporations. Now we are seeing growing public and practitioner concerns expressed around the dehumanising e_ects of AI-driven education, and the environmental burdens caused by the production, consumption and disposal of digital technologies. These shifts have certainly been reflected in the changing nature of academic scholarship and research in the area of education and technology over the past few years. In particular, we are now seeing growing interest in what can be termed ‘critical studies of education and technology’ (CSET) – bringing together academics, researchers, teachers, writers and technologists with a shared interest in approaching tech use as a problematic. This is resulting in academic research and scholarship that is focused primarily on the politics of ed-tech, and producing accounts of power, control, inequalities and disadvantage associated with and/or arising from the presence of digital technologies in education. While critical accounts of education and technology have been developed over the past 40 years, the past few years have seen a sharp increase in the number of academic researchers taking this approach. All told, there is now a fast-growing academic literature o_ering critiques of education and technology – o_ering a timely counterpoint to the traditional ‘what works’ approaches to how digital technology might be used in education settings. In light of the increased significance of this area of research it seems appropriate that we talk more openly about what it means to take a ‘critical’ approach to education and technology. Against this background, this brief report draws on the outcomes of 53 expert ‘CSET’ meetings that were coordinated and convened around the world between the 17th and 21st February 2025 (see Appendix A for further details of this process). These meetings brought together over 500 individuals from across academic, research, educator policymaker and industry communities – all with a shared interest in ‘problematising education and technology’. Each meeting was asked to address the following four common questions: (1) What are the pressing issues, concerns, tensions and problems that surround ed-tech in our locality? What questions do we need to ask, and what approaches will help us research these questions? (2) What social harms are we seeing associated with digital technology and education in our locality? (3) What does the political economy of ed-tech look like in our region? What do local EdTech markets look like? How are global Big Tech corporations manifest in local education systems? What does ed-tech policy look like, and which actors are driving policymaking? What do we find if we ‘follow the money’? (4) What grounds for hope are there? Can we point to local instances of digital technology leading to genuine social benefits and empowerment? What local push- back and resistance against egregious forms of ed-tech is evident? What alternate imaginaries are being circulated about education and digital futures? 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/33802 Resonant learning and transitional space: Enabling lasting leadership for good in a post-crisis world Bryant, Peter Developing graduates in pre-experience higher education programs that have the transdisciplinary capability to be leaders for good throughout their career is a complex curricular challenge. Resonant business education is predicated on learning experiences that draw in the lived experiences of students and integrates their current knowledge and skills into emerging experiential contexts, both being and yet to be experienced. The creation of pathways from experiences already gained by students in leadership, either explicitly or tacitly through following leaders or heroes of their own, into opportunities for experiential learning about leadership during their degrees represents a significant design opportunity. This study interrogates the challenges and affordances of designing a leadership education program at the University of Sydney Business S program purposefully creates sequences of challenging learning experiences in transitional spaces for students to integrate, repurpose and share their transdisciplinary knowledge, skills, and experience in resonant ways as they develop their skills to be leaders for good. 2025-04-08T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/33799 Bridging the Skills Gap: Enhancing the Employability of International Chinese Students Li, Wei; Hains-Wesson, Rachael; Ji, Kaiying; Shen, Yinfeng Our research focuses on exploring industry perspectives from both China and Australia on the career preparedness (or underprepardness) of international Chinese students - a viewpoint often overshadowed by research that centers on university-centric and/or student-focused analyses. Our inquiry delved into several key areas: current recruitment practices and channels used by companies, the perceived employability (or non- employability) of international Chinese students by industry experts, and the identification of key strengths and skills anticipated to be in high demand over the next 5- 10 years. 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/33790 Outsiderness and socialisation bump: first year perspectives of international university research students Zeivots, Sandris Australia has among the highest percentages of international English as an additional language background (EAL) university students worldwide and this is steadily increasing. These students contribute immensely to Australia’s and the Asia-Pacific regional economy, research and cultural creativity. Despite this, EAL students face serious academic and social challenges and have increasingly negative views on their research degree in Australian universities. This paper is concerned with understanding the first year experiences of EAL research students in a major Australian university, particularly their concerns and proposed solutions. Fifty seven student datasets were collected from students and analysed using a hybrid methodology of interpretative phenomenological analysis and case study. The findings were analysed across two themes: degree of outsiderness, and socialization bump. The degree of outsiderness emerged through perceived research students’ practices that fostered work in isolation. The socialization bump was regarded as a paradox: the most beneficial research degree experiences appeared to be profoundly social, however participants found a shortage of opportunities to socialize. The article sets forth recommendations for universities internationally to provide a clear, well-communicated and inclusive framework to allow meaningful social interactions for EAL research students to succeed in their academic and social integration. 