How can Sydney educate 100M students by 2050?
$2M for edtech company Practera to develop world leading student data privacy technology
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
Bold new plan to make Queensland a global skills destination
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.
Practera Global Skills Passport App to support 12,000 Cairns-based students
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
CRC Association partners with Practera to build Australia’s applied R&D skills
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
Practera Newsletter May 2019
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
Beau Leese, Co-CEO
Practera launches ready-to-go learning apps for innovative educators who need to help students build employability skills
Practera, Australia’s leading experiential learning startup, today announced Practera GO, a new solution that provides everything needed to launch world-class employability programs without worrying about large budgets, new learning content or complex administrative overhead.
A trend towards employability skills in Higher Ed
In recent years, higher education institutions have faced a new trend that requires adjustment to their strategy: More and more prospective students (and parents) carefully weigh up their future employment prospects when selecting degrees and universities.
This trend is fuelled by the fact that employers are demanding skills from graduates which are outside the subject area of study in Higher Education.
While still seen as necessary by employers, a graduate’s academic achievements are not sufficient for them to be recruited anymore. Instead, extracurricular activities such as work experience, volunteering, and involvement in clubs and societies are seen as having equal importance as the knowledge and experience acquired through academic study.
How does Practera GO help program managers?
Educators and program managers who need to offer extracurricular employability programs to their students can select from a curated list of high quality app experiences that come pre-loaded with all content and instructions to support learners and industry partners during their program. Free access to the Practera online admin and reporting tool allows program mangers to enrol participants, monitor progress and ensure employability skill development.
Every app includes all required content and a workflow that is validated by more than 10,000 students delivering successful projects for more than 2,000 industry partners. Based on the experiential learning pedagogy, Practera GO enables seamless feedback loops, which are crucial to develop employability skills.
Key Benefits
- New employability programs can be created and rolled out in days or weeks instead of months
- Students and industry partners get supported through mobile apps that structure their experience and automatically collect feedback
- Program managers get actionable, real-time insights into exactly who needs support and what they should do about it
“Education providers are missing out on massive student engagement and satisfaction opportunities if they aren’t tracking and managing the individual student experiences during the project.”, says Suzy Watson, Co-Founder and Head of Customer Success. “We designed all app experiences based on the experiential learning pedagogy and curated the most relevant content and workflows that works ‘out-of-the-box. This helps professional staff, for example in the careers teams, to successfully roll out high quality programs to their students for a fraction of the cost.”
Are you interested to learn more? Get started for free!
Practera Newsletter April 2019
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
Northeastern University found that employers’ top priority recommendation for colleges and universities was to “include real-world projects and engagements with employers and the world of work” in their programmes
Austrade’s Innovation in Employability report was released at the Asia-Pacific International Education Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia last week. The report showcases strategies and initiatives to enhance the employability skills of international students across all Australian states.
Canadian Universities take collaborative approach to future skills development;
Australia reviews the future of micro-credentials in its Australian Quality Framework
PRACTERA CUSTOMER SUCCESS
Enabling inspiring experiential learning programs
The Australian Government (DFAT) has launched a national skills micro-credential pilot – the Australia Awards Global Skills Passport, on Practera through the Australia Awards Indonesia (AAI) program. 400 AAI Scholars will create an e-portfolio of enrichment experiences alongside their study against one of 6 Global Skill categories. (Product demo video)
Redfern Legal Centre supported by Study NSW, the City of Sydney and the Fair Work Ombudsman are launching this week a ground-breaking new multilingual legal advice app on Practera to international students studying in NSW. The app will provide international students with instant access to customised legal information around common issues, delivered in an interactive, video-based ‘face-to-face’ question and answer format in English and six other languages.
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
Practera has taken a quantum leap – our latest release was a massive one. Highlights included;
Transitioning students and mentors to an upgraded mobile-first experience (New Practera App Video)
Launching our AI-powered Experiential Learning Support Assistant (ELSA), which offers personalised intervention options for educators based on common issues (Introducing ELSA Video)
Integrated badges, digital certificates and micro-credentialling into all aspects of the platform
Filesharing integrated to chat functionality
For current customers who want to discover the benefits of the new features 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.
Last week Practera Co-CEO Beau Leese helped launch Austrade’s Innovation in Employability report at the Asia-Pacific International Education Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The report showcases strategies and initiatives to enhance the employability skills of international students across all Australian states.
Practera Canada Vice-President Megan Underwood will be speaking at the Canada International Conference on Education (CICE-2019) in Toronto, June 24-27
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
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
Practera enables groundbreaking personalised legal assistance app
Redfern Legal Centre is partnering with Sydney edtech provider Practera to deliver My Legal Mate, a legal assistant in international students’ pockets
Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore welcomed international students to the city by announcing a groundbreaking mobile app technology which offers legal advice to international students. The My Legal mate in 6 community languages.
Practera app to help with most common legal issues
Created by the Redfern Legal Centre with funding from the City of Sydney, Study NSW and the Fair Work Ombudsman, the app has been built using the technology of Sydney based experiential learning startup Practera.
The app uses interactive video to provide students with instant access to legal information, delivered in English and six community languages. The app covers four issues most commonly encountered by international students – employment, housing, disputes with education providers and sexual assault.
Enhancing international student experience
MyLegal Mate was devised by solicitor Sean Stimson, the head of Redfern Legal Centre’s International Student Service NSW, who in February was awarded the NSW Human Rights Medal for his work with the state’s 260,000 international students.
“Over 40% of international students will encounter a legal issue during their study in NSW, which may negatively impact their experience. Redfern Legal Centre provides a free statewide legal advice service for international students funded by Study NSW but this app will offer further immediate support at much larger scale” Mr Stimson said.
“While it is not intended to replace face to face legal consultation, this professional services app is an innovative way to ensure international students can get instant access to tailored legal information and be empowered to take greater control if problems occur. By downloading the app on enrolment, international students will be armed with information about their rights before they start their course, with the ultimate aim of preventing issues arising while they are in Australia.
Speaking at the annual welcome event for Sydney’s international students, Lord Mayor Clover Moore said the app would further support overseas students.
“International students enhance our city by contributing to Sydney’s diversity and strengthening our global connections,” The Lord Mayor said.
“This wonderful new app puts an invaluable legal resource in the pockets of international students. This will help ensure they’re given every opportunity to have a safe, enjoyable and rewarding time living and studying in Sydney and across NSW.”
“Being able to attract and nurture the best students from around the world is an investment in our city’s future. That’s why we’ve supported this innovative information resource, and look forward to it helping students from all backgrounds.”


