Educational policy and management emphasise the role of science (e.g., earth science, geography) as a fundamental aspect of societal advance, but student enrolments at universities in these disciplines remain low. This commentary explores ways to foster more collaboration between university academics and high school teachers to implement…

Integrated approaches to curriculum planning and delivery are not a recent phenomenon. In the 1930s John Dewey advocated for a more cohesive conceptualisation of students' learning. Yet, despite state and national endorsement of curriculum integration in Australia, it is generally considered an alternative curriculum design that has failed to gain…

Project-based learning (PBL), a learning environment in which projects drive learning, has been successfully used in various courses in the educational programs of different disciplines. However, concerns have been raised as to the breadth of the content covered and, in particular, whether PBL can be applied to specialized subjects without…

There are movements internationally towards curricula that incorporate values and citizenship education. In Australia, this movement has been illustrated with the adoption of a national curriculum in values education. This has arisen from the perceived need for citizens to hold values around the rights and responsibilities of functioning within a…

The context of Information Communication Technology (ICT) is changing dramatically. Today, Web 2.0 applications such as Facebook and MySpace are used ubiquitously in the general population, and Virtual Worlds are becoming increasingly popular in business, for example via simulations in Second Life. However the capacity of Virtual Worlds is…