DataSharing

'Does Legislation Impede Data Sharing in Australia Across Institutions and Jurisdictions? A Scoping Review' by James Scheibner, Nicole Kroesche, Luke Wakefield, Tina Cockburn, Steven M. McPhail and Bernadette Richards in (2023) 47 Journal of Medical Systems Review comments 

 Healthcare providers and organisations, researchers and government agencies increasingly call for seamless access to, and transfer of, health and social welfare data across institutions and jurisdictions. Different healthcare providers request access to patient data, records, and information from other institutions to facilitate continuity of care and in seeking to reduce the risk of clinical errors. Likewise, patient healthcare information in aggregate form represents an increasingly powerful tool to promote collaborative health-related research by universities and research institutions. Finally, data can help guide quality improvement, policy development and resource allocation by government agencies such as public health departments. These use cases will be described as ‘data sharing’ throughout this paper. Whilst these use cases might play different roles in the healthcare system, they have the potential to promote public safety and improve clinical outcomes. 

Despite the potential for health and social welfare data sharing to improve the safety and quality of healthcare and facilitate research, it remains relatively uncommon in Australia. Although technical incompatibility and public concerns over data sharing are important considerations, one commonly cited reason not to share data is regulatory burden. Regulation, ranging from formal legislation to institutional policies and guidelines for conduct, supplies the privacy and research ethics principles concerning the use and sharing of health and social welfare data. Further, different regulation protects individuals with respect to how their data is used. This dual function has led healthcare providers and organisations, government agencies and researchers to frequently argue that in seeking to provide a protective framework, the regulation serves to prohibit data sharing. In addition, stakeholders such as researchers and healthcare providers often perceive this regulation as creating a significant barrier to data sharing across jurisdictions. Regulatory divergence is more complicated in a federal nation such as Australia, where the Federal and state governments have overlapping jurisdiction. Specifically, Federal privacy laws govern the processing of personal information by private entities as well as Commonwealth government agencies. By contrast, state agencies (such as public hospitals) are regulated under state privacy, health information and public sector laws. This somewhat diverse regulatory landscape can complicate effective sharing of data, but the challenge is not limited to clearly identified regulatory barriers. A careful review of the discourse surrounding the sharing of health and social welfare data reveals that the extent to which the identified restrictions on data sharing are actual, perceived, or self-imposed remains unclear. Although published literature has so far focused on legal analyses of privacy legislation and other forms of regulation, it can also assist in the characterisation of regulatory barriers to data sharing as either perceived, real or self-imposed. This understanding can, in turn, facilitate meaningful engagement with the challenges facing those who wish to share data for valid research and healthcare delivery-related purposes and inform law and policy reform. 

This paper presents a scoping review of the academic literature on cross-institutional and jurisdictional sharing of medical and social welfare data in Australia published between January 2011 and December 2021. To provide a meaningful review of the literature, a broad approach was adopted. Both empirical studies where data sharing supports the research method, and policy studies that consider the impact of data sharing regulations were included. This approach was adopted with a view to assessing whether perspectives on data sharing regulation diverge between scientific researchers and policy scholars. We then deductively coded these studies according to methods used in each study, as well as stakeholders, jurisdictions and regulatory tools mentioned. In addition, we deductively and inductively coded each of these articles to identify the specific challenges associated with data sharing. We also categorised articles depending on whether they considered data sharing at the institutional or inter-jurisdictional level. We concluded by examining the extent to which reported issues with data sharing are consistent with how data sharing legislation operates between different jurisdictions in Australia. The results from this study will help assess whether current regulations prohibit data sharing or other factors play a more significant role in prohibiting data sharing across Australia.

