Samuel Teague

As part of 2025 International Open Access Week activities, Murdoch University Library hosted a panel discussion on the OA week theme of "Who owns our knowledge?"

Panellists shared their expertise and insights in areas prompted by the theme, including open access publishing, integrating Indigenous knowledges, social construction of knowledge, and creative commons licensing.

The resulting discussion was a fascinating exploration of the theme, highlighting the value of sharing perspectives across disciplines and collaboration with other University areas. The webinar recording allows further reflection on the creation and sharing of knowledge.

This chapter comprises a comprehensive analysis of pertinent literature on leading geographically dispersed teams (GDTs), in particular, those working at Australian universities in the post-COVID era. The study seeks to understand the unique challenges faced by leaders whose teams operate geographically dispersed by choice and, where relevant, offers solutions to these challenges for those leading GDTs. The central finding is that successfully leading GDTs requires awareness of – and attendance to – an ‘Effective Leadership Triad', comprising the tenets of (1) Building Trust, (2) Getting the Communications Right, and (3) Privileging Distributed Leadership. We explore the implications of this review for current and emerging leaders in the tertiary education sector.

This presentation offers a re-appreciation of George Ritzer's (1993) McDonaldization of Society, which suggests that aspects of contemporary life become McDonaldized when they take on the principles of a fast-food restaurant. The presenter's central argument is that McDonaldization has become a cornerstone of modern living; an underpinning feature of the socio-political dimensions of our lives. The presenter covers the McDonaldization of sport through an analysis of how contemporary Australians watch the NBA, how Blinkist and AI changed how his peers approached reading and writing in their academic work, the rise of micro-credentialing in tertiary education, and the McDonaldization of eating, relationships, and information consumption. The presenter revisits Ritzer's (1993) principles of efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control, specifically in the context of the modern NBA, exploring the various layers that make McDonaldization such a successful way of packaging and promoting a major component of our lives. The contemporary citizen doesn't watch NBA games in full. Instead, they follow stories, players, and games via Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and through a suite of podcasts set at 1.5 speed for maximum efficiency of information consumption. This trajectory of modern sport consumption mirrors the McDonalization of our social and political worlds, including how we date, eat, read and write, and consume information.

Our presentation comprises a summary of research outcomes from a study evaluating how non-STEM students engaged with STEM-based learning materials in a second-year undergraduate unit.

Background/context. According to the Australian Government Department of Education (2023), the world of work continues to change rapidly, defined by advancing technology and increased automation of tasks and roles. Adapting to this change requires those studying at Australian universities to become more proficient in STEM-based skill areas, and in the context of this presentation, skills that fall under the broad umbrella of data analytics. To address this educational shift, Murdoch University drew on funding from the National Priorities and Industry Linkages Fund (NPILF) to develop STEM skills in non-STEM undergraduates.

Description. The findings are drawn from a newly developed, centrally delivered data analytics unit, within which a pre- and post-course survey was embedded. These surveys were administered across three teaching periods in 2022 and 2023, and respondents comprised of 157 undergraduate students. Method(s). Our surveys yielded both qualitative and quantitative data, and multiple methods of analysis were employed to understand the results. For qualitative responses, a mix of thematic and content analysis methods were used to assess the presence of consistent themes across the respondents. For quantitative analysis, we evaluated mean responses, outliers, and changes over time.

Evidence. The confidence of non-STEM students in conducting data analysis was captured in the study. The results demystify the notion that non-STEM students are less capable of expanding their depth of knowledge or skill development outside their discipline of choice.

Contribution. The study makes a significant contribution to the academic literature pertaining to development of employability skills at an undergraduate level, and how specific cohorts might be engaged with content from areas outside their discipline of choice.

Engagement. The two presenters intend to use creative data visualisations to engage the audience, as well as broad, philosophical questions pertaining to STEM and non-STEM learning in a rapidly changing world.

This presentation focuses on the challenge of leading teams at Australian Universities in a ‘post-COVID’ world. While working from home became a necessity at the height of the pandemic, academic and anecdotal evidence suggests that work-from-home arrangements remain commonplace. As such, this has become (for better or worse) the age of Geographically Dispersed Teams (GDTs), and it is within this context that I evaluate both my lived experience as a leader at an Australian university, and the academic research that details how managing GDTs can and should be done most effectively. The paper will show that a complementary and interwoven triad of leadership ‘tools’ is needed to manage GDTs (whether they be academic, professional, or comprised of students), either by choice or otherwise. This triad consists of (1) Building Trust, (2) Getting the Communication Right, and (3) Flattening the Leadership Structure (ie. embracing distributed and empowered leadership models). I argue that this triad can be replicated in a number of areas at the contemporary university as a solution to the ongoing shock of leading teams that are separated by distance.

