NEWS campusreview. com. au
Stay the course
Prospective students encouraged to accept university offers despite ongoing uncertainty over deregulation.
With about 88,000 course offers expected to be extended by Australia’ s universities this month amidst ongoing uncertainty regarding higher-education reform, the National Tertiary Education Union has urged prospective students not to be scared away from study.
In an interview with Campus Review ahead of the main round of university offers, NTEU president Jeannie Rea took aim at the Abbott Government’ s ongoing push to deregulate universities – a policy that has led to widespread concern over potential increases in student fees – but argued the move was not cause to give up on higher-education goals.
“ I think at the moment it is important that students wanting to go to university this year take up a place if they’ re offered one and enrol and start undertaking their studies. It’ s not a good time for putting off the idea of going to university,” she said.“ I really [ believe ] students should not be letting Tony Abbott’ s government destroy their dreams of a university education.”
Rea said she understood why prospective students might feel some trepidation in accepting offers given the lack of clarity regarding the overall cost of their degrees caused by the government’ s revised legislation, which remains before the parliament.
“ If this legislation is passed, of course, that uncertainty remains and students will be asked to enrol in a degree [ whilst ] being told,‘ This is the cost of your first year.’ But then the rate could well change over the years of their degree,” she said.“ So deregulation of university fees creates ongoing uncertainty and confusion and no doubt students [ will have ] to make really hard decisions at the end of each year about whether to progress, whether to transfer to somewhere maybe that’ s cheaper.
“ I can just see increasing chaos across the system.” ■
Language, drama rule the internet
Students perform play for Javanese lesson – and unleash a YouTube hit.
A play performed in Javanese and filmed by a group of ANU language students as part of an assessment task has become an unexpected viral online hit, garnering more than a quarter of a million YouTube views.
The half-hour production, The Disappearance of Sri, was written by course lecturer and adjunct professor George Quinn from ANU’ s school of culture, history and language. It is designed as an exercise for foreign learners of elementary Javanese.
A group of seven students – who had been studying the language for two semesters – performed the play as part of their course late last year, whilst a pair of students from the university’ s digital learning program carried out the filming and editing.
To Quinn’ s surprise, the video has been viewed about 300,000 times since being uploaded to YouTube on December 16.
“ I was hoping there would be a lot of interest in the video but I didn’ t expect it to go viral,” Quinn, who also starred in the video, said.“ Teaching language through drama enables our students to see how the language is used before their eyes. Even though the Javanese of my students is a long way from perfect, people were impressed.”
Quinn said global English was affecting Javanese; more than 1000 comments posted under the YouTube video demonstrate Indonesians’ desire to protect their language and culture.
“ The play called on Indonesians not to just let their culture go and replace it with Western culture,” Quinn said.“ Many comments were made by young people who use youth slang and are educated, English orientated and part of the urban middle class.” ■
The video can be viewed at youtu. be / uTL6BMG8JZ0
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