2021-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/33789 Co-design practice in higher education: Practice theory insights into collaborative curriculum development Zeivots, Sandris; Hopwood, Nick; Wardak, Dewa; Cram, Andrew Higher education curricula require regular renewal. Varied expertise is needed to meet the multi-faceted challenges of curriculum development, hence the importance of collaborative approaches. Co-design is one approach to curriculum making as a relational practice, with evidence showing it can improve pedagogical quality and stakeholder involvement via a collaborative ethos that breaks through constraints of individual imagination and assumptions. The actual doing of co-design in higher education remains largely undocumented, limiting our understanding of this crucial feature of contemporary pedagogical innovation and development. This paper combines the theory of practice architectures with practitioner inquiry to explore three co-design projects within a large curriculum transformation initiative at an Australian university. Each involved a course coordinator, educational developer and learning designer working with tutors, students, industry representatives and media producers. Analysis focuses on how co-design team members connected their own actions to those of others, and how they collectively accomplished things that could not have been achieved alone. Identifying these highlights co-design as a process of learning, coming to practise differently, shaped by the site at which it unfolds, but also reshaping this wider context. This analysis sheds new conceptual light on the black box of co-design as enacted in higher education. 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/33788 What co-design has taught us about transformative practice and academic development Zeivots, Sandris; Wardak, Dewa; Cram, Andrew; Nash, Joanne This chapter explores lessons about co-design in transformative practice and academic development. Co-design, defined as a purposeful, collaborative, and participatory design process involving multiple stakeholders, has emerged as a pivotal strategy in addressing the challenges of higher education. The Light Touch Program focuses on transformative course design and curriculum development. Through a three-year journey, this study shares insights on the program’s role in enhancing teaching and learning environments, drawing on experiences from educational developers, learning designers, and other stakeholders. The findings underscore three transformative lessons: (1) intentional flexibility is required to meet academics’ diverse needs, (2) co-design facilitates capacity building, and (3) customisable resources accelerate sharing and adoption. These lessons highlight co-design’s potential to foster innovation, adaptability, and inclusive practices in academic settings, contributing to more dynamic and collaborative design processes in higher education. 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/33787 Perceived impact of generative AI on assessments: Comparing educator and student perspectives in Australia, Cyprus, and the United States Kizilcec, R.F.; Huber, E.; Papanastasiou, E.C.; Cram, A.; Makridis, C.A.; Smolansky, A.; Zeivots, S.; Raduescu, C. The growing use of generative AI tools built on large language models (LLMs) calls the sustainability of traditional assessment practices into question. Tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT can generate eloquent essays on any topic and in any language, write code in various programming languages, and ace most standardized tests, all within seconds. We conducted an international survey of educators and students in higher education to understand and compare their perspectives on the impact of generative AI across various assessment scenarios, building on an established framework for examining the quality of online assessments along six dimensions. Across three universities, 680 students and 87 educators, who moderately use generative AI, consider essay and coding assessments to be most impacted. Educators strongly prefer assessments that are adapted to assume the use of AI and encourage critical thinking, while students' reactions are mixed, in part due to concerns about a loss of creativity. The findings show the importance of engaging educators and students in assessment reform efforts to focus on the process of learning over its outputs, alongside higher-order thinking and authentic applications. 2024-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/33786 Reconceptualising emotions-as-practices in education: A practice-oriented approach Zeivots, Sandris Emotions play a pivotal role in shaping educational experiences, yet their subjective and transient nature presents considerable challenges for research. This conceptual paper seeks to address these challenges by employing the Theory of Practice Architectures (TPA) as a lens to explore emotions as socially distributed and constructed phenomena within educational settings. TPA's holistic lens of 'sayings', 'doings', and 'relatings' offers a novel multi-dimensional approach to investigate emotions-as-practices. In education contexts, including the evolving landscape of Networked Learning, emotions significantly influence learners' motivation, engagement, and achievement. Beyond individual impact, they contribute to the collective atmosphere of educational institutions, affecting classroom