Experiential learning edtech company Practera has appointed a Queensland leader & partnerships and opened a Brisbane office to work more closely with customers in the state.

Practera Co-Founder & Co-CEO Beau Leese said, “I was privileged to work closely with Study Queensland over the past 12 months as an education innovator in residence. I found that employability and experiential learning are high on the agenda for many institutions, and there is a great deal of energy & innovation in this space around the state. Examples of exciting projects already using the Practera platform in Queensland include a world leading skills micro-credentialling pilot with Study Cairns and Study Queensland, mentoring for nursing graduates from SCU and CQU in regional Queensland, and industry project programs for UQ.”

Incoming Executive Director, Queensland Jamie Ford joins Practera from her most recent role as General Manager Customer Experience & Innovation with UnitingCare Queensland. Prior to that she was a Senior Manager with EY’s Queensland Advisory practice specialising in Higher Education and customer led transformation. She is a regular guest lecturer at UQ Business School, UQ MBA Graduate and Not-for-Profit Board member.

Ford said, “I am really proud to join the Practera team. Practera is an exciting growth stage edtech company that is achieving great outcomes for Universities in Australia and globally. I am a big believer in customer value, innovation and creating opportunities for people through new pathways and skills. I’m very excited about working with educators and industry partners in Queensland to deliver enhanced employability outcomes for students.”

Practera will also form a partnership with Brisbane based employability provider Startup Interns. Practera and Startup Interns collaborated on a recent successful Study Queensland funded program pairing students with startups. Leese continued “Students are seeking to understand career opportunities in fast growth startups, and startups are hungry for talent & mindset with the capability to work entrepreneurially. Startup interns founders Ocean Cheung and Dongjin (DJ) You have done a terrific job building energy in this space in Queensland, and we’re excited to take this program forward with them.”

Startup Interns co-founder & Managing Director Ocean Cheung said, “This partnership with Practera will see us able to advance our mission to deepen the cycle between startup founders and entrepreneurial students through practical experience of working together. Practera are at the global leading edge in this space and will help us achieve our mission at broader scale.”

Practera Queensland’s doors are open and is ready to continue partnering with educators and industry alike to achieve high quality employability outcomes for students.

Reach out to Jamie Ford (jamie@practera.com) or Ocean Cheung (ocean@startupinterns.co) to find out more.

Macquarie University has today become the first tertiary institution to launch the My Legal Mate (MLM) legal advisory app to all 11,000 of its international students. MLM is an innovative new mobile app offering on-the-go legal information to international students in NSW, developed by Redfern Legal Centre on the Practera platform.

Funded and supported by Study NSW, City of Sydney, Fair Work Ombudsman My Legal Mate is an Australian first. The app uses interactive video in seven languages to provide international students with instant legal information on problems like underpayment at work, accommodation issues and sexual assault.

“International students studying away from home can face a variety of urgent legal issues,” Redfern Legal Centre CEO Joanna Shulman said. “Many students lack knowledge about the law in Australia and simply don’t know where to get help.”

“We’re proud to partner with Macquarie University to enhance the wellbeing of its vibrant international student population, providing accessible and culturally appropriate legal information,” Ms Shulman said.

“The partnership between Macquarie University and Redfern Legal Centre is a direct response to the fact that 1 in 3 international students encounter legal issues whilst studying in Australia,” Gail White, Executive Director – Student Engagement and Registrar at Macquarie University said.

Practera Co-Founder & Co-CEO Beau Leese said – My Legal Mate is an exciting innovation “three-peat” – it is a groundbreaking and well thought through legal resource for international students and an example of how professional services can be digitised and automated. “The Practera experiential learning platform was selected to go beyond digital services and create a learning opportunity based on real world experience. Delivering MLM has been a great project for Practera, and we’re also extremely proud to be making a contribution to the welfare of International Students in Australia.”

MLM is available to all tertiary education providers in NSW, and versions for other states are in development – to enquire about access and pricing, please contact Redfern Legal Centre through their website.

Or contact us directly: 

Joanna Shulman, CEO Redfern Legal Centre

p. 02 9698 7277| mob. 0401 933 789 | joanna@rlc.org.au

Beau Leese, Co-Founder & Co-CEO Practera

Mob. 0433 262 855 | beau@practera.com

International education over the past 10 years has been an enormous success story for Australia, and nowhere more than Sydney. According to Study NSW, more than 260,000 onshore students, $13bn in exports, 95,000 jobs and double digit annual growth over the past 5 years.

