Plenty of CQUni participants at International Education Conference in Hobart
Published on 01 December, 2011
CQUniversity has sent a strong team of delegates to the 22nd ISANA* Annual International Education Conference held in Hobart recently.
Five CQUni delegates attended to present papers, representing CQUniversity campuses from Rockhampton to Melbourne.
Dr Michael Cowling and Jeremy Novak from the Gold Coast campus presented a refereed paper on 'using social networking to improve students' participation in the classroom'. This paper is the output of a CQUniversity Learning & Teaching grant awarded earlier this year.
PhD candidate Stephen Lin presented a paper (co-authored with Dr Molly Yang and Prof John Dekkers) on 'Catering to the needs of Indonesian Muslim Students Studying in Australia'.
Stephen ended his presentation with a quote** from CQUniversity Deputy Vice-Chancellor Professor Ken Hawkins: "Education institutions must work diligently to help those students whom they have invited to Australia to achieve personal, professional and academic success. They need to be provided with a sense of hope and connectedness, to feel as though they belong. Understanding and appreciation of our international students' strengths, resilience and hope for their future are paramount."
Tania Vitale from the Melbourne campus and Robyn Bailey from Rockhampton campus also participated, representing student support services across the regional and metropolitan CQUniversity campuses.
CQUniversity alumnus Dr Molly Yang presented a paper on 'Chinese students' study choice behaviour' based her recently completed thesis supervised by Emeritus Prof John Dekkers of CQUniversity.
Stephen commented that the conference has also been valuable as a networking exercise.
"Our international marketing and student service experience has been shared through delegates' interaction and presentations, amongst colleagues from all over Australia, the United Kingdom, USA, New Zealand, China and Japan," he said.
Delegates also enjoyed hearing about best practice guides and successful techniques used by other universities, with Dr Cowling commenting:
"I intend to take the innovations I've discovered at the ISANA conference back to the University to help CQUniversity engage even more collaboratively with students".
CQUniversity, once again, has excelled in achieving good performance in both practical and research fronts in international education.
* ISANA is the representative body for international education professionals in Australia and New Zealand who work in student services, advocacy, teaching, and policy development in Australia and New Zealand. Details via http://www.isana.org.au/
** (Ken Hawkins and Gail Baker: The International Student Journey, 2006)