'Infrastructuring the Digital Public Sphere' by Julie E Cohen in (2023) 25 Yale Journal of Law & Technology (forthcoming) comments
The idea of a "public sphere"-- a shared, ideologically neutral domain where ideas and arguments may be shared, encountered, and contested -- serves as a powerful imaginary in legal and policy discourse, informing both assumptions about how public communication works and ideals to which inevitably imperfect realities are compared. In debates about feasible and legally permissible content governance mechanisms for digital platforms, the public sphere ideal has counseled attention to questions of ownership and control rather than to other, arguably more pressing questions about systemic configuration. This essay interrogates such debates through the lens of infrastructure, with particular reference to the ways that digital tracking and advertising infrastructures perform systemic content governance functions.
Social infrastructure of a different sort in recommendations by the Productivity Commission in its Advancing Prosperity: 5-year Productivity Inquiry report.
The Commission states
Building an adaptable workforce: education
Reflecting the role of education in creating a high skilled and highly adaptable workforce, broad ranging reforms are proposed across higher education, vocational education and training (VET), schools and lifelong learning. These reforms emphasise stronger foundational learning to support further skills acquisition throughout individuals’ working lives via a broader array of flexible options.
Higher education reforms aim to create a more dynamic university sector, putting greater emphasis on quality teaching. Loan reforms would expand access to high quality VET, and encourage emerging vocational options that develop broad, adaptive and less occupation specific skills.
A more coherent approach to lifelong learning and ongoing skill development is based on targeted tax incentives, and the improved availability and recognition of flexible, short form training options.
Long term improvements in school outcomes are possible through increasing (and judicious) use of learning technology and a stronger link between pedagogical evidence and classroom practice.
Proposed reforms focus on assisting governments and schools in this journey.
Reform directive 1: Improve schools’ capacity to lay the educational foundations for the future workforce
Recommendation 8.1 Leverage digital technology in schools
State and Territory Governments should work with schools to extend, improve and embed the use of education technology in order to realise future benefits for students. Initiatives should aim to: • enable teaching practices to evolve with the changing classroom environment by prioritising the development and implementation of digital tools to support teaching and learning, while balancing flexibility for individual jurisdictions’ needs – this could include developing an online assessment tool and giving the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) responsibility for researching and vetting effective digital technologies to be implemented in schools • replace manual school administrative processes with technology based and automated solutions where this has not been done already – this could include evaluating technology based solutions for administrative processes currently in place and developing mechanisms to diffuse these to other schools • support continuous commitment to ongoing professional development modules that support teachers in using data analytics to drive student improvement.
Recommendation 8.2 Make best practice teaching common practice
State and Territory Governments should facilitate greater classroom access for the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) to support more principal and teacher involvement in education research to ensure that evidence based research provides information that is salient and readily applicable by practitioners. Initiatives should focus on: • enabling greater observation of, and feedback on, classroom teaching practices, by supporting more informal teacher networks, and creating or strengthening the existing roles within the local school system for highly accomplished and lead teachers (HALT) to share their in depth knowledge and skills with their colleagues • increasing curriculum implementation support for teachers, by curating high quality, evidence based and government endorsed curriculum resources (curriculum plans, whole subject sequences, lesson plans and classroom tools), to be made available for teachers and school leaders from a single source.
Reform directive 2: Enable innovative schooling approaches for improved learning outcomes
Recommendation 8.3 Enable experimentation with alternative approaches to schooling
State and Territory Governments should be open to experimenting with new, innovative school models or operational changes where there is an evidence base (including overseas) to suggest outcomes could be improved for Australian students. In the first instance, legislative, regulatory, administrative or policy barriers that would prevent individual schools varying their operating model should be removed. In addition, there should be capacity and appropriate resourcing within the local school system to allow the merits of any trials to be evaluated. Innovations should aim to: • offer different lesson delivery options to lift quality teaching and learning, including for example, offering online classes in the absence of a teacher with the relevant expertise in a topic, or trials of untimed syllabus approaches to promote a continuous learning process • better cater to student needs to encourage school attendance and lift student outcomes, including through variations in school hours and use of technology to personalise students’ learning environment.
Reform directive 3: Grow access to tertiary education
Recommendation 8.4 Grow access to higher education over time
The Australian Government should adopt an improved demand driven model for providing Commonwealth supported places to domestic undergraduate university students, subject to measures outlined in other recommendations that: contain fiscal costs (recommendation 8.5); and ensure all students are adequately supported (recommendations 8.13 and 8.14).
Recommendation 8.5 Better targeting of investment in higher education
The Australian Government should introduce a new university funding model to better target investment while facilitating wider access to higher education. • Total university funding per student by field of study (comprising the student contribution and government contribution) should continue to be the cost of delivery for that field (reflecting a median estimate of efficient costs with the methodology to be refined over time as outlined in recommendation 8.6). • The student contribution should be set based on average expected earnings for each field of study, with students with a greater capacity to repay incurring more debt. Student contributions should be higher, on average, to recoup a greater share of the costs of university from those who benefit from attending university, rather than recouping this from the broader tax base. This would also help to fund the return to a demand driven system. • The government contribution should make up the gap between the student contribution and estimated cost of delivery for each field of study.
Recommendation 8.6 Improve price setting in tertiary education
The Australian Government should conduct regular costing exercises to estimate the cost of delivering tertiary teaching and research. The methodology underpinning these cost exercises should be periodically reviewed and refined to inform more accurate cost estimates, and should aim to ultimately reflect only efficient costs. These cost estimates should inform funding as well as price and loan caps, to encourage efficient delivery of quality education and research by tertiary institutions.
