This is a temporary visa that allows you to stay in Australia if you are employed in a ‘critical industry sector’, including health care and food processing. There is no visa application charge for Subclass 408 (although you may need to pay other costs for requirements such as health checks and police certificates) and the visa allows approved applicants to stay in Australia for up to 12 months.
What can I do on the Subclass 408 visa?
With the Temporary Activity visa, you can:
Remain in Australia, if you have no other visa options (for example, if your studies have finished during this time) and are unable to depart Australia due to COVID-19 travel restrictions
Remain in Australia to continue your work in critical sectors. These include agriculture, food processing, health care, aged care, disability care and child care during the COVID-19 pandemic. Medical professionals making employment arrangements in the health care sector are also able to apply for this visa.
This visa is not open to visitors to Australia who are unable to support themselves during this time – these people must make arrangements to return home.
Having a current visa that expires in 28 days or less or your last substantive temporary visa expired less than 28 days ago,
Either having evidence from your employer that you have ongoing work in a critical sector and that an Australian Citizen or Permanent Resident cannot fill the position, or demonstrating you can’t meet the requirements of any other visa,
Maintaining adequate health insurance during your stay in Australia.
EDITOR'S NOTE: I believe some Australian universities are considering this pathway. Let's see what happens.
Image: Reasons to be Cheerful
The menu at the diner where Amy Nelson likes to take a break from work is notable for its side dishes, including caramelized bananas, cinnamon apples and mushrooms and onions.
That’s much like the radically new way Nelson and a small number of other pioneering students have been experiencing college.
First they get a credential in a skill they need, then another and another. Each of these can quickly pay off on its own by helping to get a job, raise or promotion. And they can add up over time to a bachelor’s degree.
“Even if I chose not to finish, I would still have these pieces and I’d say, ‘Look what I’ve done,’ as opposed to, ‘I have two years of college’” but nothing to show for it, said Nelson, who works as an information technology consultant and hopes to move into an administrative role.
The concept, known variously as “stackable credentials” and “microcredentials,” she said, “almost seemed too good to be true.”
That’s one of the reasons it’s been painfully slow to take off: Consumers have trouble understanding it. Even after she began the program, Nelson didn’t entirely get it. Then she started earning high-demand industry certifications, in rapid fire, in subjects such as technical support, cloud technology and data analysis on her way to her bachelor’s degree in data management.
“I don’t think it really dropped on me until I sat down to update my resume,” she said. That’s when Nelson realized that each of those certifications had already increased her value on the job market.
Now the toll being taken on the economy by the coronavirus pandemic is giving microcredentials a huge burst of momentum. A lot of people will need more education to get back into the workforce, and they’ll need to get it quickly, at the lowest possible cost and in subjects directly relevant to available jobs.
The number of people in the same stackable information technology bachelor’s program as Nelson, offered by Western Governors University, has more than doubled since the start of the pandemic, from 4,410 in March to 10,711 in May, the online nonprofit says. The number taking microcredential programs from edX, the online course provider created by MIT and Harvard and the other major provider of this educational model, rose to 65,000 by the end of April, increasing 14-fold since early March alone.
“People are looking for shorter forms of learning during this time. They don’t know whether they have two months, three months. They’ve lost their jobs,” said Anant Agarwal, CEO of edX, which had the fortuitous timing of launching a new stackable bachelor’s degree in computer science in January and three more in May — in writing, marketing and data science — and trademarked the term “MicroBachelors” to describe them.
“For them the ability to earn a microcredential within a few months and improve their potential to get hired as we come out of Covid becomes much more important,” Agarwal said.
Surveys bear this out. A third of people who have lost their jobs in the pandemic, or worry that they will, say they will need more education to get new ones, the nonprofit Strada Education Network found.
They don’t have time to waste. Among lower-income adults, who have already been disproportionately affected, one in four say they have only enough savings to cover their expenses for three months if they’re laid off or get sick, the Pew Research Center reports.
“They don’t have two to three years of runway to put a pause on their life,” said Scott Pulsipher, president of nonprofit, online Western Governors University, or WGU, which has rolled out microcredential programs in states including Nevada that supply certificates and certifications on the way to degrees in information technology and health care.