Sovereignty

Sovereignty Under The Australian Constitution: Why is Section 6 of the Australia Acts binding on State Parliaments?' by Jonathan Crowe in (2023) UQ Law Journal comments 

Section 6 of the' Australia Acts 1986 provides that, when a State law concerns the ‘constitution, powers and procedure’ of the State Parliament, it must abide by any relevant ‘manner and form’ requirements in previous legislation. This provision is generally accepted as imposing a binding limitation on the sovereignty of State Parliaments. However, the reason why this section is binding on State Parliaments is disputed. This article begins by discussing the concept of sovereignty in philosophical terms, before turning to the history of sovereignty in Australia. It explores the role of the Australia Acts in the constitutional system, focusing on their implications for constitutive power in the States, then looks specifically at s 6 and its capacity to bind State Parliaments. I argue that attempts to explain the authority of s 6 by appealing to the United Kingdom or Commonwealth Australia Acts fail. The only satisfactory explanation appeals to the idea that the Australian Parliaments acting together have a special form of sovereignty that allows them to make certain kinds of constitutional changes. This conclusion has important implications for how constitutive power is understood in Australia today. 

The Australia Acts 1986 are a truly extraordinary package of legislation. They consist of two Australia Acts passed by the Commonwealth and United Kingdom Parliaments, respectively, preceded by six Australia Acts (Request) Acts enacted by the State Parliaments. The legislation made important changes to Australia’s constitutional system, particularly regarding Australia’s relationship to the United Kingdom, but also concerning the powers of State Parliaments. The unique way that the Australia Acts were enacted was intended to harness the combined sovereignty of the eight distinct Parliaments involved. Nonetheless, questions still arise about the source of the legislation’s authority to change Australia’s constitutional arrangements. This issue holds the potential to illuminate the notion of sovereignty in Australia, including both its historical development and its current status. Section 6 of the Australia Acts provides that when a State law concerns the ‘constitution, powers and procedure’ of the State Parliament, it must be passed in accordance with any relevant ‘manner and form’ requirements. This provision is generally accepted as imposing a binding limitation on the sovereignty of State Parliaments. However, the reason why this section is binding on State Parliaments is disputed. No satisfactory explanation for this conclusion has been provided, including by the High Court. This article begins by discussing the concept of sovereignty in philosophical terms, before turning to the history of sovereignty in Australia. It explores the role of the Australia Acts in the constitutional system, focusing on their implications for constitutive power in the States, then looks specifically at s 6 and the source of its ability to bind State Parliaments to manner and form requirements. Why, then, does s 6 of the Australia Acts bind the States? 

Explanations based on the authority of the United Kingdom or Commonwealth versions of the Australia Acts are unconvincing. I argue that the only satisfactory explanation appeals to the idea that the Australian Parliaments acting together have a special form of sovereignty that allows them to make certain kinds of constitutional changes. This explanation derives from the distinctive process used to enact the Australia Acts themselves. The proposal might seem undemocratic when compared with the referendum process under s 128 of the Constitution. However, it is consistent with the role played by parliamentary bodies in the Australian system — not only as organs of representative democracy, but also as repositories of constituent power.

ChatGPT

'Not quite eye to A.I.: student and teacher perspectives on the use of generative artificial intelligence in the writing process' by Alex Barrett and Austin Pack in (2023) 20(59) International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education comments 

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) can be used to author academic texts at a similar level to what humans are capable of, causing concern about its misuse in education. Addressing the role of GenAI in teaching and learning has become an urgent task. This study reports the results of a survey comparing educators’ (n = 68) and university students’ (n = 158) perceptions on the appropriate use of GenAI in the writing process. The survey included representations of user prompts and output from ChatGPT, a GenAI chatbot, for each of six tasks of the writing process (brainstorming, outlining, writing, revising, feedback, and evaluating). Survey respondents were asked to differentiate between various uses of GenAI for these tasks, which were divided between student and teacher use. Results indicate minor disagreement between students and teachers on acceptable use of GenAI tools in the writing process, as well as classroom and institutional-level lack of preparedness for GenAI. These results imply the need for explicit guidelines and teacher professional development on the use of GenAI in educational contexts. This study can contribute to evidence-based guidelines on the integration of GenAI in teaching and learning. 

