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Published on Jan 30, 2016
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MORE DECKS TO EXPLORE
PRESENTATION OUTLINE
At a glance
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A taster
I think Asia is much more popular with students on a short-term basis. We always talk about this at conferences. It’s a first step. It’s a teaser. You dip your toe in the water, not super high committal, it’s three weeks, and then hopefully afterwards we do get a lot of students that say, “Yes, that was a great experience. I could see myself living there for a longer time.”
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Practical, on the ground experience
They went to a rural village. They saw what a rural healthcare system looked like, compared with the ones in town, so I think they got a whole lot of stuff that you can put in a dry academic text and they won’t ever absorb it. But this way they’ve got this real hands on.
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Academic motivator
“It’s made me a more confident teacher. I feel more confident to take control of the classroom. For example, one day my teacher was away, and I had no idea they weren’t even coming in at all, no one told me. And I sort of just had to take the reins because I was in the class, and it was, yep, okay you’ve got something planned and you’ve got to run with it. It was really good, challenging I think because I felt like I stepped up in that moment. I felt like I was actually a teacher on the job because I ran the whole thing. There was no assistance from anyone else. I was able to teach without being watched or judged, and it just felt like my class which was a great feeling”
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Actually for me it’s opened up the doors to one day to teach in Asian countries. Prior to this I was more inclined to go to English speaking countries, so across to Europe, England or the Americas. But this experience opened up Asia and I think I do want to go back to Malaysia or somewhere close, somewhere near there. So it definitely changed my views on where I want to be in the future, what I want to do as well.
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“I want to travel more after doing my overseas placement and it would be great if there were other teaching programs to get involved in or just volunteer overseas or something, just to see more”
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“It was really nice to see how the Malays and Indians and Chinese they all just mesh, like everyone was together, it wasn’t segregated, everyone was just so together as a unit. It was really great knowing that because before I left, I thought the three different cultures would be separate. I was scared coming into the Islamic school. I thought how am I going to be around these people? But it was really good, it was really interesting. And I even went to the National Mosque on one of the days with a friend and that was just so interesting seeing the main prayer hall and people praying in there.
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So it was a really challenging experience. And then they helped each other very well. So in that sense, there’s so much room for personal growth and then they really supported extremely well to each other. So yeah, definitely, it’s something that you cannot experience, you know, with any classroom so much.
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To be honest, I found the assessments to be a lot. Like they were two really big reports for only two weeks there, and we had full days of lectures and then full days of excursions. So we actually spent a lot of time at night sitting in our hotel rooms and just writing instead of actually being out and experiencing Thailand. So a lot of the time we had to say no to our student mentors because they wanted to show us around and we’d be like, “No. We have like a deadline. We have to finish this report by then.”
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The more diversity there is among students, the better. And we were fortunate to have two mature aged students in the tour, which was very unusual.And they are wonderful resource to help younger students, but also it goes the other way around, younger students who are helping more mature aged students. But just the diversity is so healthy and to have a limit of 28, it was really the only thing that I puzzled about the New Colombo plan.
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Provides mobility option to under-represent disciplines
We prioritise short programs for the New Colombo Plan, more bang for your buck. It’s a great opportunity to try to have more under-represented fields of study involved, so we do have medicine, nursing, various types of engineering, various types of sciences that are represented. So actually, the majority of our projects for 2016 came from sciences, health sciences and engineering, because you can’t do a semester of study overseas in nursing because of the accreditation requirements.
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Finding space in course
A lot of that hard work is actually making sure these students have space in their course plans to be able to go on the study tour. That’s why we actually have to select our students very early on.you’ve got to plan for it in advance.
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Convincing employers of the benefits
I don’t think we’ve done enough to really convince employers or even the university that the short programs can be a transformational experience that can improve career access. I think the studies that I’ve seen so far indicate that short term programs are ranked fairly low on employer rankings.
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Resourcing
We have only one short programs co-ordinator at this university and one exchange co-ordinator. We’ll probably be sending out 1,600 students this year, so staff is a huge issue. We’re not able to have the time to do the meaningful marketing and getting into academic areas. I think that there needs to be a lot more support from the faculty area but again, it’s who is going to do it? There’s not dedicated staff for it. So the university is its own barrier, that they simply haven’t supported it until recently.
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