“The affordability question is factoring in, too,” said Pulsipher; the cost per credit of WGU’s IT microcredential program comes to about $150 per credit and edX charges $166 per credit for its MicroBachelors degrees, compared to the average $594 it costs to earn a credit at a conventional in-person university.
“No one planned for or designed for a pandemic but it starts to heighten the differentiated value that comes from things like microcredentials,” Pulsipher said.
With microcredentials, students first get a credential in a skill they need, then another and another. Each of these can quickly pay off on its own by helping to get a job, raise or promotion. And they can add up over time to a bachelor’s degree. Credit: Nance Coleman / Flickr
Agarwal reports edX signed up as many learners in April as it did in all of last year — it now has 30 million — and a survey of new students found that 11 percent were already unemployed or furloughed and trying to learn skills that would help them get new jobs; edX has announced that it will offer a 30 percent discount on MicroBachelors programs to students who have lost their jobs because of the pandemic.
Even before the coronavirus hit, several providers were making a push for microcredentials. WGU and edX teamed up to create the program in which Nelson is enrolled. BYU Pathway Worldwide, an online spinoff of Brigham Young University-Idaho, has created stackable bachelor’s degrees in all of the subjects it offers. It calls them “Certificate First.”
That’s because students in these programs, and the others like it, first get certificates or certifications — short-term or industry-recognized qualifications — on their way to earning associate or bachelor’s degrees toward which the credits also count.
It’s an approach whose advocates say can help not only people who need credentials quickly to reenter the workforce, but solve a lot of problems that have been dragging down the success rates of college students seeking bachelor’s degrees.
“If you were designing [college] from scratch,” said BYU-Pathway Worldwide President Clark Gilbert, “this is how you’d do it.”
“And you wonder why we’re losing those populations in droves,” said Gilbert.
Earning credentials on the way provides a series of rewards that may make students more likely to persist. Even if they don’t, they’ll have something to fall back on that can help them get, or advance in, a job. Under the existing system, the Clearinghouse reports, 36 million have dropped out with no degrees or certificates to show for their time in college — but often student loan debt to repay.
Agarwal likens getting a bachelor’s degree in this new way to climbing Mount Everest by first hiking to the base camp at about 17,000 feet and getting acclimated to the altitude before attempting to achieve the summit.
Earning that first certificate, Agarwal said, is like reaching the base camp; stacking them into a bachelor’s degree, like getting to the top.
Early returns suggest receiving those rewards along the way is helping the so far limited number of people who have already tried microcredential programs — at edX, for example, they comprise about a tenth of all enrollment — climb more quickly.
At BYU-Pathway Worldwide, officials there report, the proportion of students who drop out between their first and second year has fallen more than 20 percentage points, from 35 percent to 14 percent, since the start of the Certificate First program.
“That early milestone — the early win — is so motivating,” Gilbert said. “Now they understand how education works. And if we lose someone, instead of being a dropout, they’ll have a certificate. Is it as good as having a bachelor’s degree? No, it’s not. But is it better than being a dropout? Yes, it is.”
That’s what student Brian Salazar experienced. “It’s very encouraging every time you pass one of the certification tests,” said Salazar, who has already earned certifications in Amazon AWS system operations administration, IT service management, Linux and several other industry cloud and network subjects.
An IT tech in Carson City, Nevada, Salazar had already gone to community college, but “I didn’t really have many job offers after getting my associate degree.” Once he started earning all of those certifications, “I started getting lots of offers,” even without the bachelor’s degree he expects to finish this year.
It’s no coincidence that the institutions furthest along with stackable credentials are nonconventional ones. Some traditional universities say they want to add them, too, but longstanding practices are hard to alter.
“Education hasn’t changed in hundreds of years, and whenever someone comes and says, ‘Hey, look, this is something cool,’ they don’t understand it, or they look with suspicion on it,” said Agarwal.
Some other universities are trying to embrace this change. Many have programs that already help students earn industry certifications in fields including accounting and manufacturing. The University System of Georgia in January launched what it calls a “nexus degree” — certifications that add up to associate degrees that can then add up to bachelor’s degrees. The financial and enrollment challenges they now face also are pushing colleges and universities to seek new sources of revenue.
Conventional institutions that are working to come up with stackable credentials, however, have been slowed down by accreditation requirements, occasional faculty resistance, the need for certification bodies and academic departments to collaborate and the difficulty of explaining to consumers how the process works.