So what will international education look like in 2050? How can Sydney benefit from and plan for these changes? At the City of Sydney and Study NSW International Education forum last week, the question was asked of myself and my fellow panellists including economists, scientists, entrepreneurs, students and human rights lawyers.

What does the future of international education hold?

2050 is a long time, but not all that long – as far as today from 1990. Some things will be very different, but we’re not talking Starship Enterprise here. Among many, three key megatrends in evidence today will have a profound influence in the opportunities for international education. These are 1) the future of work, 2) global demographic & development shifts and 3) new technologies for work & learning.

The future of work is changing more rapidly than ever. Whether we accept that 47% of today’s jobs will disappear due to automation and other technologies, the world of work is changing. The average number of jobs in a given career is going up, and the lifespan of specific knowledge is going down. This means that 2 billion knowledge workers will need to upskill and reskill faster than ever before. Without taking anything away from the importance of foundational knowledge, in response education will become more personalised, modular, lifelong and experiential in nature. International education will be highly exposed to this trend, driven by student demand for an employability return on their education investment. The postgraduate, post work experience international education market will become more important. The human skills that complement increasing automation and are best taught experientially like creativity, problem solving and service orientation are more important.

Changing global demographic growth and economic development trends will reshape international education to 2050. Global student mobility will more than double grow from 5m to 10m annually. With the development of domestic higher education systems, China, developed East Asia and India student export growth will slow but with large absolute populations of 15-24 year olds and growing middle classes still account for the bulk of growth to 2027. Developing economies in South Asia & West Asia will provide important growth markets around this period, and by 2050 Africa is projected to be the high growth international education market, with 35% of young people aged 15-24 globally. One of the big challenges and opportunities for Australia will be that the vast bulk of students will continue to study and work at home, with increasingly sophisticated domestic economies and higher education systems providing competition for onshore students.

New technologies used for work & learning. Not all learning will be virtual – students will still value personal connections with professors and peers, but new technologies will be integrated into the educational mix, and a higher proportion of learning will be purely online. For those readers whose memories stretch far enough, think of the difference of the daily use of technology between 1990 and now in the workplace and higher ed. Expect pervasive applications of technologies including AI + machine learning, VR / AR, blockchain based credentialing, and later on human-machine interface. With all students firmly digital and mobile native, platform distribution means that awesome and highly personalised programs and solutions for specific niches can be distributed globally, generating economies of specialisation and scale. Just like physical goods supply chains – services and software supply chains will become truly global, where a great lecture, an industry project, a predictive algorithm can be deployed as easily in Dalian or Tanzania as Haymarket.

What can Sydney do to seize opportunity in this future?

Much of the discussion was framed around the onshore student experience, with the implication that growth will require a lot of urban planning and debates about who is congesting the buses. While this is undoubtedly the case, there is an aspect which is underplayed – the opportunity and the benefit of education technology and offshore delivery.

Sydney isn’t just part of Australia. Unique among Australian cities it occupies a privileged position as a global destination city, as part of a network of 20-30 truly global cities which concentrate the worlds human capital, creativity, economic growth and job creation to a degree unprecedented in human history. It enjoys a comparative advantage that other Australian jurisdictions do not.

Beyond fostering continued strong growth in onshore enrolments, Sydney education providers have a phenomenal opportunity to leverage the cities brand, institutions and strengths to facilitate exponential growth in delivering educational products, programs, credentials and expertise offshore and transnationally.

As learning and work become ever more digitally enabled, education providers in all industry sectors can adopt and adapt education technology to co-create new and potentially disruptive models building on world class brands, expertise and IP. One of the great potential enablers of this is a thriving local edtech sector. Of >350 edtechs in Australia, approximately 150 are based here in Sydney, according to EduGrowth and Austrade. The 2018 Startup Muster report demonstrated that more than 1/3 of startup founders are born overseas, including many international students. Edtech is the second largest industry vertical for tech startups. Examples of scaleup stage edtech companies that have raised significant capital and gained international traction in specific niches include Open Learning in Massive Online Open Course platform, Go One in corporate training, Smart Sparrow in adaptive learning, Learnosity in assessments and Practera in experiential learning.