dynamics, inclusivity, and collaboration. However, research methods often struggle with capturing the complexity and fluidity of emotions, which creates a need for a revised methodology. This paper, underpinned by Scheer's work on emotional practices and Wilkinson’s theorisation of emotions in practice, argues for a reconceptualisation of emotions. It presents them as distributed and entangled actions, discourses, and relationships rather than merely individualised physiological responses. In Networked Learning, the interplay of emotions and learning is emphasised by digital architectures, creating unique emotional experiences and challenges. The rise of affectivism in social sciences calls for a deeper understanding of these experiences, as digital spaces alter the ways emotions are expressed, perceived, and performed. Utilising TPA, this paper conceptualises emotions-as-practices and highlights the importance of researching them through the tangible anchors of 'doings', 'sayings', and 'relatings'. This approach transcends the individualistic perspective and enables researchers to illuminate the collective nature of emotions-as-practices within education. In the context of Networked Learning, this conceptualisation reveals how digital learning can shape and is shaped by the emotional landscape through actions, discourse, and relational dynamics, and thus provides insights in the practice-oriented research on emotions. By focusing on emotions-as-practices, the paper advances a nuanced view to investigate the holistic experiences of emotion that are sensitive to the active, discursive, and relational aspects. This perspective pushes the boundaries of emotion research, and suggests novel pathways for Networked Learning. The TPA serves as a valuable lens for researchers, educators, and policy makers to understand and integrate emotions-as-practices in the wider networks of educational practices. As educational paradigms evolve with advances in technology and artificial intelligence, the need to recognise and support emotions in education becomes increasingly critical, ensuring they are not only felt but actively fostered and integrated in learning environments. 2024-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/33785 Exploring what makes learning meaningful for postgraduate business students in higher education Zeivots, Sandris; Tyrrell, Jessica; Wardak, Dewa While research exists on what constitutes meaningful learning, our study reveals the term meaningful is an ill-defined concept that is interpreted in multiple ways, often from a teacher-centric perspective. Less is known about what constitutes meaningfulness in the context of higher education, particularly in business education. This qualitative study seeks to identify postgraduate student perspectives on what is meaningful in higher education to inform the design of authentic and transformative learning experiences. Focus groups were conducted to gain insights into students’ most meaningful learning experiences across four postgraduate business subjects. We conducted a thematic analysis of the student data by inductively coding the transcripts and comments. Students derived the most value from learning experiences that incorporated real-world connections, social encounters, or productive challenges. We also found that students’ discussions of meaningfulness were relatively superficial, suggesting that postgraduate students may not be primed to consider meaningfulness in relation to their learning. We thus problematise the term meaningful and conclude by proposing ‘learning highs’ as a new tentative conceptual frame for future research identifying learning situations in which meaningful experiences occur. 2024-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/33784 Co-design as a networked approach to designing educational futures Wardak, Dewa; Wilson, Stephanie; Zeivots, Sandris Design is a contested term, and this has implications for designing educational futures. Described through five senses to elucidate its complexity, design can be conceptualised as domain, as process, as plan, as the resulting product, and as the intentional creation of new possibilities. In this paper, we use the five design senses to illustrate how they could be useful for making sense of a large, complex, and multifaceted educational project. We define the design senses as a network of socio-material entanglements and illustrate how actor-network theory can be useful in unpacking this network. Taking a postdigital perspective, we illustrate that in designing for learning in higher education, the relationships between the five senses are fluid, constantly shifting, and emergent in a network of human and non-human actants. We argue that design research needs to move beyond cognitive approaches to the study of collaborative approaches that empower participants. In doing so, our study proposes a co-design approach to designing educational futures where multidisciplinary teams connect their knowledge, skills, and resources to carry out a design task. We present three mini-cases from our co-design project to illustrate how the five senses of design can be used to unpack and untangle the web of complex relationships in co-design. Furthermore, we reflect on the shifting role of educational developers as they lead and participate in co-design teams. We conclude by problematising educational design for designing educational futures in a postdigital world. 2024-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/33782 Towards a conceptual framework of professional development: a phenomenographic study of academics’ mindsets in a business school Wardak, Dewa; Huber, Elaine; Zeivots, Sandris Business education has had limited discussion on professional development for academics. Given the increasing focus on the quality of teaching and learning in higher education, we investigate how academics conceptualise professional development. This has important implications since one’s conceptions of a phenomenon can influence subsequent approaches. Few phenomenographic studies have investigated academics’ conceptions of professional development. Our study asked business academics a typical phenomenograhic question: what does professional learning and development mean to you? Our participants conceptualised it in four qualitatively different ways: continual growth mindset; student-centric mindset; knowledge-sharing mindset; and purpose-oriented mindset. We discuss the implications of these mindsets for designing professional development in higher education. 