There’s growing pressure on all colleges and universities to speed up the process of embedding certifications and certificates into bachelor’s degrees. That’s because, even before the coronavirus created new problems for them, traditional higher education institutions already appeared to be losing business to those quicker, cheaper credentials.
Shifting so much attention to vocational skills concerns some higher education experts.
Short-term certificates “can be a positive force in people’s lives,” said Chris Gallagher, vice chancellor for global learning opportunities at Northeastern University and author of College Made Whole: Integrated Learning for a Divided World. But suggesting it’s okay for learners to stop before they reach a bachelor’s degree, Gallagher said — just because they’ve already received some shorter-term credential — leaves them at a comparative disadvantage.
That’s because, while their income potential may be higher than if they quit with nothing, certificate holders who stop short of a bachelor’s degree may miss out on substantially greater earnings; a typical graduate with a bachelor’s degree will earn $1.19 million over his or her lifetime, compared to $855,000 for someone with an associate degree and $580,000 for a high school graduate, the economic think tank The Hamilton Project calculates.
Lifetime earnings estimates for certificate holders comparable to those for bachelor’s degree recipients are not available. Some research, including from the public policy think tank Third Way, has found much less financial benefit from them. The value of some certificates also fades over time as job demands change. Back at her breakfast in Henderson, Amy Nelson said friends have begun to ask her about the stackable credentials model. Their interest was piqued when she posted on Facebook how many certifications she’d already earned on the way to her degree.
“I had only been doing this for one year and I had all this stuff. It just blew my mind, so I wanted to share that,” she said. “To be the girl who was maybe not going to finish high school and now to have all these degrees, it’s sort of amazing.”
shutterstock The employment market is saturated with graduates who have good degrees and the right qualifications. So the question on many recruiters’ minds is: what else can this candidate offer? Employers have been reporting a “skills gap” in graduates for a few decades now and there is research to support its existence. Many employers feel there isn’t enough overlap between the contents of degree programmes and the skills that transform recent graduates into successful employees. So with the number of graduates steadily rising – and competition getting tougher – it’s more important than ever that students know how to improve their employability skills. There is evidence that work-based learning can help to remove employers’ concerns and make graduates more employable. So the savvy student should be undertaking a number of opportunities to build up their CV through work experience. But of course, not all opportunities are created equal, so it’s important students seek out the right sort of experience that recruiters will look favourably upon. What employees look for When it comes to employability, universities are keen to support student development beyond the classroom – and research shows that a number of strategies can help to achieve this. These range from careers advice, networking and mentor support, as well as internships, extracurricular, off-campus work or co-curricular activities (these tend to be on-campus work associated with degree programmes). Then there is also paid work. But which is a best option for a busy student to pursue?
Gain experience, but make sure it’s the right sort of experience.Shutterstock CVs are the main form of employability assessment used by recruiters and employers. And research suggests that academic qualifications and work experience are both important.
Existing research, for example, shows that internships can help students gain important insights into the workplace – including how to communicate effectively – but they can be highly competitive. Volunteering roles on the other hand are generally less competitive and can also help students to develop different skills – such as resilience and moral engagement. While extracurricular activities can provide additional skills and experience which can be closely related with an area of study or interest. Certainly good academic performance combined with extracurricular activities has been shown to predict a high level of perceived employability. However, there is a lack of research directly comparing how different types of work experience might be evaluated. What the research says Our new research study investigated academic, employer and student assessment of a series of fictional CV excerpts. Each excerpt was based on a social science student with a 2:1 degree classification but varying work experience. The CV excerpts allowed us to manipulate three key aspects of work experience: duration (six months versus two years), type (internship versus volunteering) and location (extracurricular versus co-curricular). Although previous research suggests that opinions of student employability can differ, our results found that students, academics and employers were similar in their assessments. We found that extracurricular activities were viewed more positively than co-curricular activities overall. Internships were viewed more positively for graduate level positions compared with volunteer experience. And duration did not have an impact on employability evaluations. What this mean for students When it comes to making yourself employable, you can’t be expected to do everything, so you need to be selective in your work experience. Based on our results, it seems extracurricular activities that take place off campus are to be recommended above co-curricular activities. So it might be better to work as a project assistant for a charity than spend time as a class rep. Internships may also prove more useful than volunteering, though it should be noted that internships are generally more difficult to get hold of than volunteer positions. It’s also worth considering that a long term placement is not necessarily going to be better for your CV than a series of short term placements – so worry less about how long the role will last, and more about what the role involves. Ultimately though, as our study shows, employers view all work experience as important. So if in doubt, some work experience (of any type) is always going to be better than no work experience at all.