As an example, Practera has worked with Study NSW and 10 NSW Universities to develop the NSW Global Scope program, which connects thousands of international students in digitally enabled projects with hundreds of Government, business + community organisations to solve real problems. This model is informing our collaboration with Northeastern University in the US to design a projects program with the capacity to serve >100,000 community college students in Masachussets. Boston University is using the platform to manage health development projects in 17 developing countries.

‘Experiential learning’ is rapidly evolving as key response to educational needs and models like these could deliver a broader economic & social dividend for Sydney. For example students, educators and industry from Sydney and global cities can be connected today through high-impact and high-quality online projects and accelerators. Transnational experiential learning brings an unfair share of the worlds human capital into building opportunity with Sydney institutions, industries and students. This initiative alone would promote connection and innovation through facilitating collaboration between Higher Education and business on which Australia ranks poorly on a global basis. It would promote the development of more global connections and collaborations for Sydney. It would promote a more just and sustainable city through offering industry experience and connections to many more students, including from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

Government has a key role to play in facilitating initiatives like this, in bringing actors together and providing the brands, seed funding, license to operate and connections required to facilitate large scale cross sector collaboration.

More systematically, across the many niches and opportunities of a world of education that is more modular, experiential and lifelong, a city like Sydney can ask itself the question – not can we handle half a million international students in our city, but can we educate 100 million learners globally?

About the author

Beau Leese is Co-Founder & Co-Chief Executive Officer of Practera

Remarks adapted from City of Sydney / Study NSW International Education Forum 2019

Education Technology (EdTech) startup Practera and its collaboration partners have been awarded $1.995 million in government funding as part of a $7.45M project to develop a data privacy protection product for online student data.

Practera’s was one of sixteen projects awarded a total of $30 million by the Commonwealth’s Cooperative Research Centres Projects (CRC-P) Round 7 grants program. Collaboration partners in the project include CSIRO’s Data61, University of South Australia, global education company Navitas, Education Technology peak body EduGrowth, and cyber security solution provider Cybermerc.

Learning analytics and AI research while preserving student privacy

The project will develop a product for education providers to provably preserve the privacy of student data records. This will enable education companies to maximise the value of their student datasets, for example in learning analytics and training of artificial intelligence algorithms. The product will be applied initially to Practera’s experiential learning platform which supports programs such as project programs, internships and skills credentialing.

EduGrowth CEO David Linke said that “Learners globally are demanding more control over the data from their learning.  So having Australia at the centre of building this incredibly important tool will be a global advantage for our education providers, the EdTech sector and most importantly the learners themselves.”

Ruth Marshall, Practera’s Director R&D and Data Integrity and leader of the project said “Learning Analytics on student data provides the insights that EdTech companies need to deliver increasingly valuable and personalised insights, evolve their products and compete in the global marketplace. At the same time, it is becoming increasingly important for EdTech systems to provably protect personal and confidential data.”

Global education companies need to meet increasingly complex privacy requirements

The CRC-P grant will pay for research to apply and further enhance privacy-preserving technology and techniques developed by CSIRO’s Data61 for other applications. “We are very interested to apply these techniques in the Education industry” said Professor Dali Kaafar, Group Leader of the Information Security and Privacy Group. “The techniques we have developed at Data61 aim to quantify and measure the “privacy risks” of personal identification or re-identification, and then reduce that risk using mathematically provable risk reduction techniques.”

Professor Kaafar elaborated, “Removing obvious identifiers such as names and addresses is not sufficient to protect users from re-identification, with a linking attack for example”. Linking attacks use data from other sources such as social media to determine the identity of individuals from an anonymized data set.  A famous example is New York City taxis who released a “de-identified” set of trip data in 2014 to have it re-identified within the hour using information found on Twitter and online news.

Marshall continued, “Edtech companies with global operations like Practera need to meet increasingly complex privacy requirements around the world. Provable anonymisation of data offers a tremendous business advantage. Our customers like Universities and education providers like Navitas will be increasingly required to prove that their data remains private under regimes like the EU’s GDPR. This is becoming more important as multiple systems are used, some or all operate in the cloud and the provider has multinational operations.” The project will enhance the privacy & security capabilities of Practera in the first instance, but we certainly envisage that we are building product in its own right with application for other EdTechs.”

