New Director for the Assessment Research Centre
Education research and innovation leader Sandra Milligan has been appointed as the new Director of the University of Melbourne’s Assessment Research Centre.
Dr Milligan has a strong background as a senior public servant, entrepreneur and publisher, including the management of private and public-private joint ventures and strategic partnerships in educational innovation with diverse organisations.
A co-founder of the Good Universities Guide and of the University of the Year Award, Dr Milligan also has an exceptional breadth of experience adapting new technologies to a range of educational tasks and settings.
Melbourne Graduate School of Education Dean Field Rickards, said it was a pleasure to announce this appointment and noted that Dr Milligan recently resumed her research career at the Graduate School with great success.
“Dr Milligan’s highly original research on learning combines measurement science with data analytics, and promises to be seminal," Professor Rickards said.
“It was undertaken alongside our highly successful Assessment and Teaching of 21 Century Skills Massive Online Open Course (MOOC), which Dr Milligan also convened.
“Her research is regarded as having numerous theoretical, methodological, and practical implications for the fields of learning analytics, digital education, educational measurement and instructional design.”
As Director of the Assessment Research Centre from early March, Dr Milligan will lead research into these exciting new inter-disciplinary areas, exploring their potential to shape policy, practice, and tools for learning and teaching.
Dr Milligan said she was excited by the opportunity to lead a research team which Emeritus Professor Patrick Griffin has taken to national and international prominence.
“The Centre's achievements in furthering the theory and practice of assessment, developmental learning and evidence based-teaching provide a superb foundation for a field now being transformed by new technologies,” she said.