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The higher education sector is increasingly reliant upon casual ('sessional') staff for teaching and marking purposes. While this practice has been little examined in the past, over the last few years increasing attention has been paid to the quality of marking, mainly because students and academic staff alike are becoming increasingly likely to question examples of poor practice. Hence, many universities in Australia are now attempting to introduce stricter procedures relating to marking. Despite current concerns, there is little published research on marking practices in Australian universities. This paper adds to the body of knowledge by reporting on two pieces of empirical research into the use of casual markers. A project at Charles Sturt University comprised focus groups of, respectively, students, lecturers and markers, and a survey of distance education students. Research at the University of South Australia focused on pedagogical issues relating to marking, comparing the approaches of permanent lecturing staff with those of sessional markers. The results of these projects provide a useful insight into areas of current concern to university staff and management.

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Survey research was carried out with academics (N=205), from a large regional Australian university, to explore their views about publishing or not publishing in refereed sources and their perceived worth of this activity. Several open-ended questions were included in the survey to elicit information about the factors that either encourage or discourage these academics from publishing. Additionally, questions were posed to allow the respondents to discuss ways that the University could further support them in their endeavour to produce at least some or more scholarly publications. The responses to these questions were content analysed to discover key categories and frequencies were calculated on the most salient categories. The results of this analysis are reported and comparisons are made on the responses of male and female academics. The implications of the results for higher educational practice are considered.

In this paper, the author reflects, both as an academic researcher and as a senior practitioner, on the experience of competency-based training (CBT) in the Australian vocational education and training system. She seeks to draw conclusions about the Australian experience using a typology drawn from the academic literature which focuses on the philosophical, educational, technical and market aspects of CBT. She concludes that, despite many improvements over the past 10 years, some potential problems remain. The system is controlled overly tightly by the interests of industry and it also exhibits some inflexibilities. Both of these act to disadvantage some groups of learners. Teachers and trainers do not have adequate skills to work skilfully and critically with CBT, leading to thin pedagogy and a narrow focus on assessment of individual items of performance.