Recommendation 8.7 Expand loan eligibility to more students
The Australian Government, in consultation with State and Territory governments, should gradually expand VET Student Loan eligibility. • Access should expand to more Diploma and Advanced Diploma level courses. Instead of current criteria, all courses should be eligible except those that are primarily taken for leisure or have demonstrated poor labour market outcomes. This expansion should be evaluated after a suitable period, including observed effects of the earlier expansion on student participation, course decisions and employment outcomes; and any evidence of rorting by providers. Following this evaluation, and addressing any implementation issues, eligibility should also be considered for Certificate IV and Certificate III courses. • Loan fee arrangements should also be equalised across the tertiary sector, levied on all students regardless of type (that is, extended from fee for service VET students and non university higher education students to include subsidised VET students and university students). The loan fee rate should also be lowered reflecting application to a broader base of students.
Reform directive 4: Support a culture of lifelong learning for an agile workforce
Recommendation 8.8 Consolidate support for lifelong learning
The Australian Government should consolidate and examine the effectiveness and accessibility of available programs to support lifelong learning and to reduce gaps and increase uptake. In doing so, it should evaluate the effectiveness of targeted programs to inform and prioritise policies for a consolidated lifelong learning strategy by: • trialling policies that target support at employed lower income people, including vouchers for career planning and work related upskilling and reskilling • evaluating the incoming Skills and Training Boost to assess its effects on the uptake of additional overall training, the skills it develops, productivity, labour mobility, and the characteristics of the businesses most responsive to the measure. Government linked administrative datasets will be useful for such an evaluation but might need to be supplemented • extending the existing capacity for self education deductions to education that is likely to lead to additional income outside of the employee’s existing employment. This change should be evaluated after a suitable period, and pursued subject to assurance that strong integrity measures can effectively reduce the risks of fraudulent claims • examining the effectiveness of training programs delivered to people who are unemployed and those transitioning to work such as Employability Skills Training programs, particularly for people later in life. Government should also increase the accessibility, flexibility, and coherence of available pathways by: • extending income contingent loans to more VET courses (recommendation 8.7) • providing alternative exit opportunities through the provision of nested qualifications (recommendation 8.13) • requiring publicly funded universities to make their lecture materials available online, with consideration of extending this to some aspects of government funded VET where that is practically feasible (recommendation 8.9) • ensuring that the Australian Government’s Microcred Seeker extend beyond courses supplied by TEQSA recognised providers to the VET sector and where possible, to other private and well recognised domestic and international course offerings • constraining regulations that make acquiring new skills and moving to new occupations overly onerous. Most particularly, through regular review of occupational licensing policies and addressing issues in scope of practice (reform directive 10).
Reform directive 5: Increase tertiary education teaching quality to underpin a well trained workforce
Recommendation 8.9 Leverage information to improve quality
The Australian Government should: • increase the transparency of teaching performance by requiring universities to provide all lectures online and for free • refine and validate new Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching (QILT), and use these and other data to develop and publish more meaningful indicators of tertiary teaching quality and performance • adapt the ComparED tool to address the risk that students may misunderstand its information and consider the option of abandoning it and providing additional QILT data to non government funded websites that cover many other aspects of higher education providers relevant to student choice • give the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) the responsibility to undertake external university teaching quality assurance review processes akin to those applied by the Quality Assurance Agency (Scotland).
Recommendation 8.10 Professionalise the teaching role
The Australian Government should bolster the incentives for, and prestige of, higher education teaching by: • facilitating trials of additional funding for undertaking research and teaching development provided to individual staff based on their teaching performance, drawing on the Griffith Business School’s Teaching Excellence Recognition Scheme (TERS) • trialling a modest Australian Research Council Grant that provides funding for teaching focused research for 6 months to a year • enhancing preparation for higher education teaching, informed by the evidence collected by initiatives outlined in recommendations 8.9 and 8.11.
Recommendation 8.11 Develop an Australian evidence base
The Australian Government should extend the role of the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) to the collection and dissemination of evidence on best practice post school teaching, covering both VET and higher education. As part of this new role, AERO should also: • draw on the lessons from the teaching practices of awardees of the Australian Government’s Australian Awards for University Teaching • undertake a rapid review of the use of formative and summative review processes and professional development initiatives in higher education institutions.
Recommendation 8.12 Favour light handed and simple incentives over performance based funding
The Australian Government should: • put on hold the scheduled commencement of performance based funding of universities in 2024 and only reinstitute if its risks are better managed and if other approaches to improving the performance of universities have proved ineffective • explore the option of financial rewards to higher education providers that AERO identifies as having made successful efforts to improve and use formative assessment tools and professional development (drawing on recommendation 8.11).
Reform directive 6: Better and more flexible matching between students and work opportunities
Recommendation 8.13 Expand alternative exit opportunities through the provision of nested qualifications
The Australian Government should require that for any given undergraduate degree, Australian higher education providers create at least one subset of courses that, if completed, lead to a lower level qualification for students who decide to withdraw before completing the whole degree (‘a nested qualification’). The Australian Government should leave the design, requirements, and timing of the nested qualification/s to providers’ discretion, with the exception that any qualification would need to meet the relevant Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) standards and monitoring requirements.
Recommendation 8.14 Give students support to complete and clarity to exit
The Australian Government should amend the Higher Education Support Act 2003 (Cth) (HESA) to support completion where desirable and facilitate early exits where necessary. It should do this by: • providing grants to encourage higher education providers to experiment with and share new strategies for student retention • assessing any individual grant for its effectiveness and lessons in post implementation reviews and evaluating the higher education grant program as a whole after six years to determine whether rounds of funding under the grant have contributed to a demonstrable improvement in student completion rates • amending the ‘census date’ in the HESA to the ‘payment date’ and requiring that universities effectively communicate to students that the payment date is the time when they can exit without having to pay fees for any initially commenced course.
