VC’s corner
campusreview.com.au
out in society, what is happening in
the market, and to make sure that it
remains relevant.
What are your primary goals for Torrens,
both short and long term?
I think the first thing we must understand
is that higher education internationally
is at a crossroads. The post-industrial
revolution, and what is basically happening
across the world, is definitely creating a
totally different environment in the world
of work. It’s a different environment in
terms of the role that industry is playing
in determining the competencies for the
future, and it’s also impacting the type of
training that is required to address these
competency needs.
And for that reason, higher education
must be very careful in defining and
redefining itself in this context. Personally,
I think that higher education will need to
grow into a much more open systems
approach, a much stronger relationship
with industry and with society at large, to
accept its core responsibility for the future
development of societies.
For that reason, my purpose is, in the
first instance, absolute contextualisation
– understanding the context. Secondly,
understanding the target population
– Where do we really want to make a
contribution? – and link to that a quality
curriculum with a quality learning
environment and learning experience.
Inevitably, with that goes strong research,
because the quality of your research also
impacts the quality of our curriculum,
teaching and learning directly. And then,
the third mandate of higher education: to
make a direct contribution to society.
Given the rapid uptake of online learning
due to COVID-19, where do you see
the future for online course delivery
and learning in general? Do you think a
permanent shift has taken place?
I think what happened here was that
the COVID-19 experience triggered the
online delivery over a much broader
spectrum internationally. All of a sudden,
higher education institutions that were
still planning to do this maybe in the near
future, or were hesitant to move into that
space, almost had no choice.
Higher education institutions had to
take a bold step and say, listen, we need to
re-focus our resources, we need to refocus
our approach and move back.
As soon as we’re back to the ‘old normal’
– and the old normal will never be the old
normal in full – I think there will be a new
relationship between contact and distance
education. The almost artificial distinction
will disappear to a large extent, and we will
have much more flexibility.
So, online is here to stay. Face-to-face
will stay in a specific format, but I do
believe that students in future will not go to
campuses to collect information anymore.
They will go for a special experience.
Higher education institutions will have
to plan very specifically for how they are
going to conduct any face-to-face contact
to make it worth their while, because the
online world will become more and more
prominent in the delivery process.
Do you envisage a time in the near future
where there won’t be any lectures or
seminars, or only on special occasions?
I think the nature will change in total: it will
be a flipped classroom environment. The
old testing paradigm will totally disappear.
Secondly, I think students will come for
a specific purpose: to use a laboratory, or
to engage in a specific group discussion
that they can do better face-to-face than
online, or specifically for just reflection
opportunities in terms of deeper learning,
where that may be conducive. So, will that
approach ever totally disappear? No, I don’t
think so.
Support for students in an online
environment is absolutely imperative, but
the way in which we provide the support is
the greater bit we have to deal with.
COVID-19 has brought a lot of attention to
the sector’s reliance on the revenue from
full-fee-paying overseas students. How is
Torrens placed in this regard, and do you see
this reliance on overseas student revenue
as a significant issue moving on from the
COVID-19 pandemic?
In our organisation at the moment, we’re
definitely in a very good position, and
we’re thankful for that. So we are not really
influenced at this stage. What is important
to understand is that, if the borders remain
closed into next year, it will have a more
radical effect across the sector, not only for
specific institutions.
It’s difficult to predict what will happen.
Will we find a vaccine in time? If the borders
are opened, will they be opened on a
qualitative basis, or on a qualified basis as
we move on?
At the moment, we’re fortunate, but
it’s very difficult to plan for next year. And
for that reason we need to be sensitive
to the possible scenarios that can play
out. Personally, my sense remains that as
soon as the vaccine is on the horizon, and
things start to stabilise, the global economy
cannot remain closed for that long. It’s
just not affordable. We will start to see that
people will move again.
You’re an advocate for opening up
opportunities to allow higher education for
all, and focusing on the positive impact that
education has on society. What are some of
the practical ways this can be achieved by
institutions like yours in the short term?
I have a simple perspective on this. The
whole idea of openness and accessibility
is the new ideology of higher education.
In other words, we need to make sure we
create a system that is open enough for as
many people as possible to participate.
That means, firstly, that our online
capacity, our ability to service people in
different ways, must be user friendly, but it
must still be quality.
Secondly, we must be able to manage
diversity. As students are coming from
across the world, we must have a system
that assists, inducts and orientates those
students into our system with a necessary
support environment that can help them to
adapt and to slot in.
The next thing is that in the learning
process, we must be more flexible, in the
sense that we must accommodate the
specific learning needs of students, and
we must also accommodate the different
paces at which students perform and in
which they progress. In other words, there
are certain students that have a slower
pace, and others a faster pace.
Now, the flexibility in terms of delivery, in
terms of facilitation of specific processes,
and the accessibility of those services, is
fundamentally important and goes hand in
hand with a quality support structure.
I firmly believe that curriculum
research priorities must be contracted,
and it must be reflected on, with all the
role-players involved to a larger extent.
Not that we want to make education a
commodity – that is never the argument
– but the relevance of education and our
engagement in community, based on the
relevance of our research, is of the utmost
importance. And that must be almost a new
social contract that we must develop. ■
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