2024-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/33780 Towards a framework for designing and evaluating online assessments in business education Huber, Elaine; Harris, Lynne; Wright, Sue; White, Amanda; Raduescu, Corina; Zeivots, Sandris; Cram, Andrew; Brodzeli, Andrew With the recent and rapid transition to online teaching and learning in higher education, this explanatory study investigated the key design considerations used by business educators designing assessments suitable for online delivery. From a comprehensive literature review, we identified five key design considerations for online assessments: they must (1) assure academic integrity; (2) allow for provision of quality feedback; (3) support a positive learning experience for students; (4) assure the integrity of student information; and (5) ensure all students have an equal chance to complete the assessment successfully. An additional consideration (authenticity) was identified through a survey of educators and four focus group discussions. Our analysis confirmed that scale of delivery and resource limitations, along with institutional policies and accreditation requirements, are broader and interrelated contextual factors that influence practices and decisions about assessment design. Focus group participants also identified constraints and trade-offs they negotiated in designing, evaluating and implementing online assessments. Based on our findings we propose a framework to assist educators in best-practice decision-making about online assessment design and contribute to the discourse between educators, higher education providers and professional accreditation bodies regarding online assessment. 2024-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/33779 Pre-service teachers becoming researchers: the role of professional learning groups in creating a community of inquiry Zeivots, Sandris; Buchanan, John; Pressick-Kilborn, Kimberley Contemporary schools seek to employ teachers who are curious learners, who can employ practitioner inquiry skills to investigate, inform and grow their own classroom practice, responsive to their circumstances. As a profession, the question we must ask is how do we best prepare and continue to equip teachers with the necessary research skills to investigate and inform their own practice? In this study, we share our pedagogical stance and features of our approach in a new core undergraduate subject for pre-service teachers (PSTs). We discuss professional learning groups (PLGs) for initial teacher education students as the main intervention in the subject, and, more specifically, we elaborate how regular participation in PLGs formed in an on-campus subject can help PSTs to become researchers. We draw on 183 student exit tickets and student feedback surveys to consider broader implications for how to engage teachers in research. This study poses questions about the nature of practitioner research and investigates the role that PLGs play in disrupting the challenges universities face in preparing teachers to engage in and with research. 2024-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/33778 Collaborative sensemaking with generative AI: A muse, amuse, muse Vallis, C.; Taleo, W.; Wheeler, P.; Casey, A.; Tucker, S.; Luu, J.; Zeivots, S. Educators are wrestling with the changes wrought by generative AI (GenAI), particularly the widespread adoption of ChatGPT. This paper introduces creative and collaborative sensemaking with GenAI as an alternative form of academic and professional development to spark reflection on the implications of this technology for educators and to increase GenAI literacy. By combining human and AI-generated text in iterative loops, we created a text and a creative process to collectively investigate the use of GenAI in education. Collaborative poetic inquiry, an arts-based research method, was used in tandem with generative experiments using AI tools, culminating in an ode to collaborative sensemaking. Drawing on the authors’ collective experience as a group of educational professionals and academics, we then critically analysed how GenAI may impact educators and augment creative practices to generate new insights. Further implications for practice from this sensemaking with GenAI in education are discussed. 2023-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/33580 Building Good Jobs for Women on the Central Coast Hill, Elizabeth; Cooper, Rae; Seetahul, Suneha; Basu, Sulagna; Kent, Jennifer Women on the Central Coast want good jobs that are financially rewarding, provide opportunities for training and progression, and allow them to meet their family commitments, and health and wellbeing needs across all stages of life. However, living on the Central Coast can limit women’s access to jobs that match their skills and often imposes a high time penalty on women who commute to Sydney or Newcastle for good jobs. On the Central Coast and its environs, poor public transport, inaccessible and high-cost early childhood education and care, combined with a lack of good flexible work and training opportunities leave many women with limited opportunities and constrained choices around what work they can pursue alongside family and personal care needs. This report analyses how women on the Central Coast experience work now, and what they aspire to in their working futures. Barriers and enablers of work vary by stage of life and career, as well as by family type. With limited options, women do their best to balance work and care, but this often comes at significant cost to their own wellbeing as they manage the ‘mental load’ of balancing these competing tasks. This is unfair and inefficient. It limits women’s opportunities for economic security and puts a brake on economic productivity in the region. Public investment on the Central Coast in essential public services such as public transport and early childhood education and care, alongside expanded opportunities for high quality flexible and part-time work, will change and improve employment prospects for women and support their aspirations for a successful future at work. Improving opportunities for women’s employment will benefit households, business and government. It will provide an important boost for the Central Coast economy, promote productivity and improve women’s economic security. 