Public interest in artificial intelligence (AI) has grown substantially as a result of recent public access to large language models (LLMs; e.g., OpenAI’s GPT-3 and 4, Google’s PaLM 1 and 2), and chatbots (e.g., OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, Microsoft’s Bing) that allow users to interface with LLMs. These Generative AI (GenAI) tools afford individuals with the ability to instantly generate writing on any topic by inputting a simple prompt. The public discourse surrounding GenAI has been mostly positive, but in the education sector there is serious concern about academic integrity and plagiarism (Dehouche, 2021; Lampropoulos et al., 2023; Sullivan et al., 2023; Yeo, 2023). Some schools have responded by banning the technology outright (Yang, 2023), a move likened by some to the banning of the pocket calculator when it was perceived as a threat to math education (Urlaub & Dessein, 2022). What is clear is that this new technology possesses disruptive potential and that institutions which have relied heavily on student writing for education and assessment will need to respond accordingly. 

Although a few schools have banned ChatGPT and similar tools, many have not, displaying confidence that their institution’s academic integrity policy is robust enough to accommodate the new technology. However, current definitions of plagiarism have been described as medieval (Dehouche, 2021; Sadeghi, 2019), typically including language such as kidnapping, stealing or misappropriating the work of others (Sutherland-Smith, 2005), which now leads us to question whether a chatbot counts as one of these others. Generative AI is trained on a selection of diverse natural language data from across the Internet which allows it to string together unique combinations of words and phrases, similar to how humans learn to produce an unlimited amount of novel spoken or written text from the limited language they absorb from their environment, a tenet of generative grammar (Chomsky, 1991). The result is that there is no identifiable other whose work is being stolen by a chatbot. To complicate matters, the language of OpenAI’s Terms of Use state that it assigns users “all its right, title and interest in and to Output” from ChatGPT, including for purposes of publication (OpenAI, 2023). Any practiced educator would likely agree that submitting an essay written by ChatGPT without disclosure violates academic integrity, but students may not readily see a problem with it. 

Although GenAI has multiple applications, its use as an authoring tool in programs like ChatGPT allow for easy misuse. Students who have purposefully violated academic integrity in the past through the use of contract cheating or paper mills will likely not hesitate to use ChatGPT or other GenAI tools to do so now, but other students will need guidance on how to avoid inadvertently cheating. Student perceptions of academic dishonesty have historically been unclear or incomprehensive, and rarely align with teacher expectations (Tatum, 2022), GenAI will only serve to complicate this (Farrokhnia et al., 2023). 

Some advocate working towards a coexistence with AI in education by establishing common goals and guided exploration of the limitations of the technology (Godwin-Jones, 2022; Tseng & Warschauer, 2023). Yeo (2023) has specifically recommended the exploration of student perceptions about the ethics of using GenAI tools, and Pack and Maloney (2023a) suggested teacher and researcher use should also be investigated. 

To date no consensus has arisen regarding what constitutes appropriate use of GenAI in higher education. Therefore, with the goal of identifying some common expectations, the purpose of this study is to explore student and teacher perspectives of using GenAI for various tasks in the writing process, including brainstorming, outlining, writing, and revising done by students, and evaluation and feedback done by teachers. The research questions guiding the study are: 

1. What are undergraduate students’ and teachers’ perspectives on using GenAI in the writing process (brainstorming, outlining, writing, revising, evaluation, and feedback)? 

2. How do student and teacher perspectives on the use of GenAI in the writing process compare?

Teaching

'Beyond emergency remote teaching: did the pandemic lead to lasting change in university courses?' by Broadbent, Ajjawi, Bearman, Boud and Dawson in (2023) 20(58) International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education comments 

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly disrupted traditional methods of teaching and learning within higher education. But what remained when the pandemic passed? While the majority of the literature explores the shifts during the pandemic, with much speculation about post-pandemic futures, a clear understanding of lasting implications remains elusive. To illuminate this knowledge gap, our study contrasts pedagogical practices in matched courses from the pre-pandemic year (2019) to the post-pandemic phase (2022/2023). We also investigate the factors influencing these changes and the perceptions of academics on these shifts. Data were gathered from academics in a large comprehensive Australian university of varying disciplines through a mixed-methods approach, collecting 67 survey responses and conducting 21 interviews. Findings indicate a notable increase in online learning activities, authentic and scaffolded assessments, and online unsupervised exams post-pandemic. These changes were primarily driven by university-guided adaptations, time and workload pressures, continued COVID-19 challenges, local leadership, an individual desire to innovate, and concerns about academic integrity. While most changes were seen as favourable by academics, perceptions were less positive concerning online examinations. These findings illuminate the enduring effects of the pandemic on higher education, suggesting longer-term implications than previous studies conducted during the acute phase of the pandemic. 

