2025 review

 Well another busy year that has flown by rather quickly.

Next year, we are Te Pūkenga no more and return to being Ara Institute of Canterbury. An organisational restructure in mid- 2025 saw the Ara departments being dismantled and repackaged into three faculties. Each is helmed by a Dean of Faculty and supported by portfolio managers and a small number of faculty operations managers. My work team is now part of Ako (teaching and learning) Quality. We still do the same things, but the larger team is now made up of quality, learning design/educational development, kaiako (teacher) capability, and research.

This year, we have had a catch up on programme reviews. Many of our degrees, which are supposed to be reviewed every 5 years, were not reviewed through Te Pūkenga. The large institute was working through all the degrees under its wing, and unifying them i.e. based on one programme of learning. So far, only a handful of programmes were unified. So a large backlog of programmes now need to be reviewed, leading to my team's chief busyness this year as we work through many degree programmes and 'sub-degree' programmes for review and re-registration with the NZ Qualifications Authority.

AI and its implications on education has also been a focus. The AARIA 'Using Gen AI to support foundation/bridging ākonga (learners) was completed and launched in August. We are also piloting Cogniti - developed by the University of Sydney to provide support to teachers to build AI agents, and PebblePad, an eportfolio platform. 

Highlights include final publication of the book 'AI in Vocational Education' at the end of May. The book had a good number of downloads and a positive and supportive review.  

Three weeks  in Europe, culminating in the Journal of Vocational Education and Training Research (JVET) conference at Oxford, provided for R & R opportunities, a catch up with my cuzzie in Scotland and networking with VET researchers from Europe, South America and Africa. 

Presentations across the year have largely been on AI. I presented a plenary at the local NZ Vocational Education and Training Research Forum in November. There, the presentation of the lifetime award for the forum was extra special as NZ VET moves into another era and into post Reform of Vocational Education. 

The cessation of Ako Aotearoa, and the Centres for Vocational Excellence (CoVEs) will mean that funding for VET research will be very thin on the ground. Thankfully, my institute is supportive of research activities in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) space, so we will continue with the various AI pilots/projects. 2026 will be very much a year of reconsolidation for the institute, so its a 'watch this space' process for the next year or so.