Professor Stephen Colbran was recently appointed to the AUQA Register of Auditors until 30 September 2011. AUQA is the principal national quality assurance agency in higher education with the responsibility of providing public assurance of the quality of Australia’s universities and other institutions of higher education, and assisting in enhancing the academic quality of these institutions and accreditation authorities, reporting on performance and outcomes, assisting in quality enhancement, advising on quality assurance; and liaising internationally with quality agencies in other jurisdictions, for the benefit of Australian higher education.

Professor Stephen Colbran has also recently returned from Turkey where, upon the request of the Turkish judiciary and with funding from the British government, he was a keynote speaker at a conference on judicial performance evaluation. Professor Colbran has now been engaged by the Turkish judiciary to prepare a report on how to improve the objective measures of judicial performance evaluation used in Turkey for both judges and prosecutors. Turkey has a Civil Law system in which judges and prosecutors are trained once they leave university. It is anticipated that the Turkish Ministry of Justice together with the British Government will apply for European Union funding to implement the recommendations of the report currently being prepared.

ReMarks, the feedback management system, devised by Professor Stephen Colbran, with support from external funding, is now proceeding to trials at CDU, Flinders, UWS, University of Canberra, and University of Auckland. Numerous other universities are currently evaluating the product. ReMarks can be downloaded and used by Australian Academics free of charge from www.remarkspdf.com.