[LINK] Online University Access for Indigenous Communities

[Tom Worthington]

On 16/09/12 08:56, tomk wrote:

> This link appears to be broken (at least for me). ...

Apologies, the correct link for the Final Report of the Review of Higher
Education Access and Outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
People, is:
http://www.innovation.gov.au/HigherEducation/Indigenous/ReviewOfIndigenousHigherEducation/FinalReport/index.html

I had chopped "index.html" off the URL to make it shorter, but that did
not work.

> A pdf version is available ... However it has a July 2012 date
> thereon. (Could be an updated version.)

No, the report appears to have been completed in July, but it was not
released until last week.

The PDF version is useful if you want to search, or print out, the whole
report. But I found the HTML version better for reading on screen and
for copying excerpts from. The Executive summary is at:
http://www.innovation.gov.au/HigherEducation/Indigenous/ReviewOfIndigenousHigherEducation/FinalReport/executivesummary.html

The web designer in this case has done what I have been advocating for
some time: offer the web version first on the page, with the
PDF later. Otherwise I suspect that many people click on the
first link they see and end up with hundreds of pages of PDF, which they
did not really want.

In this case the table of contents could be made more
prominent on the web version by labelling it "Contents", as is done in
the printed version. Also it might have been better having the landing
page an extended table of contents, not the front matter. I extracted 
the full table of contents from the web page and blogged it at:
http://blog.tomw.net.au/2012/09/online-university-access-for-indigenous.html#toc

ps: The report also discusses supervision of Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander HDR students. I am studying research supervision
techniques at the moment and the “hands-on” approach and appreciation of
cultural differences (particularly a deference to authority) discussed,
are also relevant to other groups of students:
http://blog.tomw.net.au/2012/09/supervision-of-indigenous-higher-degree.html


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Tom Worthington FACS CP, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
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Adjunct Lecturer, Research School of Computer Science,
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/