Media Contact

Ruth Marshall

Mob. +61 0411 222 040

Email ruth@practera.com

Queensland is set to attract its “unfair share” of global talent following the launch of Australia’s largest ever student career development drive.

International Education Ministerial Champion Kate Jones today launched the Study Queensland Talent Program which will be available to all students studying in Queensland.

The Study Queensland Talent Program will offer new employer engagement programs to all students to build their 21st-century skills as well as e-portfolio and micro-credentialing app to help them record their experiences and achievements in real time. 

Ms Jones said the program would position Queensland to be able to offer students world leading recognition of the skills they develop alongside their study to better prepare them for their future career.

“We have great education and training providers and some of the world’s leading tourism destinations,” she said.

“We want to make sure everyone who gets an education in Queensland builds authentic connections and has great employment prospects, both here and globally. That’s what this program is all about.

“It’s also part of our plan to attract more international students to study in Queensland.”

The $1.6 million program will be funded through the Queensland Government International Education and Training Strategy.

The Start Here Go Anywhere e-portfolio and micro-credentialing app – which is currently being piloted in Cairns – will be rolled out across the state in coming months.

Ms Jones said the app would encourage students to take up new and existing employability programs and enable students to record their participation in activities to help build their extra-curricular profile, allowing them to be more attractive to global employers.

Importantly, she said the program would be supported by a new Study Queensland Employer Champion Groups, which includes Urbis, Queensland Tourism Industry Council, Quandamooka Yoolooburrabee Aboriginal Corporation and Bank of Queensland.

“International education is Queensland’s fastest growing service export, last year injecting more than $5 billion into the economy,” she said.

“We want to grow this industry to create jobs for Queensland.”

The program will be delivered by Study Queensland, which is charged with implementing the International Education and Training Strategy to Advance Queensland.

The program was launched at the Study Queensland International Education and Training Summit held in Brisbane this week.

Attracting more than 300 people, the summit explored ways to attract skills and talent from across the globe featuring TIQ Commissioners from China, Japan and ASEAN.

This is the media statement originally published in the Queensland Cabinet and Ministerial Directory on June 26, 2019.

Study Cairns has partnered with Study Queensland to launch a “world first” pilot program aimed at helping students get a foothold in the Cairns job market.

The Start Here, Go Anywhere Global Skills Passport is an app platform for 12,000 international and domestic students to build portfolios of globally relevant skills.

This app launch is part of Study Cairns Connects – a program designed to log employability experiences for domestic and international students and to engage a network of Cairns business, community and government organisations.

Study Cairns president Carol Doyle said the program offers students access to volunteering and internship programs which complement employability experiences offered by Cairns-based education providers.

“With Study Queensland’s international education tagline  ‘Start Here, Go Anywhere’, this exciting pilot project showcases the opportunity for international and domestic students to study in a unique regional Queensland location like Cairns”, she said. “Participation in the project empowers students to develop transferrable skills like service orientation, innovation, teamwork and communication.”

“This is a bold, world leading ‘region scale’ initiative and potentially serves as a pilot for broader adaption by other Queensland international education regions.”

The Global Skills Passport and introductory workshops are designed to equip students with a World Economic Forum skills based framework and issue open badge standard micro-credential certificates.

For students the resource provides a digital tool to help them to build and demonstrate the skills needed to succeed in the future of work. 

This article was published in the Cairns Post and DailyTelegraph

The CRC Association has partnered with edtech startup Practera to support the education and knowledge transfer activities of CRCs with the Practera experiential learning & micro-credentialing platform.

CRC Association CEO Tony Peacock announced the partnership during last week’s Collaborate | Innovate | 2019 conference. He said “The CRC Association is pleased to announce our partnership with Practera to develop a series of experiential learning products to help CRC’s enhance activities like industry skills development, PhD mentoring, innovation challenges and industry education. These programs are critical to build the impact skills of our scientists and to collaborate effectively with industry, but we often reinvent the wheel in these spaces. Practera offers the opportunity to provide digital templates that can be adopted and adapted by CRCs to use with their students and industry partners. Practera is a great Australian startup which brings to life a clear vision for work integrated learning and industry-research collaboration that closely aligns to the mission of the CRC program.”