Is sociology an art or a science? Is it philosophy? Social psychology? Economics and political theory? Surveying the great sociologists since the mid-19th century, one would have to answer "yes" to all of these questions. Sociologists like Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Theodor Adorno conducted serious scholarly and social-scientific analyses, and wrote highly speculative theory. Though it may seem like we're all sociologists now, making critical judgments about large groups of people, the sociologists who created and carried on the discipline generally did so with sound evidence and well-reasoned argument. Unlike so much current knee-jerk commentary, even when they're wrong they're still well worth reading.
Having already surveyed Marx in his series on Euro-American political philosophers, School of Life founder Alain de Botton now tackles the other three illustrious names on the list above, starting with Durkheim at the top, then Weber above, and Adorno below. The first two figures were contemporaries of Marx, the third a later interpreter. Like that bearded German scourge of capitalism, these three—in more measured or pessimistic ways—levied critiques against the dominant economic system. Durkheim took on the problem of suicide, Weber the anxious religious underpinnings of capitalist ideology, and Adorno the consumer culture of instant gratification.
That's so far, at least, as de Botton's very cursory introductions get us. As with his other series, this one more or less ropes the thinkers represented here into the School of Life's program of promoting a very particular, middle class view of happiness. And, as with the other series, the thinkers surveyed here all seem to more or less agree with de Botton's own views. Perhaps others who most certainly could have been included, like W.E.B. Dubois, Jane Addams, or Hannah Arendt, would offer some very different perspectives.
De Botton again makes his points with pithy generalizations, numbered lists, and quirky, cut-out animations, breezily reducing lifetimes of work to a few observations and moral lessons. I doubt Adorno would approach these less-than-rigorous methods charitably, but those new to the field of sociology or the work of its practitioners will find here some tantalizing ideas that will hopefully inspire them to dig deeper, and to perhaps improve their own sociological diagnoses.
Quick fyi: I spend my days at Stanford Continuing Studies, where we've developed a rich lineup of online courses for lifelong learners, many of which will get started next week. The courses aren't free. But they're first rate, giving adult students--no matter where they live--the chance to work with dedicated teachers and students.
How should you take notes in class? Like so many students who came before me and would come after, I had little idea in college and even less in high school. The inherently ambiguous nature of the note-taking task has inspired a variety of methods and systems, few of them as respected as Cornell Notes. Invented in the 1940s by Cornell University education professor Walter Pauk, author of How to Study in College, Cornell Notes involves dividing each page up into three sections: one to paraphrase the lecture's main ideas, one to summarize those ideas, and one to write questions. After writing down those main ideas during class, immediately summarize and add questions about the content. Then, while studying later, try to answer those questions without looking at the main body of notes. You'll find a complete and concise explanation of how to take Cornell Notes at Cornell's web site, which includes information on the "Reflect" stage (in which you ask yourself broader questions like “What’s the significance of these facts?" and "What principle are they based on?") and the "Review" stage (in which you "spend at least ten minutes every week reviewing all your previous notes" to aid retention). For a more detailed visual explanation, have a look at teacher Jennifer DesRochers' instructions for how to take Cornell Notes in the video above, which now approaches one million views on Youtube. Her own version encourages taking down main-idea summaries in drawings as well as text, and including things like "key points" and "important people or ideas" in the question column.
That DesRochers' video now approaches one million views suggests students still find the Cornell Notes system effective, as much as or even more so than they did when Pauk first published it. Over time, of course, its users have also augmented it: take Doug Neill's video "Improving Cornell Notes With Sketchnoting Techniques" above, which combines standard Cornell Notes with his system of "sketchnoting," also known as "visual note-taking and graphic recording." He provides examples of what such Cornell-formatted sketchnoting might look like, explaining that "having the option of doing something more visual in your mind triggers a different type of processing power, so that you're more active in the way that you're responding to the ideas. You're not just passively taking in information." The nature of school, as students in every era have known, can often induce a state of passivity; systems like Cornell Notes and its many variations remind us of how much more we can learn if we have a way to break out of it.