This study investigates the transformation in student knowledge pertaining to the study area of ‘data analytics’, and the building of confidence, specifically in non-STEM students, to analyse, interpret, manipulate, and present data to a range of stakeholders using Microsoft Excel. The context of the study is a newly developed, centrally delivered undergraduate data analytics unit, within which a pre-and post-course survey was embedded. These surveys were administered to students across three separate semesters: S2 2022, S1 2023, and S2 2023. The confidence of both non-STEM and STEM students in conducting data analysis was captured. The findings indicate that students benefit from an immersive curriculum where they are exposed to both an understanding of data analytics in a broad global and social context, characterised by rapid technological change, as well as opportunities to master technical skills utilised through Microsoft Excel. The results demystify the notion that non-STEM students are less capable of expanding their depth of knowledge and technological skill development outside their discipline of choice. These results are important in the context of graduate employability and the importance of digital literacy in a rapidly changing world of work.

Background/context. Pre-2019 in the tertiary education sector was the era of ‘slow-learning’; long lectures, lengthy discussions, and ‘slow-burn’ consumption of knowledge. In 2020, COVID-19 ushered in a pace of change that asked educators to adapt and pivot in ways that came at a cost, and I argue in this paper that this pace of change has only accelerated. COVID-19 sent educators ‘into the wild’ (Teague 2023), scurrying to adapt to fully online delivery and, for some, an identity shift away from being exclusively face-to-face educators and leaders. In the context of returning to the face-to-face classroom in 2022, the need to embrace hybrid learning models, and the disruption of ChatGPT, I argue that the ongoing pace of change in the tertiary sector is coming at a cost to educator wellbeing, peer-to-peer connection, and our identities as teachers. In December 2021, I wrote that ‘there is a special kind of grief saved for leaving a place that changes irreversibly while you’re gone’. Today, I apply these words to our experience in the tertiary classroom. That experience of loss sits at the centre of the proposed showcase presentation.

The initiative/practice. The research underpinning this paper is auto-ethnographic in nature. Between 2019 and 2023, I collated field notes concerning my lived experience as an educator, and in particular, how I’ve navigated an identity transition while the tertiary sector shifted to fully online delivery during COVID-19, and then into the hybrid classroom in 2022. These field notes are the ‘data’ that underpins the analysis presented.

Methods of evaluative data collection and analysis. Thematic analysis has been used to identify the principal themes embedded in my field notes. Those that are explored extensively in the proposed presentation are ‘identity’, ‘grief’, and ‘pace of change’.

Evidence of outcomes and effectiveness. The proposed paper advocates for the development of a symbolic and tangible space within which educators can validate each other’s lived experiences during an era of relentless change. The paper is a ‘call to pause’; an opportunity to actively listen to each other and reflect on what we’ve lost that could have been saved, and what we should go back to retrieve while simultaneously embracing the future.

Throughout the 2010s, I developed a teaching practice based on robust academic principles and extensive lived experience in the classroom. But in 2020, my most proficient skills were diminished overnight, and I found myself spending the better part of three years teaching exclusively online and scrambling to keep pace with the change brought about by COVID-19.

In 2022, I re-entered the physical classroom. My time spent exclusively in the online world has taught me some valuable lessons relating to both teaching practice and unit design.

The purpose of this presentation is to deliver a reflexive commentary concerning one educator’s re-discovery of effective teaching practice in the classroom. I explore the ways in which I draw on the online world as my personal ‘gym’ for developing face-to-face teaching ‘muscle’. I discuss transactional learning versus transformational learning; educators as storytellers; and minimalism and efficiency as the core tenets of online teaching that I’ve transposed into the face-to-face domain with great success.

My hope is that this presentation will inspire other educators to examine how their own face-to-face teaching practice can be bolstered through a consideration of online teaching as ‘the gym’, that informs the development of a more powerful face-to-face teaching practice.

In 1958, Hannah Arendt wrote in The Human Condition that mass society had destroyed the private realm. She argued that the public sphere affirmed or denied the value of our actions, and “every activity performed in public [could] attain an excellence never matched in privacy”. Embedded in this argument is an understanding that the two realms can be understood as separate. While the public space is a site for connection and performance, the private is a sanctuary, and the two spheres are – or perhaps – clearly demarcated.

This paper summarises the preliminary findings of an auto-ethnographic study examining what happens to the division between public and private selves when a pandemic forces us to retreat inside our homes? In the context of tertiary teaching, what happens when our home-space becomes our makeshift workplace? In answering these questions, the paper offers a re-appreciation of Arendt’s thesis and examines the changing nature of the public/private divide at a time where a large portion of the world’s population has found itself sequestered indoors, isolated, and attached to mobile devices. Emphasis is placed on the lived experience of teaching scholars working in the Australian tertiary education setting. Preliminary findings suggest that some tertiary educators wished they had re-fashioned their professional boundaries in anticipation of the shift to fully online teaching and delivery.