2025-02-03T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/33485 Australian Co-operative History Patmore, Greg This collection of co-operative data is organised by state and territory with the exception of South Australia and Western Australia where the data obtained is not included due to a confidentiality agreement. The files consist of excel files that provide organisational histories for each co-operative in that state and territory. The are two PDF files that provide an overview and bibliography of the Visual Historical Atlas of Australian Co-operatives Project. My co-researchers for the project were Associate Professor Nikola Balnave and Professor Olivera Marjanovic from Macquarie University. 2024-12-17T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/33431 Assessment design through co-design. Reimagining Business School courses Zeivots, Sandris; Sun, Jennifer; Liao, Yuan; Kennedy, Amanda; Cram, Andrew This educational resource explores the transformative practice of assessment design in higher education. The resource focuses on three large courses at a Business School at a leading Australian university. Using a co-design approach, the project brought together students, educators, industry partners, educational developers and learning designers to collaboratively enhance assessment practices over a year-long strategic education project. Key interventions included Connect:In workshops, weekly student reflections, academic capacity-building workshops and student-generated videos. Collectively, these activities aimed to create inclusive, innovative and meaningful assessments aligned with contemporary educational priorities and challenges, including the integration of Generative AI. The outcomes demonstrate co-design’s ability to improve student learning experience and ensure alignment with diverse learning goals and assessment practices. 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/33340 Walking Together: Education Guide for the Indigenous Leadership in Business Video Series McHugh, Amy Bliss; Lafaialii-Paul, Mesepa; Young-Ferris, Anna; Vale, Carol; Sarago, Lisa The ‘Walking Together’ Education Guide serves as a complimentary resource for educators to accompany the One Sydney, Many People (OSMP) funded Indigenous Leadership in Business Video Series. We have collaborated with Indigenous business leaders to create a video series to centre Indigenous ways of leading, knowing and being into curriculum. The ‘Walking Together’ Education Guide was codesigned with Carol Vale of Murawin, Lisa Sarago of Land on Heart, and educators from the University of Sydney. The University of Sydney Business School strives to instil a culturally responsive pedagogy in teaching, learning and student life by delivering an enriching educational experience for all students. This guide will help management/business and other educators integrate our Video Series and amplify the voices of Indigenous leaders in Australia, into their curriculum. This guide is undergirded by the Cultural Interface Theory (Nakata (2007)) and The 8-Ways Pedagogical approaches (Yunkaporta,2009) to enrich curriculum development and processes for better teaching and learning. 2024-11-28T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/33277 Sixty years of research on technology and human resource management: Looking back and looking forward Kim, Sunghoon Technology has changed the way we work and how companies manage their employees. This article reviews 60 years of research on the relationship between technology and human resource management, as represented in Human Resource Management. Based on 154 articles, we identify recurring and evolving patterns of research on technology across three time periods (separated by the advent of the personal computer in 1977 and by the popularization of consumer internet services in 1997), three perspectives on technology (tool, proxy, and ensemble view of technology), and three thematic streams (the impact of technology on jobs and organizations, the utilization of technology in HR activities, and the management of technology workers). Drawing on patterns of research that emerged in the past, we provide suggestions for future HR research on newly arriving technology. 2021-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/33230 Moving from ephemerality to resonant learning: Integrating creative industries leadership experiences into the delivery of leadership education as a lifelong experience Bryant, Peter Developing graduates from business school programs that can develop and apply transdisciplinary capabilities to become responsible, creative, and innovative leaders and creators of good throughout their career is a complex curricular challenge. The development of leadership education programs that explicitly and tacitly integrate the transdisciplinary frameworks, tropes and behavioural aspirations of arts and cultural industries leadership (and vice versa) is equally complex yet enabling of the development and opportunities of human-centred leadership capability. This paper will interrogate the challenges and affordances of designing leadership education programs that purposefully integrate creative industries leadership capabilities to support skills development and experiences that transcend the immediacy of a graduates first job and into the complexities and challenges of a future career facing successive crises. As a counter to the economic and consumerist conceptualisation and co-option of ephemerality as a framing of the market value of lifelong learning to a university, this paper will posit the design concept of resonant learning to describe the longitudinal epistemic influence of learning through educational experiences that last past the immediate gratification of graduate employment. It will use an analysis of staff and student data from a participatory action research project evaluating a higher education program that integrates creative industries knowledge into responsible leadership education conducted over five iterative cycles of development. The study showed that supporting learners to move from a state of ephemerality to states of resonance frames the modalities of transition and experiential learning through a creative leadership education. 