Pexels Having a student body that is representative of wider society has been high on many universities’ agendas for quite some time. Yet recent UCAS data shows the gap between disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged students, particularly those studying at “top” Russell Group universities, has recently widened. The picture is mixed across higher education as a whole. The number of Scottish students from deprived areas increased in 2018, as did the number of black students. Yet the widening of the gap at elite institutions is concerning – particularly given the dominance of Russell Group universities in key areas of public life such as politics and the legal system. It would be unreasonable to suggest this gap in educational attainment is the sole responsibility of universities. After all, educational inequality takes root before children even begin primary school. And universities are making efforts to address the gap. Most university websites provide details of widening participation schemes and bursaries. But how effective are these schemes? And are there factors that they are failing to take into account? The problem with aspirations A cursory glance at schemes designed to widen participation in education at university level reveals an oft-repeated phrase: “raising aspirations”. This seems intuitive enough - if young people lack confidence and opportunities, it follows that they will be less ambitious than their more advantaged peers. Yet researchers have questioned the usefulness of raising aspirations in expanding access to higher education. A 2011 report published by the Joseph Rowntree foundation found that “it is not correct to characterise deprived neighbourhoods as places where aspirations are always low”. The fact is that young people from disadvantaged backgrounds have plenty of aspirations for the future but lack the resources to achieve them.
Rich, white students still fare best at university.Pexels Although well meaning, a narrow focus on aspiration risks framing disadvantaged students as somehow lacking and blaming difficult circumstances on their own aspirational deficits. There is also the risk of assuming that academic paths are always the right ones, and that vocational or manual jobs are less aspirational. Most fundamentally, a focus on aspiration can prevent a reckoning with systemic social and economic inequalities that limit young people’s options and which cannot be easily overcome by individuals. Systemic barriers Students involved in Widening Participation schemes are a diverse group – including adult learners, minority ethnic groups, care leavers, and students with disabilities. This shows how obstacles to university can vary. However, key themes pop up again and again. Money is among the most obvious. The scrapping of maintenance grants in favour of repayable loans in 2016 means that poor students now face a higher debt burden than their more privileged counterparts, who are more likely to receive financial assistance from family members. Then there are geographic factors: disadvantaged students in London are more likely to attend university than their northern counterparts. Disadvantaged students also receive less guidance and support in school regarding higher education and careers. None of these factors relate to aspiration, but all can profoundly impact the opportunities available to disadvantaged students.
Students from disadvantaged backgrounds report struggling to afford textbooks and food on campus.Pexels There are also cultural barriers. Universities with a predominantly middle-class student intake can exclude students who do not fit that category, consciously or otherwise. When I worked with students in Leeds participating in the now-defunct Aimhigher scheme, a common question was whether they would be mocked for their accents. Working-class students describe being labelled as a “box-ticking exercise” by middle-class peers and being made to feel ashamed for the way they dress. These feelings of not fitting in can be harder to pin down than concrete barriers such as debt or a lack of career guidance, but may also contribute to the higher drop-out rate among students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Institutional change Focusing on individual aspiration rather than systemic barriers to higher education can lead to the burden of change being placed onto disadvantaged students rather than institutions themselves. But for widening participation to be effective, universities must consider how their own institutional cultures can change to accommodate a more diverse student body. In academic terms this might mean expanding the curriculum to include previously neglected perspectives. Practically it might mean offering accommodation to some students without asking for a guarantor. Or institutions might offer a free foundation year for students from disadvantaged backgrounds who do not have the required grades but show academic potential. Where institutions will not change willingly, pressure must be brought. This was highlighted in the recent threat of legal action against universities imposing academic sanctionsupon students who fall into rent arrears – a policy which would further disadvantage poor students. Ultimately though, when it comes to widening participation there is no magic bullet. And many universities are genuinely committed to expanding access. But while campus visits and “aspiration-raising” activities are no doubt useful, universities should be aware that the primary barriers to higher education do not always lie with disadvantaged students. Instead deep-rooted economic and social inequalities can play a major role. And these are barriers that can only be addressed through social and institutional change.
