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Background and objective: The impact of Australian Government Rural Clinical School (RCS) programs on the geographical maldistribution of the Australian medical workforce is important to report. Methods: This data linkage study compared graduates of the Flinders University medical program who have undergone training in a metropolitan tertiary hospital (Flinders Medical Centre, Adelaide) with those who participated in the Parallel Rural Community Curriculum (PRCC) RCS Program based in rural towns of South Australia between 1999 and 2012. Australian Health Practitioners Authority data were used to determine their location of practice in 2017. Results: In 2017, more than one-third (36.8%) of PRCC graduates were working in nonmetropolitan Modified Monash (MM) 2-7, compared with 20.7% of city campus graduates (odds ratio 2.2; 95% confidence interval: 1.6, 3.0; P <0.001). The difference was even more evident when comparing smaller rural centres in MM 3-7 and MM 5-7. Discussion: The study demonstrates the strong correlation between the Flinders University RCS Program in South Australia and long-term rural medical workforce outcomes.

We describe a space industry work experience program and report on the design, implementation, and evaluation of this program, including its purposes, organisation, participants - hosts and students - and its outcomes. The program was a collaboration between the South Australian Department for Education, the South Australian Space Industry Centre, universities, and space sector enterprises. We found that the program was in-demand among students, although places at this stage are quite limited. It was well-received by participating industry partners, all of whom indicated an intention to continue their involvement in the program. Student placements were designed to be immersive, but the extent of this varied between what might be described as work-shadowing through to structured and challenging project work. The most challenging and structured placements were highly valued by students and were more effective for informing an academic stream of student participants about the range of space industry careers currently available. Implications for future work experience placements are drawn for the organisation and structure of placement programs.

This Practice Report discusses the first year of operation of the First Year Clinic Placement Program (FYCP) at Flinders Law School. Lizzio identifies five key areas (or senses) as important in supporting transition into study: connectedness, capability, resourcefulness, purpose and culture. His sense of culture incorporates clear values, and his sense of purpose incorporates notions of personal development, vocational direction and disciplinary engagement. Embedded in a first year compulsory topic, this FYCP initiative draws on Lizzio's five senses, and has potential to provide a transformative experience for students, supporting them to develop a positive identity as a holistic legal professional, commencing at enrolment. The authors envision this as the first stage in a vertically integrated curriculum. [Author abstract]

I am a bogan academic activist. Amongst other things in my life, I have been and still am an activist film maker. What follows draws on my film making experience to deconstruct, via my 'bogan-ness', what it means to be scholarly or to be an 'academic'. I present, therefore, my paper in the form of a scene by scene script where I play the central character. I use this role, not to navel gaze, but to shed light on who activists are more broadly and how bogan activism plays an important part in social change. In this paper, I start and always return to an afternoon conversation with my honorary bogan academic mentor, and brother in solidarity, Grant Banfield. He acts as a provocateur, pushing me to reflect on how it is that I came to call myself a bogan academic activist. Why am I happiest being what Grant calls a 'worldly scholar' who lives for the doing rather than the incessant thinking about how to make the world a better place? The conversation connects the past and present. I have never spent much time thinking about this but now I find myself flicking back through the files in my mind to remember what got me to this very point in time. Why a bogan academic activist rather than simply an academic or a scholar? Can I be all of these things together? And, probably most important of all, why has activism played such a powerful role in my life? [Author abstract]

Peer mentoring is often considered the single most effective strategy for increasing student retention and student satisfaction. As a consequence, mentoring programs have been implemented at most universities and are an essential feature of best practice transition programs. Yet, the literature is inconsistent regarding what the term entails and how it is applied, leading to diverse opinions about what constitutes a mentoring program. It could be argued that agreement on a definition of mentoring is secondary to the benefits of its practice and that an emphasis on terminology is just playing semantics. However, this article argues that terminology does matter and that elucidating what mentoring entails is crucial to the comparative evaluation and improvement of mentoring practice as well as the identification of best practice. The article goes on to suggest how mentoring boundaries might be set by drawing on experiences from an Australian University.

The Australian Science and Mathematics School (ASMS) is a purpose-built innovative senior secondary school situated on the grounds of Flinders University, South Australia. The school was established to address declining enrollments in senior secondary mathematics and science, students' negative attitudes, a shortage of qualified science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) teachers, and a curriculum that lacked relevance to contemporary life. Such research evidence called for transformation in STEM education and acknowledged that teachers' professional learning was central to achieving transformation. A key professional learning strategy employed by the school to transform STEM education was the engagement of teachers and academics as professional partners in developing interdisciplinary curriculum. The value and challenges of the professional partnership are explored in this article, noting the importance of valuing rather than dismissing dissonance between the groups.

This paper suggests that the sociological theory of emotional labour is a useful way to interpret how teaching practices in Higher Education often involve the simultaneous management of both staff and student wellbeing. This paper applies Berry and Cassidy's Higher Education Emotional Labour model (2013) to the management of extension requests. We put forward a case study of processing a significant number of extension requests in a short space of time in a large, first year Health Sciences topic. We consider the responsibilities and risks for staff and students in this scenario, and ponder the implications for future practice and pedagogy. We argue that student and staff wellbeing must always be considered as interrelated, and that academic administrative procedures need to be developed with this mind. [Author abstract]

It is a common perception amongst students (and faculty) that traditional recipe-based laboratory experiences are generally boring, non-interactive and non-engaging. As a result, such laboratory sessions are unlikely to promote higher order thinking and learning. As a part of the national SaMnet (Science and Mathematics network of Australian University Educators) project, the authors have developed an 'inquiry-based' approach to learning in laboratories, and introduced laboratory experiences which are designed to equip first year physics students with the concepts and skills required to plan and carry out an experiment to investigate a particular problem. The aim was to motivate and stimulate students' interest, so that they explore experimental activities and design their own experiments. The authors implemented inquiry based laboratory activities for non-physics majors in semester 2, 2012 at two Australian universities (Flinders University in South Australia and Curtin University in Western Australia). The students were given five traditional and one Inquiry-based Laboratory and this article reports the student perceptions of the new experience. Students felt they had to do a lot of thinking and analysing for inquiry-based reports and believed that they learnt more in the inquiry-based laboratory than the recipe-based laboratory. The authors also found that student marks either improved (for laboratory reports) or remained the same (for related examination questions), and conclude that inquiry-based laboratories at worst do not negatively impact on student performance and may actually benefit student learning. [Author abstract, ed]

Increasing the opportunity for students to be involved in inquiry-based activities can improve engagement with content and assist in the development of analysis and critical thinking skills. The science laboratory has traditionally been used as a platform to apply the content gained through the lecture series. These activities have exposed students to experiments which test the concepts taught but which often result in a predicted outcome. To improve the engagement and learning outcomes of Flinders University's large first year biology cohort, the laboratories were redeveloped. Superlabs were run with 100 students attending weekly sessions increasing the amount of contact time from previous years. Laboratories were redeveloped into guided-inquiry and educators facilitated teams of students to design and carry out an experiment. To analyse the impact of the redevelopment on student satisfaction and learning outcomes, students were surveyed and multiple choice exam data was compared before and after the redevelopment. Results suggest high levels of student satisfaction and a significant improvement in student learning outcomes. All disciplines should consider including inquiry-based activities as a methodology to improve student engagement and learning outcome as it fosters the development of independent learners. [Author abstract, ed]

After returning to Flinders and completing his training as an infectious diseases physician and then a PhD on the response of astrocytes to viral infections, Wesselingh was awarded a fellowship to study the neuroimmunology of HIV at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, USA.