2024-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/32980 Breaching Boundaries: Improving Data Breach Notifications in Australia Andrew, Jane; Baker, Max; Bowyer-Pont, Penelope This report presents the findings from an ARC-funded research project examining organisational data breach disclosure practices in Australia. The research sought to understand how organisations navigate the increasingly important and challenging areas of information security, privacy, data breaches, and breach disclosure and notification. We conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 50 senior personnel from organisations including large for-profit entities, key not-for-profits and government agencies at both a state and federal level. We interviewed senior executives and personnel working in information security, privacy, cybersecurity, data management, risk, and compliance roles. In this report we present ten key findings from our interview analysis. For each finding we suggest recommendation(s) that, if implemented, support an improved disclosure regime and can help guide organisational best practice as data breach notification assessments are made. 2024-08-22T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/32706 Looking Beyond Hours of Care: The Effects of Care Strain on Work Withdrawal Among Australian Workers Constantin, Andreea; Hamilton, Myra; Zettna, Nate; Baird, Marian; Dinale, Daniel; Gulesserian, Lisa; Williams, Alison This article advances understanding of the unpaid care–paid work nexus for carers of a person with a disability or illness, or a frail older relative. It examines the relationship between care intensity (measured in terms of both care hours and care strain) and withdrawal from work (measured in terms of both withdrawal of time spent in paid work and withdrawal from career development and progression). The analysis reveals that care strain has a stronger relationship with all dimensions of work withdrawal than care hours. It also reveals that the relationship between care strain and work withdrawal is moderated by a family-supportive work environment. The article sheds new light on the potential role of workplace cultures in mitigating the impacts of work–care conflict. 2022-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/32683 Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property Protocol for Curriculum Wright, Danika; Hardy, Catherine; Janke, Terri; Auld, Rhiannon; Fitch, Emma The University of Sydney Business School is committed to embedding culturally competent practice in all aspects of our research, teaching and engagement. We will work to ensure that all staff, students and community members with whom we interact feel safe, respected and valued. As part of this commitment, the University of Sydney Business School Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Protocol for Curriculum supports academic and professional staff in promoting culturally safe practices across our teaching programs. It is with great pride and respect for the knowledges and cultures of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples that we invite you to learn from, explore, and embed this Protocol in your work. This Protocol has been co-designed with the aim of guiding, educating and directing Business School staff about the importance of cultural attribution and recognising the rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to their Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property. The Protocol guides educational practices that encourage self-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the process to establish and maintain strong relations with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and communities. We recognise that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge and perspectives have been historically excluded or misrepresented within Western education systems, and we are committed to promoting culturally responsive curriculum practices that recognise the richness and diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and knowledge. The Protocol outlined in this document is intended to provide a framework for all staff in the Business School to engage in culturally responsive practices. It is envisaged that this work can help inform culturally responsive curriculum practices in your own curriculum design and development lifecycle. This Protocol provides a valuable resource for educators who seek to engage with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and communities, knowledge and culture in a respectful and meaningful way. 2024-06-20T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/32633 “Just another day in retail”: Understanding and addressing workplace sexual harassment in the Australian retail industry Cooper, Rae; Hill, Elizabeth; Seetahul, Suneha; Foley, Meraiah; Harris, Marnie; Hock, Charlotte; Tapsell, Amy Sexual harassment is a systemic and pervasive feature of the retail industry ecosystem and a persistent part of daily interactions between retail workers, and their managers, peers and customers. It is such a common experience that many retail workers perceive it as “just part of the job”. Sexual harassment causes harm on multiple levels: