News 25/6 – PEDA, Low Pass Rates & Dirtiest Flat

June 25th 2010 at 7:48am, By Dave Guerin

  1. PEDA Affair Hits Tertiary You may have heard of the Pacific Economic Development Agency allocation in the Budget – $4.8m for a new body in a non-contestable allocation. It will cause National some problems for a while yet. Anyway, Auckland providers are starting to plan bids for the money, which will include “subcontracting with established training providers for pre-trade literacy and numeracy courses”. The whole thing may work – we don’t have much detail yet – but the angst around it will distract from any achievements for years.
  2. University Entry The TEU entered the fray on entry, calling for an open debate about the issue. TV3 had a small story on their site about the issues.
  3. Tight Places It’s not just students who are feeling the pinch of tight places – the TEC closed off access to the Workplace Literacy Fund for employers yesterday.
  4. Low Pass Rates Radio NZ has a short story about the TEC’s plans to cut funding to courses with completion rates below 30%, NZ ITP is quoted as saying that TEC should be careful with low enrolment courses (Percentages don’t always work well  in small courses, but we’re talking about 70% failure here – that’s 1/2, 2/3, 3/4, 4/5 or 5/6 students failing in a small course! There’s no excuse for that.) and because students can benefits from courses even if they don’t pass (Maybe, but they benefit a lot more from appropriate courses that they have a chance of passing.). A better argument might be that not funding a course might make it impossible to run a qual, but then again, why would you enrol people for a qual when 70% will not complete components of it? I think the rule would be better applied at programme/qual level but I applaud the TEC for being tough on such issues.
  5. Titanium The Titanium Industry Development Association (TiDA) has set up shop in the new engineering block at Bay of Plenty Polytechnic’s Windermere campus. I’ve been following this story for a while and there’s great detail in this release – I wish them well. Wayne Mapp will open the facility next week.
  6. Last Tram to CPIT Christchurch may extend its trams to run out to CPIT.
  7. The Long March A University of Canterbury academic has revived the unpublished memoirs of a NZ missionary kidnapped and held hostage during the Long March of the Chinese Community Party’s Red Army in 1934. Maybe Russel Norman could protest about it…
  8. Canty Cuts Speaking of the University of Canterbury, the TEU and the Academic Board have won a reprieve for library changes. They are part of a wider STAR project that has resulted in 95 redundancies so far and a further 58 proposed, according to the TEU’s latest newsletter.
  9. WorldSkills at CPIT The national final for WorldSkills will be at CPIT this year. It’s a great competition to allow learners to show what they can do.
  10. Farmers at Massey Massey is bringing in the farmers this week for various seminars and conferences.
  11. ITPs Join KAREN 7 ITPs will join KAREN over the next few months: SIT, EIT, UCOL, BOPP, Tairawhiti, WITT and Whitireia.
  12. Top Carpentry Apprentice A Unitec apprentice, Kartika Mutzelburg, has won the Certified Builders’ Assn Third Year Apprentice Challenge in Queenstown.
  13. Lincoln Research Lincoln has signed a new research agreement with two Chinese universities - one from the eastern seaboard and one from a western province.
  14. Waikato Arts Grads Doing Well A Wintec arts graduate is helping to set up one-day art shows in vacant CBD spaces in Hamilton. A University of Waikato Maori and Theatre Studies grad is off to the Jacques Lecoq international theatre school in Paris in October. He will focus on physical theatre training.
  15. Unitec  and Matariki Events Unitec has a musical running as well as a Matariki festival. SIT also had a Matariki event.
  16. Undie 500, Dirtiest Flat and Burns The Press has penned an editorial on drunken behaviour and included the Undie 500 in its coverage. Turns out that Kaikoura turned them away too. Speaking of messy students, some University of Canterbury students won a competition for the dirtiest flat in NZ. The Press covered it, as did Campbell Live. Since we’re on messy students, an Otago Polytechnic student suffered burns after apparently emptying an aerosol into a couch cavity and then lighting it.
  17. Kitty Litter From messy students to tidy cats, Massey University researchers have found a way to use waste from olive oil production (skins, stones, etc) into biodegradable kitty litter. They’re still doing the tests but it looks like a good idea.
  18. Science Symposium The University of Waikato is running a science symposium that aims to find innovative and effective ways of communicating science events to the public through discussions from researchers, workers and organisations working in the field of science. It runs on July 8.
  19. South Island’s Next Top Farmer…will be decided in a Lincoln University competition, where innovation is the focus.

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