Government, employers and professional societies want university graduates who are better prepared for employment. The UTS Work-Ready Project is a curriculum renewal initiative that aims to improve graduates' professional attributes and employability skills. The paper provides an overview of the project's curriculum renewal strategy of 'contextualised by the profession and integrated into the curriculum'. Representatives of professional societies were interviewed for their understandings of the professional attributes required of a contemporary graduate.Eleven key work-ready graduate attributes were identified, with relevant subattributes, understandings and skills. These formed a matrix for the development of potential learning activities. The project website gives access to matrices of generic and professionally contextualised work-ready learning activities. Each work-ready activity includes learning and teaching support resources that can be downloaded to enable easy integration into existing subjects. Formative evaluation of the project's website is presented, together with the strategies for integrating and embedding improved work-ready learning into UTS's diverse professional and disciplinary curriculum.

How does students' general academic achievement moderate the implications of social networking on specific levels of learning performance? ABSTRACTThis study examines to what extent the use of social networking sites impacts different levels of learning. In particular, we examine how post-secondary students' general academic achievement, reflected by grade point average scores, moderate these impacts. The impacts of social networking noted in the literature vary considerably, with positive and negative implications on student learning noted. Examining the moderating effects of students' general academic achievement may address the reasons for such inconsistency in impacts observed. To better understand the implications of social networking on student learning, we examine the implications of student time spent in total on Facebook and on different reasons for using Facebook through a series of ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions. The data on students' social networking use is collected via a survey and data retrieved from institution records on student performance. The context of this study is a first year equation and problem solving centric subject, consistent with the subject matter emphasised in business and STEM disciplines. The findings indicate social networking use puts students at risk who are generally lower academic achievers; in particular their performance is lower across the least difficult levels of learning performance with greater Facebook use. In contrast the performance of higher academic achievers is not significantly impacted. The findings highlight the importance of considering students' general academic achievement as a moderator of the relationship between social networking use and learning performance, and also the importance of considering the impact on specific levels of learning.

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Education Interest Group Symposium at the AFAANZ conference, for their valuable comments and suggestions concerning our research. In addition we would also like to thank Roger San for his assistance with this research.

In recent years educational, industry and government bodies have placed increasing emphasis on the need to better support the development of “soft” skills or graduate attributes within higher education. This paper details the adoption of a student-generated multimedia screencast assignment that was found to address this need. Implemented within a large introductory accounting subject, this optional assignment allowed undergraduate students to design, develop and record a screencast so as to explain a key accounting concept to their peers. This paper reports on the trial, evaluation and redesign of this assignment. Drawing on data from student surveys, practitioner reflections and descriptive analysis of the screencasts themselves, this paper demonstrates the ways that the assignment contributed to the development and expression of a number of graduate attributes. These included the students' skills in multimedia, creativity, teamwork and self-directed learning. Adopting free-to-use software and providing a fun and different way of learning accounting, this novel approach constitutes a sustainable and readily replicable way of supporting graduate attribute development. This paper contributes understandings that will be relevant to both researchers and practitioners.