it affects the wellbeing of individual employees, damages team cohesion, creates economic damage for businesses, and is a drag on the national economy. At June 2023, the retail industry had contributed over $102 million to Australia’s annual gross domestic product (Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman, 2023). It employs 9 per cent of all Australians, and is the nation’s third-largest employer of women and the second largest employer of young people (Australian Bureau of Statistics [ABS], 2021a, 2022b, 2022e). Not only is retail a major source of employment, but it is also an essential service, providing Australians with the goods they depend upon every day. Retail workers deserve safety, dignity and respect. Addressing sexual harassment in the retail industry is both a pressing workplace safety issue and a nationally significant concern. The changed legislative landscape, including the introduction of an additional “positive duty” on employers to eliminate sexual harassment and related unlawful conduct as far as possible, should add extra impetus and urgency for change. 2024-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/32542 From script to screen: An emergent view of AI-generated avatars Vallis, Carmen; Britton, Boyd In an age of ‘deepfakes’, designing learning media and video intentionally and ethically becomes more important than ever. Emerging educational research focuses on generative large language models, which use neural networks to produce human-like text based on prompts. Yet the educational design of synthetic media, particularly AI-generated avatars, which are also currently produced from text prompts, remains less explored.This paper share insights from an ongoing evaluation of realistic, AI-generated avatars as educational presenters at a large Australian metropolitan university. Using commercially available software, we created a suite of AI-generated avatars and accompanying interactives to explore the topic of ethics in business intelligence which was delivered to approximately 1200 students across two semesters in2022 and 2023. The aim was to provoke critical discussion around ethical decision-making with AI by immersing students in text-to-video technology as part of their learning experience.To better understand students’ perceptions of synthetic media as a stimulus for learning, we conducted four focus groups over two iterations of the course. Our multidisciplinary team also documented the design, development, and implementation challenges ofAI-generated avatars. Preliminary findings suggest that clarifying design intentions is key to the effective and ethical application of AI-generated avatars. Automating video content with synthetic media to simplify certain types of educational content could be a catalyst for increased sharing and collaboration.While traditional video formats may prove a simpler choice in the short-term, this study indicates the potential of more hybrid human and nonhuman representation in certain contexts. Students were comfortable with synthetic media use and blending humans and nonhuman elements, expressing a desire for greater interaction with both. We propose a posthuman perspective on AI-generated avatars, one which acknowledges the messy and entangled nature of learning and teaching with technology, that often surfaces issues of ethics and power. To assist educators, ‘VIEW’ is outlined, a brief educational design guide for AI-generated avatars that considers aspects such as the intentions or purpose of the video, the suitability of video as a medium, implementation, and ethical questions.Finally, we suggest more critical and ethical studies on the emergence of synthetic media applications in higher education are needed. 2024-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/32009 Retirees' perceptions of goal setting: A qualitative study Dudley, Dorothy; O'Loughlin, Kate; Lewis, Sophie; Vanessa, Loh Objective: To investigate the language and meanings that retirees give to goals, including their perceptions of the benefits and limitations of pursuing goals in retirement. Methods: In-depth interviews and mini-group discussions were conducted with 60 community-dwelling Australian retirees aged 57 to 88 years. Data were transcribed and analysed thematically. Results: Responses to the term 'goal' varied by age in relation to the meaning and relevance of the term to retirement planning, largely shaped by the perceived formality and flexibility of goal setting which linked to acceptance or fear of failure when goals were not achieved with three profiles emerging: the Acceptors, the Ambivalent and the Rejectors. Language was highly influential in forming perceptions. Conclusion: Retirees' perceptions about the meaning and usefulness of goals varied greatly, with the language used a key factor in the perceived relevance of goal setting. 2020-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/31905 Strategic human resource management in the era of environmental disruptions Kim, Sunghoon; Vaiman, Vlad; Sanders, Karin This article—which serves as an introduction to the special issue of the role of (strategic) human resource management (HRM) in the era of environmental disruptions— summarizes previous research, introduces articles related to this special issue, and provides suggestions for future research in the area. This special issue intends to advance HRM research by putting it in the context of disruptive environments, aiming to deepen our theoretical and empirical knowledge about the role of HRM in these disruptive environments, and provide insights to managers and policymakers who must deal with current as well as future disruptions in extra-organizational environments. The different sections of this introductory paper are structured from the perspective of an individual (“How can HRM help individual employees cope with environmental disruptions?”), an organization (“How can HRM help organizations be more resilient against environmental disruptions?”), and a community/societal perspective (“How can HRM help the community being affected by environmental disruptions?”). We conclude by proposing several research ideas and practical implications for human resource professionals that would enable them to deal with individual employees, their organization, and the community in times of environmental disruptions. 