Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia
Australia began to see a huge expansion in the university sector after World War II. The six universities located in each State experienced a sudden influx of students after the war that brought with it fears of falling academic standards.
University departments were small and often unable to keep pace with larger numbers of students. Professors ruled their departments and were largely beyond criticism. Teaching undergraduate students was a department’s main responsibility with research not yet high on the agenda with only a small number of academics having a PhD.
Source: University of Melbourne Archives.
The quality of teaching in universities was largely taken for granted. Lectures were the universal mode of delivery with tutorials and laboratories reserved for the honour years. First class honours students were generally expected to take some of the teaching load often with no preparation and assigned to the largest first year classes. Concerns about the growing failure and attrition rates led universities to establish higher education research units to collect data on student performance.
The first unit was set up by Don Anderson at the University of Melbourne in 1958. This was soon followed by the Education Research Unit established by Laurie Short at University of New South Wales in 1960.
In 1964 the Martin Report recommended that Colleges of Advanced Education be formed to cope with the expanding demand for student places in tertiary education. This brought large numbers of young and inexperienced staff into the system throughout the 1960s with academic staff increasingly being employed with no prior teaching experience.
Source: University of Newcastle Archives.
Source: University of Melbourne Archives.
Barbara Falk came from a college of teacher education to establish and run the University Teaching Project at the University of Melbourne in 1961. Research centres soon began to include teaching development in their area of responsibility with a group of practitioners joining as ‘educational developers’. Higher Education Advisory and Research Unit was established at Monash University in 1965. Macquarie University established the Centre for the Advancement of Teaching in 1967. In 1968, the Research Unit in University Education was established at University of Western Australia.
Fred Katz who worked with Barbara Falk in teacher education in the 1950s replaced Laurie Short at UNSW to set up Tertiary Education Research Centre in 1968. The remit of the Centre was very broadly based and a major emphasis was on collaborative research with Faculties and Schools designed to improve teaching programmes through the clarification of educational objectives and the development of new teaching procedures. In general, there was a move towards working more closely with individuals and small groups of the teaching staff in attempts to enhance the quality of teaching.
Courtesy of UNSW Archive
Source: ANU archives
Don Anderson moved to Australian Nation University in the same year to establish the Education Research Unit when Barbara Falk merged the Education Research Office with University Teaching Project to create the Centre for the Study of Higher Education.
With a growing number of universities and colleges having a unit responsible for collecting information about student performance the Directors of the higher education research centres would meet each year at the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science (ANZAAS) Congress. Don Anderson was looking for a way to share information among Directors of other education research units and was impressed by the role the Society for Higher Education Research was playing in supporting higher education research in the United Kingdom. He convinced Kol Star a Research Information Officer for the Australian Vice Chancellors Committee to test the idea in his meetings for the AVCC. It became clear that there was widespread support in Australia and New Zealand for a similar society that would arrange regular meetings, share information, and work towards raising the status of higher education research more generally.
Kol Star organised a gathering at the at the 44th Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science (ANZAAS) Congress held at the University of New South Wales. Sixty people working to improve teaching and learning in higher education came together and voted to formalise a series of informal meetings that had been held at previous conferences to address the challenges faced by higher education in Australia. The intention was to establish a Society dedicated to promoting higher education research and development, and that the membership would be open to any person interested in that objective. Only a few of those who voted were higher education researchers. Most were working as student counsellors, librarians, technical teachers, discipline-based academics, as well as all staff of the five or six research and development units that were established at that time.
The outcome of the meeting in 1972 was the election of an interim Executive to write a constitution, decide on the membership fees, and begin recruiting members into a society for higher education researchers and developers. The interim Executive's decisions were intended to be formally ratified by a vote of the Society's members at the next ANZAAS Congress that was to be held in Perth the following year.
The interim Executive met twice during 1972 to craft a constitution and membership structure based on those of the Society for Higher Education Research. Two other critical decisions about the name were made at the initial meeting. First, the Society’s name needed to include development as well as research, to reflect the role of most people at the meeting. Second, the name needed to cover Australasia to include the University of Papua New Guinea, which was then on the verge of gaining independence from Australia.
The program for the new Society that was largely worked out by the interim Executive has been the basis of the Society's activities ever since. HERDSA would have an annual conference, a newsletter, and special interest groups that met locally between conferences.
It was thought that the best way to launch the new Society was to hold a workshop on higher education teaching and learning after the 1973 ANZAAS Congress. As the conference was to be in Perth, the job of arranging the workshop was given to Alan Lonsdale.
Approximately 130 people attended the first Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia (HERDSA) event, in which guest speakers presented examples of their classroom activities.
Following the HERDSA workshop, HERDSA members met separately and voted for the Society's constitution and executive structure. Kol Star, Fred Katz and Alan Lonsdale become duly elected as part of the executive for HERDSA. In addition to President (Katz), Secretary (Star) and Treasurer (Lonsdale) the founding Executive included the Editor of the newsletter (Anthony Dare) and six general positions that included Barbara Falk, University of Melbourne; Norman Henry, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology; John Powell, University of Papua New Guinea; and Alan Prosser, University of New South Wales.
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