Mercurius Goldstein wrote hursday, 15 April 2010:

>... export of Australian education exceeds that of wool or wheat ...

What s also not realised, is that the hottest e-learning software product "Moodle" is from Australia (the second hottest product "Mahara" is from New Zealand). These two products are changing the way education is done and thought about, around the world. I have just been at Adelaide University for a couple of days discussing how we are going to do professional postgraduate education for computer people: http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2010/04/open-source-tools-for-e-learning.html

This education is "exported" online around the world, with Australian leading the way in how it is done. I have proposed the same techniques also be used for computer education at the vocational level, where Australia sets standards used in some developing countries, in the Indian Ocean region and parts of Africa.

Many of these techniques are also being applied in other unviersity coruses, in secondary and primary schools. The techniques go by fancy names such as "Mentored and Collaborative e-Learning", but in many ways are fundamentally the same as traditional learning techniques made more efficient with the web and mobile phones: http://www.tomw.net.au/technology/it/collaborative_e_learning/

Even some of my more conservative university collogues are starting to understand that you do not have to teach by standing in front of people talking at them and then making them do an exam on paper. As this understanding spreads through the education industry, we will see a dot com type of bubble in online education offerings.

The Australian government is investing hundreds of millions of dollars on infrastructure for e-learning and for upgrading teaching skills. However, what is lacking is any coordinated approach for using this as an export product. The vocational and higher education sectors are treated separately, even though they are using the same software tools and teaching approaches and the customers (students) do not see an difference between the products.