2022-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/31656 Designing Gender Equality into the Future of Law: Final Report Foley, Meraiah; Tapsell, Amy; Cooper, Rae; Lee, Talara; Lipton, Briony; Rutledge-Prior, Serrin; Vromen, Ariadne The legal profession has undergone profound transformation over the past two decades, driven by new technologies and forms of legal service delivery that are upending the traditional organisation of legal work. These changes are disrupting career pathways and requiring lawyers to rethink the skills that will be required for future success. The COVID-19 pandemic spurred further integration of new technologies, and challenged long-held norms in relation to how and where lawyers should work. Collectively, these changes are occurring against a backdrop of persistent gendered inequality. It should be noted that there have been substantial improvements in women's numerical representation in the legal profession. Under current NSWLS leadership, a 20-year trend toward convergence in men's and women's participation in the Australian legal profession has been realised. For example, women now outnumber men in the legal profession in all states and territories across Australia, and in New South Wales, female solicitors have outnumbered male solicitors for a sixth consecutive year. While women remain under-represented in senior leadership roles including as partners, principals, barristers, and judicial members, over one third (35%) of private practice partners/principals in New South Wales are now women. In corporate and government legal roles, there is now an even split between women and men in senior roles. Numerical dominance aside, issues of gendered discrimination, disrespect, and harassment remain stubbornly entrenched in the profession. 2023-09-11T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/31445 Teachers’ work during the COVID-19 pandemic: Shifts, challenges and opportunities Wilson, Rachel; Stacey, Meghan; McGrath-Champ, Susan Reports of teachers’ work intensification have become common over the last decade, so it seems important to ask: how are teachers coping with the additional demands and changes brought by COVID-19? In this paper, we present initial data from a large, system-wide survey of teachers in NSW public schools, undertaken during the first phase of the pandemic in Australia, in order to document the nature of these shifts. These data provide teachers’ voice on some of the challenges, and difficulties they face in relation to professional work during the pandemic; and also the opportunities they have identified within the flux of change that has occurred in 2020. This study considers: 1. teaching in ‘COVID-wary classrooms’; and 2. teaching via remote learning. Heavy demands for up-skilling, particularly for the second of these shifts, teaching via remote learning, and the development and implementation of new public health understanding within schools, have created new and additional challenges for the teaching profession. 2020-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/31443 Leaders for good in a post-crisis world: Designing transdisciplinary and resonant leadership education programs in transitional spaces Bryant, Peter Developing business graduates to have the transdisciplinary and resonant capability to be leaders for good throughout their career is a complex curricular challenge. The design of leadership education programs is impacted by two dissonances (the resonance dissonance and the transdisciplinary dissonance) that emerge between the transitions students are experiencing as they journey through higher education and the transactional behaviours engendered by policy and institutional practice. This paper will interrogate the challenges and affordances of designing a leadership education program that purposefully creates transitional spaces for students to integrate, repurpose and share their transdisciplinary knowledge, skills, and experience as they develop their skills to be leaders for good. Using the evaluative and reflective outputs from a participatory action research project, a single instance case study has been developed on the Leading in a Post-Crisis World program at the University of Sydney Business School (Australia) to interrogate the positive and negative impacts that the resonance and transdisciplinary dissonances have on the successful design of a leadership education program. The paper will posit the notion of resonant learning as a way of enhancing the efficacy and longitudinal benefits of leadership education to effect social change and address current and yet to be experienced critical global, local, or personal crises. 2023-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/31147 Forecasting tail risk measures for financial time series: an extreme value approach with covariates James, Robert; Leung, Jessica; Leung, Henry; Prokhorov, Artem The paper develops a tail risk forecasting model that incorporates the wealth of economic and financial information available to risk managers. The approach can be viewed as a regularized extension of the two-stage GARCH-EVT model of McNeil and Frey (2000) where we permit a time-varying data-driven selection of a sparse set of covariates affecting the scale of the extreme value distribution of risk. We use a rich data set from the U.S. equity market to explore when this additional information improves Value-at-Risk and Expected Shortfall forecasts compared to popular tail risk forecasting methods such as the traditional and non-regularized GARCH-EVT models, and the GJR-GARCH(1,1), Hawkes POT model, CaViaR and CARE models. Under an extensive set of performance criteria and tests we demonstrate that our approach produces competitive risk forecasts, particularly during periods of financial distress. 2023-01-01T00:00:00Z