In 2020 and 2021, higher education institutions globally had to modify curricula and pedagogy due to the COVID-19 pandemic (UNESCO, n.d.). This rapid shift became commonly known as ‘emergency remote teaching’ (Hodges et al., 2020). Emergency remote teaching (ERT) involves unplanned, quick adaptation, often using existing technology and resources, and with emphasis on preserving instruction rather than enhancing learning quality (Watermeyer et al., 2021). This type of teaching is distinct from online learning, which is a thought-out approach designed for online delivery and is considerate of learners’ needs and preferences (Hodges et al., 2020). During this emergency phase, face-to-face classes were stopped or transferred online to lessen COVID-19 risks (Crawford et al., 2020; Johnson et al., 2020). Class assessments moved online, activities requiring specific locations or equipment were disrupted, and students had to work more independently, regardless of their self-regulation skills (Bartolic et al., 2022a; Slade et al., 2022). Many academics felt ill-prepared for the changes that transpired (Sum & Oancea, 2022) and reported concerns that teaching quality suffered during this time (Weidlich & Kalz, 2021). 

COVID changed teaching and learning practices in a profound manner. For example, a consortium comprising nine institutions from around the world investigated changes to teaching and learning during the early stages of the pandemic, collecting data from 4243 students, 281 instructors, 15 senior administrators, and 43 instructional designers (see Bartolic et al., 2022a, 2022b; Guppy et al., 2022a, 2022b). This body of work showed challenges faced in ERT (Guppy et al., 2022a), including the modifications in assessment approaches corresponding to the digital shift (Bartolic et al., 2022a) and student vulnerabilities and confidence in an online learning environment (Bartolic et al., 2022b). However, are these findings a question of a momentary disruption and a return to the previous status quo? Or does the pandemic represent the kind of external shock that fundamentally changes the landscape? Funding bodies report substantial challenges for teaching and learning innovations to have long lasting impacts (Kottmann et al., 2020). What is interesting about the pandemic is that it forced change across all levels of the university all at once, and this may prove to be a useful lesson for understanding how educational change itself can unfold in different circumstances. Therefore, it is important to ask what, if anything, has been retained and why. 

In a systematic review from 2023, Imran et al. analysed 68 studies on blended and online teaching modes, aiming to identify emerging themes in learning modes from the post-pandemic era. Notably, of the studies they examined, only a handful were conducted in the recent post-pandemic years of 2022 and 2023. Among the few that were, none compared pre-pandemic conditions to the post-pandemic environment nor centred their analysis on data highlighting shifts in teaching practices from the viewpoint of educators. Instead, a significant portion of these studies offered mere speculations about the future in the aftermath of the pandemic. This led the authors to emphasise a noteworthy gap in the literature, concluding that “future research should focus on the long-term effects of COVID-19 on teaching modes and the resulting changes in curriculum development” (p. 8). Echoing this sentiment, Kerres and Buchner (2022) noted that much of the current research predominantly centres around the pre- and mid-pandemic phases, with scant attention paid to post-pandemic impacts. They argue that despite the plethora of available research, “it is still difficult to grasp a clear picture of the effects of the pandemic on education in the various sectors of education worldwide” (p. 6). This ambiguity primarily stems from the dearth of data concerning educational transformations in the post-pandemic world. 

The current research intends to delve deeper into the post-pandemic aftermath than previous studies. We explore the elements from the pre-pandemic era that were retained and what adjustments made during the pandemic persisted, if any. Further, using ecological systems theory as a framework, we explore which factors at the individual, faculty/discipline, university and outside the university contributed to retain changes. This will enhance understanding into how educational change occurs and may allow universities, faculties, and academics to tackle the challenging problem of sustaining change to teaching and learning practices.