Ruth Marshall, Practera’s R&D Director and a former Commercialisation Advisor for Data61 has been working with a small group of CRCs on developing prototype products. She ran a workshop at the conference to elicit best practices and demonstrate prototypes.

 

Mike Ridout, Innovation Broker and Education Director of the Food Agility CRC said “this project has the potential to help students and early career researchers develop needed business skills including teamwork and collaboration in an industry setting”

Liz Barbour, CEO of the Honey Bee Products CRC agreed – “this project will help develop solutions to challenges such as helping students get a more consistent and reliable mentoring experience, supporting students across different geographical locations.”

Ruth said “Practera will work with CRCs to develop a portfolio of useful digital experiences to facilitate students, researchers and industry practitioners undertake collaborative activities and develop their skills. High-quality experiential learning programs can be costly to run and are not easy to repeat because there are no economies of scale. Practera provides the digital tools to support the design and delivery of quality experiential learning courses at scale”.

The platform steps students through goal setting and skills-development planning framework with multiple opportunities for reflection. Students can earn micro-credentials for their achievements along the way, earning badges that can then be published to other platforms such as LinkedIn. Students can showcase the particular skills they have developed in their applied R&D projects, which are hugely valuable but may not otherwise be recognised in their formal academic achievements.

Enquiries: connect@practera.com

This month in experiential learning

Industry news, customer success stories and product updates.

Hi there,

Practera works with educators around the world at the frontier of experiential learning for the future of work. Here is a snapshot of leading thinking and practice.

WHAT WE ARE READING

Interesting news in the world of experiential learning

Forbes published a commentary about a big shift that might impact Higher Ed sooner than expected. Instead of going to college to get a job, students will increasingly be going to a job to get a college degree. How Great Teachers Are Thinking Outside the Classroom to Help Students Learn. Their classrooms are increasingly diverse, but their responsibilities remain the same: to ensure that all students have access to the learning opportunities that will help them be successful as students and throughout their lives.

PRACTERA CUSTOMER SUCCESS

Enabling inspiring experiential learning programs

More than 1,000 successful  participants in the Study Melbourne Live Projects Program paved the way for further investment to grow the initiative with Practera in 2019/20 – bigger and better than ever!. University of Melbourne launches Practera app to help students feel welcomed to campus, navigate the city of Melbourne, make the most of student life and develop their skills in a professional environment during their first month.

If you are looking to strengthen or setup your experiential learning program, schedule a free consultation with a senior member of our team

PRACTERA PRODUCT UPDATES

Building the worlds leading platform for experiential learning

We released Practera GO – a ready-to-go employability app solutions for innovative educators that has everything needed to launch world-class employability programs without worrying about budgets, learning content or administrative overhead. For current customers who want to discover the new benefits in a personalised training session – as usual: please reach out to your Practera representative and we are happy to schedule a meeting.

PUBLICATIONS & CONFERENCES

What we write, publish and present at events and conferences

The Co-operative Research Centre Association is developing a pilot Practera platform to support CRC’s in their education and knowledge transfer activities, including mentoring, challenge projects and applied research skills credentialling. If you’d like to learn more, Practera Director, R&D, Ruth Marshall will be delivering a prototype session at the Innovate Collaborate conference in Adelaide, May 28-30. [EduTech] Wes Sonnenreich, Practera Co-Founder and Co-CEO will be part of an EdTech expert panel at EduTech on June 7 (Free Event) [IET Summit] We will be sharing our insights about “Innovation in Employability” at the Study Queensland International Education & Training Summit Tuesday 26 June [CICE] Practera Canada Vice-President Megan Underwood will be speaking about the future of work at the Canada International Conference on Education (CICE-2019) in Toronto, June 24-27 [GIC] Practera co-Founder & Co-CEO Beau Leese will be presenting with the University of Melbourne on the Study Melbourne LIVE Projects program at the Global Internship Conference in Auckland July 2-5 [NSEE] Practera US Vice-President Nikki James will be speaking with UNSW and Northeastern University at the NSEE (National Society of Experiential Learning Conference) September 23-25

We are excited about how experiential learning will change the way we teach and how it will prepare the next generation of learners for the future of work.

If you’d like to learn more or discuss your experiential learning program please contact us

Best,
Beau Leese, Co-CEO